A recent New York Magazine story examined a new initiative at for third grade students at Fieldston Lower School that separated students by race and asked each group to talk about their own perceptions about other races and how certain races perceived them. It became very controversial among parents for different reasons — some parents said they didn’t want to segregate their kids while others said their children didn’t belong in certain groups. A Jewish parent said their child didn’t belong in the white group and some biracial children identified more as white and didn’t want to be put in the multiracial group.
The idea is that children form ideas about race very early in their lives, so why not discuss race before those perceptions become entrenched and children stop forming cross-racial friendships?
However, there is an entirely different debate going on in K-12 education that instead focuses on the teachers and their role in perpetuating institutional racism in schools.
A report by The Center for American Progress, “America’s Leaky Pipeline for Teachers of Color” shows teacher diversity in the U.S. is very low, despite the fact that student diversity is increasing. Teachers of color make up 18 percent of public school teachers, but only a little over half of students were white, according to the report. Part of the reason for this is because students of color don’t transfer from community colleges to four-year schools as often as white students, where they would be able to get a degree in teaching.
“Because communities of color disproportionately enroll in community college and are less likely than whites to transfer to four-year institutions, students of color have reduced chances of earning a bachelor’s degree in teaching,” CAP’s experts,” Ulrich Boser and Farah Z. Ahmad write in the report.
That means that even schools with populations that are majority students of color often have a very white faculty. Faculty members are punishing children of color more severely, and according to a recent Stanford University study, they’re doing so because a student’s race affects how they judge misbehavior.
A report by the Discipline Disparities Research-to-Practice Collaborative found that female students of color, LGBT students and Latino students were disproportionately more likely to be suspended. Black students were 1.78 times as likely to face suspension and Latino students were 2.23 times more likely to be suspended. Students with disabilities were also punished more, especially if they were black students with disabilities.
“Society generally has an aversion to seeing children of color as actual children,” said Jose Vilson, a middle school math educator in the Inwood/Washington Heights neighborhood and author of “This Is Not A Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and the Future of Education.”
Vilson said it’s important to make cultural competence for teachers a mandatory part of teacher development.
“There isn’t a current rubric for cultural competence, and that’s a struggle for a lot of parents of color … But there are people who should not be teaching people of color because they can’t serve students well because of their biases, and that’s something that needs to be dealt with,” Vilson said. “We need to speak up and say that cultural competence is professional competence, because you can’t teach students if you don’t actually value the students as students.
When asked how administrators can approach teachers who treat their students of color differently, Vilson said it’s important not to simply call them a racist, since it shuts down the teacher and causes them to become defensive. Instead, he suggests talking to both the student and teacher alone about what happened and share the student’s perspective with the teacher.
“I’ve had situations where a racial incident happened and it could have been worse,” Vilson said. “But what I did was I said ‘Let’s talk to the student about what they should be doing,’ and with the adult I say, ‘This is what it looks like from his perspective and why this child runs to me and not to you,’ and if I have an honest conversation about what’s going on, it seems to be better than just saying this teacher is racist.”
In 2014, The U.S. Department of Education released a report showed even more disparities in how students of color were punished, with black students being expelled at three times the rate of white students. In some cases, even black elementary school-age girls are arrested by police.
Vilson says that when black female students exhibit behaviors that are perceived as typically masculine, they are often disciplined worse than male students of color.
“It has to do with the issue of ‘How do police inside a school building perceive our children?’ They perceive one behavior one way with black boys but they perceive the same behavior another way with black girls, and they end up being dealt with even more harshly because of it, and frankly, I see that daily,” Vilson said.
Salecia Johnson, a 6-year-old kindergartener, was arrested at her school after crying, breaking glass and kicking over a shelf. An older male child, a black eighth grade student, was arrested and detained for as long as six days for throwing Skittles on the school bus. The officer allegedly told the boy he would have “beat the fuck out of [the student]” if they were the same age, according to a letter from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to the Department of Justice (DOJ).
Vilson said that he often sees situations where teachers are more comfortable talking about race in the abstract than actually discussing lived experiences when he tried to raise questions about cultural competence in K-12 education.
“I found it incredibly uncomfortable with people who should know better about how to build these conversations, so trying to bring that up becomes, ‘Oh we’re not racist, we have this many people of color, and we’re saying, ‘Well its not just about diversity, it’s about the idea that we need to deal with race and gender,’ even if white people have conversations about race in a constructive way with other white people,” Vilson said. “We can try to ignore the lived experience piece all we want, but we’re interacting with each other and inequity happens. These day-to-day things collectively build up and if we don’t deal with it, it becomes an issue.”