Mismatch Of Race From Teachers

Authors Glenn E. Singleton and Curtis Linton in Chapter Five of Courageous Conversations About Race broach the topic of race, by asking the reader to evaluate his or her own consciousness of race. According to the authors, in order to address the achievement gaps between African American students and White students, educators should shift their energy towards focusing on the factors that they have direct control of inside the classroom rather than on the factors that influence this achievement disparity between races outside the classroom.

Schools systematically subjugate minority and black students when a school’s enrollment contains a huge racial majority. If students have no exposure to persons of different ethnicities, cultures, races, and religions, then these students will experience culture shock when they confront “other” people. Even in our class, we talk about black and minority students as another group, one that differs from “us.” We think about the inequalities in school systems as problems we need to fix, not as problems that have influenced our thinking and affect us as prospective teachers. For example, a white graduate student with

African American students account for the larger majority of minorities in public schools in the United States. Most areas in the northern part of the United states and coastal areas are ethnically diverse. However, down south this is not the case. Students of color will experience a harder time in the education system. African American students meet the obstacle of educators who will not want them to succeed based on a preconceived thought. In fact, Caucasian teachers make up for 85% of all

African Americans are not the only ethnicity group to be singled out with behavior. Racial and ethnic minority students report experiencing low teacher expectations, having less access to educational resources, being placed on lower educational tracks, and being steered toward low-paying employment (Kozol, 1991; Olsen, 2008).This low expectation is causing

Public education has faced many extreme challenges and obstacles historically. Based on the films I’ve viewed I think the top issues were segregation and poverty. Segregation in schools started in the 1800s and continued until the 1960s. I learned mostly about the problems with segregation in the film A Struggle for Education Equality. In the film, it explains facts and statistics about children and how their lives were like. From around the time period of 1950-1980 schools were very much segregated and only ⅗ of students graduated and 50% of them went to college. The fight for equality in schools began in Topeka Kansas where high schools became integrated. Elementary schools, however, were not integrated and still segregated. The NAACP tried to have 13 parents try to enroll their kids into white school but of course, it failed because of segregation. Linda Brown was one of the children in the experiment and that’s when the Brown v Board of Education of Topeka of 1954 was created which banned the inequality in schools. The southern states still had segregation problems, unfortunately, but the Elementary and Secondary Education Act gave 4 billion dollars of aid to disadvantaged children and around 9 years after that, 91% of southern black children attended integrated schools. Segregation had clearly gotten so much better but was a major problem for a long time in terms of public education. Poverty, in my opinion, is another major problem facing public education today. In

Shankar Vedantam, author of Hidden Brain and NPR science correspondent informs and advocates for equality in the education system in his article “How a Self-Fulfilling Stereotype Can Drag Down Performance” published in the Washington Post (2009). Vedantam begins his article by interacting with the audience while he asks a question,and he cites Sociologist Min-Hsuing Huang’s research on the influence that the environment has on a minority. Huang found out that: reminding minorities of their race before a test, limits them more than if they weren't reminded. Vedantam highlights the fact that Huang’s research goes unnoticed by prominent figures in….such as managers, policy makers, parents,etc. He then goes on to prove the corruption in social science that impacts the lives of every minority, which is truly everyone because anyone can be in a setting that makes them a minority.

A substantial amount of educational and psychological research has consistently demonstrated that African American students underperform academically relative to White students. For example, they tend to receive lower grades in school (e.g., Demo & Parker, 1987; Simmons, Brown, Bush, & Blyth, 1978), score lower on standardized tests of intellectual ability (e.g., Bachman, 1970; Herring, 1989; Reyes & Stanic, 1988; Simmons et al., 1978), drop out at higher rates (e.g., American Council on Education, 1990; Steele, 1992), and graduate from college with substantially lower grades than White students (e.g., Nettles, 1988). Such performance gaps can be attributed to

In some schools there has been an issue of white teachers and students treating black students differently. This issue has been going unnoticed or ignored and needs to be addressed.

