I had lunch and extensive adult-life conversation, including swapping coastal stories of how to buy a mortgage with a colleague and friend from my former life working in Mexico. She currently teaches social studies to middle school students in Seattle. Her partner asked what we had talked about over brunch (we met while he finished a late sleep), and I explained we had solved middle schools’ problems in the US. Trouble is, we forgot to take notes. Here’s the best I can remember.
Steph explained that her middle school students are just beginning to enter that awful phase of choosing whether or not to be jumped into gangs. At her school, about 70% live in poverty. About 16% of her students are Latino, and only about 9% are white, she said (the rest are Asian and African American). As the Latino students population has recently risen over the last couple years, so has the black and brown tension–a phenomenon that either lurked under the surface or hardly existed until now. Furthermore, she keeps waiting for her district to respond to the steep rise in gang recruitment… despite her letters to her superintendent. She is hopeful that a couple community meetings being held this summer may bear some fruit.
“We have so many kids skipping now… and the 6th graders have learned it from the 8th graders–what do we do?” I was encouraged to learn that few of her fellow teachers are of the gripe and moan ilk, e.g., “It’s because they come here and don’t want to learn.” Rather, they want to know how they can be effective in communicating with families at home instead of ineffective. The teachers, unlike most of the students, tend to be white. Well-intentioned, not fully equipped–and they’re wise enough to sense it.
Ah, so close to the University of Washington, and yet, so far… Multicultural education rockstar theorists are there–James A. Banks and Geneva Gay. And yet, where is the university in this? Far, far away, it seems (of course these people can’t be everywhere–we know that–but they’re SO CLOSE). It’s true–she teaches in a district that borders Seattle proper, but she’s encouraged that it is small enough to implement change without heavy layers of bureaucracy. Nonetheless, when she complains about these issues, she is tasked, along with the one other Spanish speaking staff member at her school, of serving on the committees to solve the problems. Her principal is proactive, she says, but one wonders how long this principal will be there. ”We go through cycles of awful principal, clean-up principal, awful one, awful one, great one, awful one.”
The same problems. Crisis of leadership, teachers who want to do well, but don’t know how, children with curricula that leave them preferring to skip school, enough alienation from school community that kids would rather be beaten into gangs. It’s a common story, and, yet, we in the US still don’t have even adequate answers.
I guess the good news is that Steph, and so many passionate teachers, still have their hearts and skills invested in the kids. And that counts for so much, but I fear it’s not enough.
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