Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Black Lives Matter: Make Education More Inclusive


Black Lives Matter: Make Education More Inclusive

By Jill Jenkins


The NAACP proclaimed in a public service announcement,  “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” This is still true today.  Education is the key to improving the quality of life and upward mobility to all people and with the growing gap between those who have and those who have not, quality education is even more important for the success of any individual.  More Black and Brown people have been provided fewer financial and educational opportunities for decades, but making education more inclusive could make a tremendous difference in the quality of education they receive.  How do we make education more inclusive are: first, invite unrepresented minorities to join extra curricular activities; second, provide academic and emotional support; and third, help families solve problems with flexible and personal solutions.          



Invite Students to Join Extra Curriculum Activities

In many schools Black and Brown students often do not participate in any extra curriculum activities beyond sports like track, basketball and football.  Although these sports often help elevate these students by offering scholarship opportunities, they do little to help the student who is not athletically inclined.  Even though participation in drama, debate, journalism, creative writing, student government or even chess club also help students earn scholarships, many of these activities are dominated by White students.  Students may avoid participating because they are working to help their financially strapped families.  Others may not join because they don’t see any of their peers participating.  Adolescence is a very social period.  To alleviate this problem, one school where I taught personally invited groups of friends to join.  It worked, they joined and they did well.




Problems

As the debate coach and drama teacher, I experienced some difficulties.  For examples, when I took a group of debaters to an predominately White school, two of my debate team members were cornered by a group of White students who were jeering and yelling derogatory racial slurs.  Luckily, another team member retrieved me and I was able to intervene and ended the incident.  However, at another school a similar incident happened to a student with less self control who retorted to their ugly comments with some vehement of his own.  The principal of that school asked me to give him bus fare and send him back to school.  When I consulted my principal, he agreed with the solution; however, today, I would have taken my entire team back and ended the competition.  When I sponsored an after school debate meet at my school, one little girl from a local parochial high school was so frightened that she locked her knees when she stood up to speak and fainted. 

Solutions:

  •              1.  Luckily the district decided to cut costs, and required that the three high schools share buses when going to week-end debate meets.  The social interaction between the students from the poorer area of town (my students) with the more affluent areas created a community that looked out for each other.  As a result, there were less incidences of racial conflict.
  •             2.  Collaborative work with people from differing race groups and social-economics improves relationships and understanding.  A better approach to help all stud enters interact in a more positive way and learn the argumentative skills for debate might be a workshop where suburb and predominately White schools and urban Black and Hispanic schools take workshops taught by debate coaches from both types of schools.  Activities might include discussions on controversial topics, not necessarily racism, where each student has to paraphrase what the speaker before him says before adding to the discussion.  It teaches listening and the students learn that they have more in common with each other than they believed.  Then, pair the students with a student from the other schools mixing races and economic backgrounds and given the research material and the time, they collaborate to debate together as a team.  The next day, the new teams debate one another. Although winning the debate for the school, would be lose, but learning to work with new people could be an invaluable life skill.

Another Problem
 

            Another problem that I encountered is when I cast an experienced young acting student as Alice in Alice in Wonderland who happened to be Black.  I was called into the principal’s office because a parent had complained that she didn’t understand why I had cast a Black student when her daughter, who had no experience in theater, looked exactly like Alice. When I was the artistic director of Self Inc., an improv psycho-socio drama troupe, I was called into the principal’s office again because another parent had complained that seeing mixed racial families in improvised scenes about communication in the home made her feel uncomfortable.  Be prepared as a teacher to justify doing the right thing and if that doesn’t work, don’t be afraid to call in members of the community, ACLU or NAACP.  They are all friends to education.


Add Emotional and Academic Support Programs

At another urban school where I taught 90% of the students enrolled where minorities and 10% were White, but the enrollment in the honors programs was 90% White and 10% minorities and most of them were Asian.  The administration designed a program called Century Club, similar to AVID developed in San Diego.  Low performing, but bright students were identified and interviewed.  Forty students were selected and enrolled in honors classes, but given a support class where the teachers monitored their grades, made certain they did their assignments, tutored them and taught them study skills. Since many of these students were from parents who worked several jobs to support their families or were single parent households, some lacked the language or academic skills to help their children, the school simply stepped in and helped the student get the support that was usually available in most middle class families.  As a teacher, I also helped students get counseling, social work or drug rehabilitation help when they brought me a problem I couldn’t solve. 
            In other schools I have seen students fall through the cracks because schools failed to provide additional support.  For example, I taught one young man who was a refugee from a village in Africa.  He spoke a language that no one in the district spoke and understood and spoke, no English.  He was enrolled in a class with 35 other 9th grade Language Arts students and expected to do the curriculum.  When I complained to the administration, I was told to buy a few programs for your IPad for him and just pass him.  I tried my best to help him, but feel it was less than adequate. Many students fall behind for reasons that aren’t in their control. I had another student whose mother was so afraid of ICE she would pull her children out of school and take them to sit in the hospital whenever her husband went into the hospital for dialysis. As a result, all of these students were years behind their classmates.

Flexible Rules that Solve Human Problems with a Flexible Approach

            Schools are designed to accommodate the “Leave It To Beaver” families of the 1950’s and few families, especially families in Black neighborhoods are that family. In most working class families are financially unstable as a result both parents work and older children either work or are burdened with caring for younger siblings.  If one or both parents are incarcerated, the high school student is often attending school, raising younger siblings and supporting the family financially.  Families in stress often need a little wiggle room in the rules to survive.  Often it is a small alteration, like one of my students who watched her younger siblings when her mother left for work.  When her father arrived home, he took her directly to school, but she was usually five or ten minutes late.  Excusing such a tardy seems trivial, but it can help a family immeasurably.  I had two students who were failing their first period because they were terminally tardy, when I called their mothers, I learned that both students were single parents and woke their children before leaving for work, but the two lollygagged about and were tardy.  I suggested a solution.  I would call the two everyday before I left my apartment and pick them up on my way to work (something because of liability teachers could not do today).  For a week the two were on time, but because teachers are required to be in the building 30 minutes before school started, they decided that they could get to school on time without my help.  They did. 
             Another situation arose where a young Black student began submitting papers that were illegible and illogical.  I showed his papers to the counselor who decided to call his parents in for a meeting.  From the meeting, we learned that the student’s mother had recently passed away and he was living with his father and paternal grandfather.  Since his father was an elementary teacher two blocks from the high school, we decided that during his last period of the day, we would walk to his father’s school and tutor his father’s students.  The extra time and the helping other students, brought out of his depression and his academic skills returned.  Thinking outside the box often helps student who are suffering some personal loss.

In Conclusion

            In conclusion, schools need to become more inclusive if students of color are to succeed.  We need to invite students to participate in extra-curricular activities and advocate for them when they meet obstacles.  We need to provide emotional and academic support for students to perform in a rigorous academic curriculum.  We need to communicate with families and in a personal and flexible manner help them resolve problems they might be facing.  “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” Lets not waste any.