Cracks in the Foundation: Trouble at Latin High School (Part 2)
by David Rose
(with contributions and review by Jenna W. Gravel, and Nicole Tucker-Smith)
[Note: This is the second installment of a six-part blog series by CAST Co-Founder David Rose, part of CAST’s UDL Rising to Equity initiative, a multiyear, community-driven effort to revise the UDL Guidelines to identify, name, and redress systemic barriers to equitable learning and outcomes. We encourage you to join the conversation in the comment boxes, by using the hashtag #UDLrising on your favorite social media platform, or by emailing your feedback to udlguidelines@cast.org.
Access parts one, three, four, five, and six on the UDL Center blog. You may also download an accessible version of the complete paper on the CAST website.]
In the spring of 1968, I was teaching for the first time in a public-school classroom. At the time, I was enrolled in a Master of Arts in Teaching program at Reed College and was assigned for my practice teaching to Portland, Oregon’s only predominantly Black high school. Encouraged by that supervised experience, I decided to apply for a permanent teaching position in inner-city Boston’s public schools. Over 700 teachers applied that year (it was the height of the Vietnam era). Following Boston’s procedures, they ranked all of the applicants in order, literally from 1 to 700. Benefitting from many privileges, I looked great on paper: High scores on the National Teacher Exam, enthusiastic recommendation letters from people like B.F. Skinner (at the height of his fame), and the principal of the school in Portland. I was ranked number 2 of those 700 applicants (I still want to meet the number 1). Delighted, I wrote a letter expressing my preference for a position in one of the poorest schools academically and economically — where I could best apply my possible strengths.
A week later I got a letter telling me I had been assigned to Boston Latin — the district’s most exclusive exam school which was populated at that time almost entirely by white students from the most economically advantaged sections of Boston. I objected to the placement, but the Superintendent’s office advised me that they had carefully reviewed my request and were firmly convinced that I would be more “suited” for Boston Latin and its highly promising students rather than “wasted” in a depressed neighborhood school. I appealed the placement aggressively and was ultimately released and assigned to a recently integrated high school with an annex that was located in one of Boston’s “transitional” neighborhoods. As a temporary annex in a rough neighborhood, the school was under-resourced and under-supervised. That was respectively a hindrance and a blessing.
My assignment to Boston Latin did not itself constitute a barrier to anyone. But a consistent institutional pattern of assigning all the “best” teachers to the most privileged schools and the least qualified teachers to the neediest (and predominantly Black and Brown) schools, is profoundly and systemically discriminatory: It ensures that some students will have a much steeper climb, and less support, than others. And that is merely the tip of an iceberg. Most of the resources in my school were inferior to those at Boston Latin: There were fewer books (and no library), there was no auditorium or projection equipment, students in my school were suspended at vastly higher rates than at other schools, etc. The accumulation of those and other disparities created subtle but consistent barriers that were pervasive and systematic. They affected not only the productivity but the motivation of our students, and their teachers. Including me.
Nothing in the present UDL Guidelines addresses the kind of barriers that diverted the best teachers, resources, curricula, and administrators to Boston Latin or similar schools, and left students and teachers in the poorest schools to face harder tasks with weaker services, tools, and resources. These barriers are “institutional” barriers, rather than curricular or classroom barriers. Although more distal than classroom barriers, the effects of institutional barriers on student learning and well-being are often more persistent, unrelenting, and inescapable. That feels like a big crack.
But where do the barriers in institutions come from? Institutions are animated by people who individually and collectively make decisions about what will happen inside classrooms. Those decisions reflect their own goals, prejudices, biases, fears, hopes, and histories. Their decisions both envelop the classroom and intrude deeply into it — decisions about goals and priorities, about methods and materials, about testing and supervision, about the allocation of limited staff and services, about who “belongs” in the school or classroom and who does not, about who is “gifted” and who has “special needs,” about who deserves special services or treatments and who does not. They decide who should teach at Boston Latin.
Like the foundation of universal design in architecture, the foundation of UDL in education (essentially the three principles and the nine guidelines) address a limited set of barriers. For the UDL Guidelines to ignore institutional barriers is not just to ignore the elephant outside the door, but to ignore an elephant that is intruding into the room. It seems clear that the UDL Guidelines cannot address all of the barriers in the surrounding institutions, but it is also clear that the UDL principles and Guidelines cannot plausibly succeed as a decontextualized or isolated solution. The Guidelines should explicitly recognize the institutional barriers, emphasize their importance, and provide accessible ramps that connect the UDL Guidelines to the broader ecology of educational equity and justice movements. More saliently, it is important to capitalize on the fact that most institutions (certainly schools) describe themselves as “learning organizations.” With that orientation in mind, the application of UDL Guidelines to such organizations should be fairly straightforward (the human brain is another example of a learning organization) with minor modifications to make the recommendations and examples more obvious and explicit.
[Go to part three of this six-part series. Or download an accessible version of the complete paper on the CAST website.]
