Cracks in the Foundation: Trouble in the Department Chair’s Office (Part 4)
By David Rose
(with contributions and review by Jenna W. Gravel, and Nicole Tucker-Smith)
[Note: This is the fourth 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, two, three, five, and six on the UDL Center blog. You may also download an accessible version of the complete paper on the CAST website.]
By late winter of the school year, I had settled into a regular routine as an English teacher. My placement at the annex turned out to have been very fortunate. For one thing, it gave me considerable freedom to experiment; the bulk of the faculty and the department chair were miles away in central Boston, and I had very little formal supervision. But the best thing was that I had a number of dedicated and creative teachers around me. I was very lucky indeed to strike up a friendship with the art teacher down the hall. Soon, we began finding projects on which to collaborate. The first, and best, was to launch an art and poetry magazine, The Annex, that published original poems and illustrations produced by our students.
We loved doing it, primarily because it showcased the talents of our students and encouraged them to share their work meaningfully with each other, and with their friends and their parents. It was produced on the school’s mimeograph (look it up), so the art was limited in its range, but the combination of art and poetry was often moving and very personally expressive.
Sadly, and frighteningly, one of our students was shot and killed while he was ordering a fast-food burger and fries near his own home. It was terrible for all of us but was not, more revealingly, as unexpected or shocking to our students as to us. Many wrote about it in their journals.
At that time, we were studying a few poems by William Carlos Williams (his bracing brevity made him appealing and highly teachable after Shakespeare). One of the students wrote the first draft of the following poem in his journal and we encouraged some minor revisions for publishing in the magazine. I still remember it exactly by heart.
May 6, 1969
I think
I’ll buy some French fries
and end
it all.
Sometime later in the spring, I was called to the central office by the head of the English department. As I entered his office, I noticed that the latest issue of our magazine was on his desk. I was delighted to see it and imagined I had been invited for some kind of plaudit.
Instead, he began with an accusatory tone: “What made you think your students actually wrote these poems?”
The department chair did not know any of the students in my class. He had never seen their work, nor studied their backgrounds or their test scores. He was instead projecting his own expectations (some would say biases or prejudices) about what kind of work they would likely to be able to do. Based not on any evidence from their work or their actual abilities and disabilities, but on who he thought they were — their identities. He knew they were poor, and they were Black and Brown, not the “quality of students” they used to have before the school was integrated.
As I left his office, part of me withered inside. I had just read Rosenthal and Jacobson’s book on the Pygmalion Effect (published in 1968), a book of research showing that a teacher’s expectancies about a student had a lot to do with determining — either negatively or positively — their outcomes. For me, the book had a powerful but depressing impact: I recognized that the department chair’s low expectations for my students ultimately posed yet another kind of barrier for them, a profoundly different and insidious kind of barrier.
The biggest crack in the foundation of UDL is evident in the gap between barriers of ability and barriers of identity. Barriers of ability dominate the UDL Guidelines. There is no doubt, however that there are other kinds of barriers, barriers that are barely addressed in the UDL Guidelines at all. Those barriers are faced primarily by students who have been excluded, marginalized, or diminished because of their skin color, their language, their ethnicity, their gender, or their sexual orientation. There is certainly plenty of evidence that such students face barriers and low expectations. There is little evidence, however, that the UDL Guidelines are either relevant or attentive to the particular kinds of identity barriers they face.
And those barriers have consequences. When my department chair revealed his low expectations for my students, those low expectations led to inequities and impediments in what kinds of goals he would set for them (and me), in what kinds of resources (and new teachers!) he would dedicate to reaching those goals, in how he would recognize and evaluate success, in how he would interpret behavior and language, in how he would reward and punish, and so on.
Some would argue that barriers of identity need to be addressed by other organizations and guidelines. And that is true. But scientists in any field would recognize the criticality of examining the intersection of ability and identity (rather than addressing them separately) in order to properly predict or understand the effects of causal claims or interventions. The simple truth is that in American schools, reading difficulties for a White student are not the same as reading difficulties for a Black student. A youngster who is Black and poor is much less likely to get a diagnosis of dyslexia, much less likely to have had effective remedial instruction, much less likely to find accessible or universally designed materials in his classroom, and so forth. (It is startling to remember that most of my students were reading at more than seven years below grade level yet none of them had any special reading instruction or support). Contrastingly, a disruptive behavior by a student who is Black or Brown is much more likely to lead to a diagnosis of behavioral disorder, or lead to expulsion or suspension than a peer who is a White student. To the extent that the Guidelines ignore those intersections, they are less informative, less helpful, less realistic, and less equitable. Opening up the existing crack in the Guidelines — between identity and ability — will allow and encourage more effective, more universally applicable, guidelines.
[Go to part five of this six-part series. Or download an accessible version of the complete paper on the CAST website.]
