Week 2 Readings
#templesoced
There were 3 homicides in my hometown this weekend. This is all I could think of while reading this week’s material. I can’t trace a direct line but it just made me think of how the outcomes of education inequality can be linked to so many other issues in our society. One of the victims of the shootings this weekend was a pregnant girl. It feels wrong to call her a woman because she was so young. If there was better funding for schools in Bridgeport, CT could these deaths have been prevented? It seems silly to blame these tragic events on one school district when I know the issues run far deeper, but that’s the only thought that kept appearing in my head while reading these articles. In the past couple of years, all 3 public high schools went under renovation. Surely this would improve outcomes in the city, right? While I do believe that your learning environment affects how you learn, I can’t help but think that students would learn better with more funding for extra curricular activities, updated textbooks, better teachers (the Teach for America teachers that come from the suburbs and have never taught in an “urban” area aren’t cutting it), etc. When I think of “educational inequity” I think of my own experience and everyone else who attended school in the Bridgeport Public School District. I think about how we had holes in our ceilings and had to go through metal detectors, and how a very small percentage of teachers actually reflected the racial and ethnic diversity in the student body. I think about how a lot of the teachers lived in neighboring suburbs and weren’t actually a part of the community. I think about how just 20 minutes away, there are multi million dollar homes and a fully funded robust education program. Like the author of “Education’s Limitations and Its Radical Possibilities”, I too believe in the fundamental power of education. It’s disheartening to see something you believe in so much fail so many students.
While I was a senior in high school I took an African American Literature class. Taught by a white man. This class was exciting, nonetheless, because it felt the most similar to classes we would encounter in college. This class delved into the origins and horrors of slavery from a stricly Black perspective. Something most students weren’t used to. In previous U.S. history classes, we were taught a very watered down, white perspective on slavery and Jim Crow Laws. Previous classes never made me think. We were taught the material and then we moved on. We didn’t analyze how slavery, Jim Crow Laws, segregation, affects Black people today. It was a matter of learning the same version of history year after year, the only difference was the teacher standig up in the front of the class. It went like this: slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, MLK, Brown v Board of Ed and boom, racism was over.
This was my first class where we didn’t read one piece by a white author. Still the “1619” podcast, taught me things I had never heard of. It’s chilling to think about how many practices originated from slavery. The podcast mentioned how tracking employees performance and making sure they’ve met their quota stems from enslaved people picking cotton. I definitely learned more than ever while taking African American Lit, but it still barely scratched the surface. We didn’t talk about redlining or the school to prison pipeline, we learned that mass incarceration was bad but that was about it. I appreciated this podcast for its honesty. It didn’t tip toe around the truth, no matter how unsettling it is to hear. The way we are taught about the history of the U.S in middle and high schools (especially in the south) is a disservice to us all. This summer I learned that some pictures from the Civil Rights Movement are put in black and white in school textbooks so that it seems like it happened a longer time ago than it actually did. Who does that help? Why are we brainwashing students?
