EDUC 513 Prof. KK Zutter Summer 2009 Philosophy of Education Speech Adrienne Reininga

“ I pray for all of us the strength to teach our children what they must learn, and the humility and wisdom to learn from them so that we might better teach”. Lisa Delpit

INTRODUCTION: I teach second grade at a public elementary school in Harlem where 90% of students are English Language Learners and 100% qualify to receive free school breakfast and lunch. On the 2008 NYC Progress Report, our school received a letter grade of D in the category of Student Performance because only 30.5% of our students are on grade level in English Language Arts and only 46% of our students are on grade level in Mathematics. Nine year olds growing up in low-income communities are already three grade levels behind their peers in high-income communities. Half of these children will not graduate from high school by the time they are eighteen. Those that do graduate will, on average, read and do math at the level of eighth graders in high-income communities. Only one in ten of will graduate from college. Because African-American and Latino children are three times as likely to live in a low-income area, these disparities prevent children of color from having equal opportunities in life.

This is concrete proof that educational inequity persists along socioeconomic and racial lines, due in large part to the prevailing ideology that schools cannot make a significant difference in the face of socioeconomic disparities and that children of color cannot meet high expectations. This blatant injustice angers and saddens me, and makes me determined to find a way to give my students the education they deserve. Mel Levine explains that “the growth of our society and the progress of the world are dependent on our commitment to fostering in our children and among ourselves the coexistence of and mutual respect of many different kinds of minds”. As a teacher, it is my responsibility to create an inclusive learning environment- one that acknowledges the continuing significance of racial identity in ways that can empower and motivate students to transcend the legacy of racism even when the composition of the classroom continues to reflect it. Paolo Freire states: “Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed with be sufficiently strong to free both”.

Good teaching must start with the deep belief that all children can not only learn but excel at the highest levels. It is one thing to say it, but another thing entirely to actually convey this belief through teaching because we are acculturated not to believe it. Everywhere we look, there is research that links failure and socioeconomic status, failure and cultural difference, failure and single parent households. This breeds a dangerous tendency to assume deficits in students rather than to locate and teach to strengths. As Beverly Tatum asserts: “not knowing students’ strengths leads to our ‘teaching down’ to children from communities that are culturally different from their teachers. Because teachers do not want to tax what they believe to be these students’ lower abilities, they end up teaching less when, in actuality, these students need more of what school has to offer”. High expectations are absolutely necessary. Take for example one of my second graders, Sebastian. Sebastian is a brilliant artist and a gifted mathematician who has a gentle spirit and a big heart. A congenital condition makes him deaf in one ear, and we use an FM unit to support his hearing. After a year long battle to have him evaluated for special services, it was determined that he has both an expressive and receptive language disorder. His IEP includes promotional criteria of 50%. This essentially means that Sebastian’s future teachers will be justified in holding him to low expectations. I have been Sebastian’s teacher for two years, and I know how intelligent and capable he is. But low expectations and failure to recognize his strengths will only add to the barriers to his success.

As a teacher, I must value and respect all manifestations of my students’ culture, particularly language. I must simultaneously respect and preserve my students’ cultural inherencies while teaching them to follow the ‘rules’ of the wider world (as dictated by the hegemony). Students must be taught the codes needed to participate fully in the mainstream of American life, not by being forced to attend to hollow, inane, de-contextualized skills, but within the context of meaningful communicative endeavors. As Lisa Delpit states: “They must be allowed the resource of the teacher’s expert knowledge, while being helped to acknowledge their own ‘expertness’ as well. Even while students are assisted in learning the culture of power, they must also be helped to learn about the arbitrariness of those codes and about the power relationships that they represent… If we are to successfully educate all of our children, we must work to remove the blinders built of stereotypes, monocultural instructional methodologies, ignorance, social distance, biased research, and racism. We must work to destroy those blinders so that it is possible to really see, to really know the students we teach”.

References: Delpit, Lisa (2006). Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Freire, Paolo (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum. Kozol, Jonathan (2005). The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press. Tatum, Beverly Daniel (2007). Can We Talk About Race? And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Levine, Mel (2002). A Mind at a Time. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.