Q&A

What were the initial reactions of the people in Northeastern Albemarle , when you asked them to participate in your research?

Initial reactions seemed to reflect one or more of the following perspectives: pride, concern for anonymity, concern for accuracy of the story, longing for the story to be publicized, concern for helping me, hope that publicizing the story will help the situations of struggle they described.

Have the families involved read the book?  If so, what was their reaction?

Each family involved has members who read the chapter that pertains to their family in the book, before I was willing to publish it. I needed there approval before publishing it to make sure that I told their story as close to how they would have told it themselves. They seemed pleased with my efforts to tell their story. In qualitative research, we call it, member-checking.

Do you believe the promise of Brown v. Board of Education will ever be achieved?

Update: I used to believe that the promise of Brown could be achieved, as it has been already in specific locations with a diverse critical mass of socially just people with legitimate authority. The PBS (2003) series “School–1980-2000” alluded to the public schools of Montclair, NJ as an example of the promise of Brown and pluralistic democracy being fulfilled. At Holt Elementary School in Durham, NC, where I once worked as a Teacher’s Aid, I saw some signs of this promise. Durham (2006) actually boasts major changes that closed previous gaps in achievement separating Blacks and Latinos from Whites. The problem with “achievement” in North Carolina, Illinois, Ohio, Florida, Texas, Kentucky, Michigan, and most other states, is that “achievement” is based on one-shot standardized, timed, test scores, which most teachers understand as only one form of assessment; providing only a snapshot into the abilities, disabilities, and capabilities of their grade-school students; and I agree with them.

Now, I believe that Brown has fulfilled some of its promises.

1. It has fulfilled its promise for state and local implementation, a hidden promise to do the least harm to the most white families irrespective of the consequences for black families.

2. It has fulfilled the promise of fighting de jure segregation (i.e., a legal frame granting U.S. citizens the right to live in any public school community) with no critical, comprehensive funded mandates to ensure the defeat of de facto segregation (i.e., a social context frame of acceptance for some and rejection for others that surround that legal frame and ultimately decides how far legality can lead toward equity). Time and again, one can witness the busing in of students before busing in the training and personnel procedures necessary to ensure the knowledge, skills and dispositions are present in the leadership to support anyone bused into new and potentially hostile school settings.

3. It has fulfilled its promise of more white students and black students attending public education-related events together for entertainment, food and hospitality services; and field trips to spaces like public parks.

4. It has fulfilled its promise of more white students and black students matriculating together at public colleges and universities together, which has arguably led to more genuine relationships across the color line. (Note: In 2003, Deirdre Royster reminds us in Race and the Invisible Hand: How White Networks Exclude Black Men from Blue- Collar Jobs that white men can obtain employment faster than their black peers upon graduation even when they share nearly identical track records after matriculating through the same institutions of higher education).

5. It has fulfilled its promise of whites and blacks attending utilizing public education-related transportation together. (Note: The color line can be exposed, however on buses and trains to school and college as white students and black students of sit as intimate strangers; people who sit near each other most days of the week with little critical communicative competence to organize across racial and class differences toward a justice for all approach and away from justice for just us).

Brown sadly hasn’t fulfilled the promise of integrated schools, even where there is desegregation, there is little authentic integration to be found in school communities throughout the U.S. Dr. Gary Orfield and Dr. Jonothan Kozol remind me that too many K-12 public schools have resegregated and that when considered in tandem, U.S. K-12 public schools are more segregated today than in 1968, in part, because neighborhoods are have resegregated. Dr. Rosalyn Mickelson details within-school and between school second-generation segregation, a phenomenon that Dr. Karolyn Tyson discusses in-depth in her 2012 Critics’ Choice Award Winning book, Integration Interrupted. Issues including the school-to-prison pipeline, school community gentrification, disproportionate special education and unfair gifted education placements of black, Latin@ and the impoverished all beg me to question how Brown fulfilled some of its promises, while playing out as a pyrrhic victory for too many black families–black families in rural North Carolina that as a whole, had stronger educational outcomes before Brown, which is detailed in Dr. Vanessa Siddle Walker’s acclaimed Critics’ Choice Award winning book Their Highest Potential.

What can we, as future teachers, do to ensure that all our students have adequate educational opportunities, regardless of their race, gender, or class?