Teaching in racially diverse classrooms often leaves educators feeling uncertain about how to proceed and how to respond to historically marginalized students. There is pressure to acknowledge and accept students of color with different perspectives, to diversify the syllabi, be more aware of classroom dynamics, and pay attention to how students of color experience the learning process.

School institutional racism is in the form of teachers, resources and harsher punishment that potentially leads to school- to- prison pipeline towards blacks and minorities starting at a young age. Low income neighborhoods have a higher population of blacks and other minorities, and since those neighboring schools are funded through property taxes these schools are extremely underfunded, understaffed, and lack the resources needed to properly provide these students with the education they need. As stated in the article by Myles Moody, “This current system is set up to fail Black Children (Moody, 2016).” Most teachers who are employed in these low income schools may employ inexperience teachers who lack the ability and experience to bond with their students and their cultural needs (Moody, 2016). This lack of bonding is developed because there is a lack of congruency between the students and the staff. The teachers also lack the experience to also build a good rapport with their students’ parents; therefore, there is a high level of mistrust towards teachers that directly impact the students’ level of education (Moody, 2016). When the teacher, student and parent develop a good relationship with one another, the teacher is more inclined and comfortable to report to the parent any possible behavioral or learning discrepancies

American society likes to believe that race relations in our country are no longer strained. We do not want to hear about the need for affirmative action or about the growing numbers of white supremacist groups. In order to appease our collective conscious, we put aside the disturbing fact that racism is alive and well in the great U.S.A. It hides in the workplace, it subtly shows its ugly face in the media, and it affects the education of minority students nationwide. In the following excerpts from an interview with a middle class African American male, the reader will find strong evidence that race plays a major role in determining the type and quality of education a student receives.

Teachers must have a full understanding of their student’s cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds in order to become socially conscious of the power relations among their students. In order for teachers to learn to lose their own biases, I will host after school teacher trainings where I will facilitate discussions about race and class. This is important because according to author Gilda Ochoa, if teachers hold on to cultural assumptions they run the risk of sending racialized messages to their students, who then internalize them (Ochoa 165). In her book, Academic Profiling, she provides examples of how students pick up on such messages. For instance April Lee, reveals how she is aware of her teachers’ expectations of Asian Americans when she states, “When a teacher looks at you and your face, [they think,] “oh, you’re Asian.” She must be really smart, or she must be really good at math” (Ochoa 165). These stereotyped messages or “ideological assaults” often translate into the differential ways teachers treat their students and is known to create resentment in the students treated inferiorly (Ochoa 172). Clearly, in order for

“Students are less likely to be suspended, expelled, or placed in detention by teachers who are of the same race as they are” I believe some students feel more comfortable around people that are the same race. While I whole heartily believe that implicit bias does play a role into this quote. Where students of the opposite race as the teacher or school administration have biases towards these students whether they relies it or not.

“…it is clear that no one teacher can articulate all viewpoints well, and that a diversity of student opinions makes for better classes.”-Finkelman. Classes with no racial diversity, would contain a small variety of viewpoints. Not everyone’s perspective would be the same on everything but the class would be poorer and would never fully obtain its true depth that is clearly possible when multiple races are combined. Along with different races there comes numerous backgrounds, and walks of life, not just the dissimilarity in people’s skin color and physical appearance. There is also the fact that with Affirmative Action no one outside of the minority groups is given the same acceptance and help, but without it would it really help them in the long run if their classes never reached their

What is racism? The definition is prejudice or discrimination to another race. Unfortunately, racism is evident almost anywhere especially in a high school. Name-calling, bullying, verbal abuse – are all forms of racism and can be seen in high schools, where all different backgrounds –teachers, pupils or staff – face with negative backlash of racism. Students of different race groups find it extremely tough to bond with their classmates from other “races circles”. How damaging is racism to schools? To society?, is it all black and white or are we blind to it? In this essay I will discuss racist incidents in schools specifically in America and Britain, who are infamous for racial incidents, and how it will affect the students and any others involved in those situations in the future