Blame white supremacy
Re: “A Rotten Year” (5/16/2019): Our students of color are not the reason why our schools are rotting, it is white supremacy culture. This year was rotten, but not for lack of excellence in our schools; this year was rotten because a long dormant undercurrent of white supremacy broke through our defenses this year, flooding our communities with fear and distrust. If it felt like a rotten year for teachers, it is because teachers are finally being called out on their covert and overt participation in white supremacy culture. This was a year characterized by personal failings, not faulty district policy. Instead of blaming students and their behaviors, we need to think about what we are doing to rebuild the trust that has been broken between our mostly white school staff and our many students and families of color.
Instead of centering ourselves, our focus should be on how rotten this year was for our black students who were personally traumatized by racism. How rotten it was and has been for their sense of self, school community, their families and their home community. Our students and families clearly do not have a homeplace at school. It is our duty as educators to decenter whiteness to ensure that all students feel a sense of belonging and mattering within our schools.
As Dr. Maisha Winn says in Justice on Both Sides, “to practice restorative justice, one must not only be committed to seeing the full humanity of others but also be open to the possibility of not always being right but instead making things right.”
Teaching is an adaptive profession. Schools need to adapt in an ongoing way to meet the needs of our students.
If we are venting at the expense of students, then this article is both detrimental to our community and not providing any solutions. We need to move forward in an action-oriented way with anti-racism at the forefront of our practices.
Educators Actively Working Toward Anti-racism is a group of mostly white teachers in Madison working toward greater equity.
— Educators Actively Working Toward Anti-Racism, via email
“‘I’m just trying to teach my class and black kids are getting in my way. It would be really helpful when I want them sent out, they got sent out,’” says [school board member Ali] Muldrow, playing the role of a white teacher.” Is this seriously what Ali Muldrow believes goes on in the mind of teachers? She is sorely mistaken and misrepresenting our schools. What is wrong with consequences for behavior? Has it come to this that there cannot be consequences or lessons for behavior that does not lead to a positive learning environment?
Until she and all of the school board members visit, unannounced, any of our schools for a full day or multiple times, and until our illustrious superintendent sees that teachers can’t just “hug it out” when a student is calling him/her a b**** or telling them to get out of their face or threatening to punch them, then there needs to be consideration for the entire story and not just the story from the students and family.
I have been a teacher for almost 20 years and teaching is no longer what it was, and it isn’t because “I can’t just Google it” (another wholly uneducated comment). It is because I have to spend 20 minutes of every 50-minute class teaching and modeling decent human behavior. It frightens me where our children and society are headed at this rate.
— Tammy Jones, via isthmus.com