Update: The first things that future teachers can do is what you are already doing—begin by (a) engaging critical reflexive self-exploration as part of the process of preparing to know the communities that you will serve (i.e., by questioning what you know about them, questioning how you came to know what you know and confronting your own implicit association biases about them, and revisiting how you may be what Dr. Jenny Gordon calls inadvertently complicit in the problem rather than trying to be colorblind, gender-blind, or social class-blind),  (b) doing the groundwork of actually getting to know families in the communities where you will teach (for more in-depth information on this suggestion from Harvard, copy and paste into your web browser: http://www.hfrp.org/family-involvement/fine-family-involvement-network-of-educators/member-insights/how-can-we-prepare-teachers-to-work-with-culturally-diverse-students-and-their-families-what-skills-should-educators-develop-to-do-this-successfully), and  (c) engaging the process of assemblage (i.e., gathering multiple layers of credible evidence and information from and with the school communities where you will teach to contextualize your approach to curriculum and instruction–this process of assemblage should include the perspectives of any families representing ethnic, class, and/or gender oppression in the state and local matrix of domination [Dr. Patricia Hill-Collins, 1990]). Entry points with bus drivers, cafeteria workers and maintenance staff members can be a critical part of your work. These colleagues tend to live in the school communities and too often their expertise is dismissed. My research and personal experience suggests that they have a wealth of knowledge to assist educators and most of them are open to sharing it when approached with respect and humility.

Moreover, it is important to have enough experiences of diversity to validate the diverse experiences of your students. These experiences should be face-to-face rather than vicarious via documentaries, books, TV, films, periodicals, etc. You must be reasonable enough to be open daily to counter-evidence, and new challenges to what you always thought were the right ways to do things. I talk to my students about the VCC:

1. Validation of ethnicity (note: the Human Genome Project provides robust evidence that biologically, humans are not different “races,” but as a sociologist of Education, I recognize that humans are affected by “race” wherever is believed to be a biological determinant; in other words, I can paraphrase Montegue (1970) here to clarify, “race is real in its consequences”), social class, gender
2. Commitments
   – to safe and productive learning environments
   – to forever learning
   – to forever unlearning the substances of our response bias (how we understand and keep in check what Swim and Stangor, 1998 call the hits, misses, and false alarms of our daily response biases in the classroom)
3. Confidentiality (unless, one must report the story by nature of the law)

Finally, your aspirations for equitable and excellent teaching in the current climate of high stakes testing accountability and resegregation will require you to begin seeking and acting upon evidence of struggle within your spheres of influence. In May of 2006, the National Educational Association (NEA) noted five national crisis issues facing education today including the fact that there is not enough diversity among teachers to match the diversity in grade-school students. As the NEA notes further, teachers are primarily female, white, married, religious, middle-class, and 43-years-old, while over 40% of the grade school children they serve are students of color. The point is not that white teachers can’t teach non-white kids. The point is that most of these teachers and students live largely segregated lives outside of school and thus, the teachers have not had enough experiences to validate non-white, and impoverished students. In the most recent issue of Educational Researcher (noted by the International Science Index as one of the top Education journals in the world), Blanchett (2006), O,Connor and Fernandez (2006), and others argue that this ethnic and class mismatch in classrooms, schools, and school districts contributes to disproportionality (the unfair overrepresentation of Blacks, Latinos, and poor whites in Special Education, and the unfair underrepresentation of these groups in Gifted Education). After seeking such evidence, you have to ask yourself what you have asked me today, “What can I do?” If you teach in an all same-ethnic group school, it will become even more imperative for you to engage your responsibility to bring diverse materials and people (both in real and vicarious ways)  into your lesson and unit planning. I have done this type of planning with my preservice teachers and graduate student-practitioners to ensure students leave the course with an obligation to “other” Americans and an understanding of how our liberation is tied to each other; to understand how we live out the Miner’s Canary situation where our democracy is only as healthy as the least cared for among us.

How do you feel when cities, such as Omaha , Nebraska , redistrict and in effect resegregate themselves?

I know this type of thing occurs. It both validates my work and saddens me at the same time. For, you see, I can say “I told you there were still problems.” But, everyday that I find them, I find myself not much unlike the description someone once wrote about “the pessimist” who only receives “the empty consolation of being right.”