By聽H. Richard Milner IV
Of all the challenges that vex black parents, perhaps none is more frustrating than to be forced to send their children to schools where their children鈥檚 talents are unrecognized, overlooked, ignored or even squashed.
As I argue in my book, Rac(e)ing to Class: Confronting Poverty and Race in Schools and Classrooms (2015, Harvard Education Press), teaching in a way that recognizes the strengths of black students takes considerable training. This is especially true in a system where the majority of teachers are white and middle class.
As a scholar of race and urban teacher education, I see a major disconnect between what schools offer black students and the realities that many black students face outside the classroom.
Given how often public schools fail black children, as Jacqueline Irvine describes in her book, Black Students and School Failure (1990, Greenwood Press), the allure of a 鈥渃ollege prep鈥� school, even if it is in a nontraditional school environment, becomes easy to understand. Such a school is seen not only as an alternative to the regular public schools but also as the doorway to the most elite educational institutions of higher education in the nation and all that earning a degree from one of those institutions entails.
As one of many scholars who studies the interplay of race, culture and education, I believe the true measure of a school鈥檚 worth is not the extent to which its students get accepted into elite institutions. Rather, I鈥檇 measure a school by the degree to which it inspires students to engage in collective efforts to improve the human condition. This is particularly important for black students in the United States, who hail from a population that experiences gross disparities in a broad range of areas鈥攆rom wealth, education and justice to infant mortality and life expectancy.
Educational researcher Gloria Ladson-Billings has questioned the overemphasis on test scores. She has stressed the need to reframe the way society thinks about education鈥攖o go from focusing on the so-called 鈥渁chievement gap鈥� to considering an 鈥渆ducation debt鈥� that reflects how much more should be invested in the education of children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. I have stressed the need to focus not on achievement gaps but rather on 鈥渙pportunity gaps鈥� that show inequities in systems, structures and practices, among other factors, that can prevent children from reaching their potential.
Given the unique history that evolves from slavery, Jim Crow, and other forms of discrimination and the many ways in which they have impacted black identity and success, educators must also work to create environments that equip black students with knowledge and skills they need to analyze, critique, question and write about the ways in which they鈥檝e been miseducated. To be clear, we should not blame educators for the multidimensional challenges we face in education, but we should provide tools to help them more deeply understand and support these students.
Even at its best, if a school鈥檚 focus is primarily concerned with test prep, it is not a truly transformative school, the kind that black students need and deserve.
True transformative schools don鈥檛 just work to help black students better fit into the existing educational and social system. They don鈥檛 just want to contribute another 鈥渂eat the odds鈥� story about how so-called 鈥渕erit鈥� and 鈥渉ard work鈥� can help black students overcome centuries and decades of class and race inequity and oppression.
What black students need more than anything else is less schooling and more education.
Schooling is 鈥渁 process intended to perpetuate and maintain the society鈥檚 existing power relations and the institutional structures that support those arrangements,鈥� as Mwalimu J. Shujaa states in Too Much Schooling, Too Little Education: A Paradox of Black Life in White Societies (1994, Africa World Press).
Education, on the other hand, is an emancipatory process of lifelong learning that enables students to study and read the broader society and work to disrupt injustice.
Charter and private schools that just want to 鈥渟chool鈥� black students well enough to get into the Ivy Leagues so that they can earn a degree, acquire material things and the trappings of success, all the while fitting into the existing power structure, are problematic. Such schools may appeal to black families because of their negative experiences in traditional public schools, but they don鈥檛 really enable students to challenge the status quo.
Indeed, as Audre Lorde has argued, the 鈥渕aster鈥檚 tools will never dismantle the master鈥檚 house.鈥� And as James Baldwin stressed in his famous 鈥淎 Talk to Teachers,鈥� during these times of anti-blackness, racism, xenophobia and discrimination writ large, it is time to 鈥済o for broke鈥� in order to teach black children to break out of the existing social order. In order to do that, educators must radically shift what education is鈥攁nd who decides what counts as academic and social success.
A was originally published on The Conversation on Dec. 18, 2018.
H. Richard Milner IV is Cornelius 菠萝视频 Professor of Teaching and Learning at Peabody College of education and human development.