Racism in Schooling

Hello Interwebbers,

So this is it… The final blog post for this course, and I chose this final topic as it is close to my heart. Racism has been woven into the very foundations of the schooling systems here in the US and elsewhere for a long time. ‘Who gets to go to school?’, ‘Who goes to which school?’, and ‘What kind of education do they get?’ are some of the questions that we encounter when we think of racism in schooling. With each passing school year, teachers all over the world strive to make their classrooms more inclusive to different cultures, beliefs, and ideas. However, there are still many schools here in the US where the students do not get the same type of resources and opportunities to learn about the world through school as much as other schools. Segregation among school districts is still a prevalent phenomenon that effects schools and students all over the nation. In order to understand where it all comes from, we are going to go back in time to the early 1900s, when African American students were in old school houses with little opportunities for further success while the Caucasian schools were big buildings with an abundance of resources and plenty of opportunities for attending college and continued studies for future success.

Gloria Ladson-Billings, a well-renowned author in the Educational Studies association (a.k.a. students who study education like us!), wrote the article “Landing on the Wrong Note: The Price We Paid For Brown”. This article retells the story of the historical Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case where the court ruled that school should no longer be segregated, however the implementation of the case of Brown was not the best idea for ending racism in schooling. She describes Brown as “The degree to which school desegregation has become an international issue” (page 1) and also said that her “…problem with Brown as the remedy, or more specifically, the implementation of Brown as endorsed by the Court” (page 3 of 11). She quotes a variety of scholars from different fields. One such example is the legal scholar Charles Lawrence, who pointed out that “…if we are to have a real and meaningful remedy, we have to recognize that racial reality in order to reframe Brown and ‘make it stand for what it should have stood for in 1954.’” (page 5). While Ladson-Billings discusses segregation in schools in this article, segregation is the result of racism and other such prejudices. Lawrence offers three underlying characteristics of segregation in this article:

1. It’s only purpose is to “label or define Blacks as inferior and thus exclude them from full and equal participation in society.”
2. The injury of segregation comes from its “system” or “institution” rather than from “particular segregating acts.”
3. This institution of segregation is “organic” and “self-perpetuating” and cannot be dismantled cia public sanction. It “must be affirmatively destroyed.” (Lawrence, 1980, page 5 of article)

He also states that black children in segregated schools in the racist school system did not suffer because they were in classrooms with other black children, but suffered from the whole system which defines them and their schools as inferior (page 5). Ladson-Billings says that “Born is the first step in a long and arduous process [to get rid of the whole problem of] segregation and white supremacy” (page 8 of 11). Towards the end of the article, she describes how the parents’ ability to choose where their children attend school, while a very good thing, has unfortunately aided in society’s maintenance of segregated schools.

We did not see segregation of this kind when we were in Peru, but we were warned of the underlying segregation in the school systems. There are schools like Colegio Roosevelt, which is a school for children of the elite from Peru and all over the world, that only offer their educational services to those who can afford the extremely high annual tuition fees. To give you an idea, each year at the school costs a little bit less than a year’s tuition in a university in the US. La Inmaculada is yet another school with slightly high tuition fees, however, the students get opportunities to work with students from smaller schools in the mountainous regions and interact with other students who definitely have less than them.

I did not learn about the tuition fees for Fe y Alegria #2. I did learn that the students do not need 3D printers, state-of-the-art buildings and plenty of money in order to learn the things they need to know to grow and thrive as citizens of this world. The students and teachers collectively come up with creative ways to use the resources that they have to make an impact on their education. The students use what they learned to create new ideas for how they can take care of their environment, their communities, their families, their lifestyles, and themselves. I’m sure these students would love to use all the gadgets and gizmos that students at Roosevelt and La Inmaculada are able to use, and that these students would use these materials to explore even more about what they are learning. We wondered, as we got a tour of Roosevelt, if the gadgetry was necessary for a successful education. Throughout the tours in these schools, including the Fe y Alegria school in Andahuaylillas and the Cusco Public School, I felt the huge discrepancies in the differences at each school. My questions for the schools with the most funding are: “Why aren’t there more opportunities for other students from other walks of life in their country to attend these schools, through scholarships for instance? With all of that money, why can’t students from other “lesser” school districts attend the schools with the state-of-the-art facilities? Doesn’t everyone deserve this kind of education? Why is it only offered to a select few?” I understand, this situation and my questions pertains more to segregation rather than racism in the educational systems in Peru. However, the students from the Fe y Alegria #2 school that I described can relate to many students in the US: their families may not have a lot in terms of money and material wealth, but they have the desire to learn and improve their lives and the lives of others in their communities.

Belen Desmaison wrote the article called “Lima’s Wall of Shame and the Gated Communities that Build Poverty in Peru”. It discusses the wall that separates the poorer side of the mountain from the wealthier side of the mountain. The wall was built to prevent the poorer community from building their houses in the backyards of the legal landowners on that side of the mountain. In the end, however, the wall became a stigma of poverty and shame for those who live on the wrong side of it. The poorer people have to pay ten times as much for tanks of water to be delivered to their neighborhoods than the richer part of Lima. Through the last seventy years of Peru’s history, more and more people from all over Peru have been flooding into Lima. While Peru is a big city, it is like trying to fit 100 students into a small classroom: very quickly, there will be some students that will be at a great disadvantage in comparison to the rest. I witnessed this as we travelled around to many places like these during our adventurous journey. I realized that the poorer people were refugees of a variety of different problems who did not have a place to live. When they found these hilly regions, they set up their houses and stayed there. This is how it has been for the last twenty years or so. While some people in Peru have to endure the punishment of living in these derelict regions just for being poor, black students in the US are more likely to be punished, and be punished more severely, in schools all over the US.

Michael Harriot wrote the article called “Government Study: School is Racist”. This article gives a series of studies provided by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) studying the Department of Education’s data on civil rights that prove the claim that there is still an underlying racism in our school systems, especially when it comes to punishing students. “The GAO found that black students are overrepresented in the disciplinary data, which is a very nice way of saying that black children are punished more often and receive harsher punishments than white kids. “These disparities were widespread and persisted regardless of the type of disciplinary action, level of school poverty or type of public school attended,” the report explains (pdf). For example, at every level of discipline, the GAO found that white kids were underrepresented and black kids were overrepresented. In fact, black students were most overrepresented in the areas that allowed school officials to arrest, kick out or suspend the black kids (out-of-school suspension, corporal punishment and school-related arrest).” You can find a copy of the report in the quote itself. Why are black students the first to be given the harshest punishments in schools while other kids get a stern talking to with the classic “finger-wag” and the “don’t do that again” speech?

Every student should be treated with the dignity and respect that is due to each of them. They are human beings too, and the color of our skin should not, and does not, define how much of a human each of us is. With each passing day, more and more students have to stand up out of their seats and scream to the skies to make their voices heard. Racism in schooling is a major policy issue that needs to be discussed and dealt with swiftly. The US system sets punishment as a precedence to remediation and we need to be able to make that change, as future, current, and former educators, as students, as parents, and as people who care about the state of the country. Before any other occupation, all of us were students first. It is the students of today who will define the USA of tomorrow.

I had a wonderful time writing these blogs for all of you to read! I am so happy that you all have enjoyed it and have been following me on my journey.

Until next time,

Aditi Narayan