This week, I stepped back into my role as a teacher educator (after a six month break from teaching) at the first meeting of a semester long "Diversity and Equity Foundations" course for aspiring secondary teachers -- all juniors or seniors. The course is designed to expose aspiring teachers to the diversity of students who are populating American public school classrooms, and to help these candidates examine their own identities, views, and perceptions of those who are dissimilar from them. After introducing my new students to some basic facts about the system of public schooling in the United States, I then led them through a profile of the diversity demographics that are prevalent in our schools today.
In Maryland, for example, 54% of students enrolled in the public schools are children of color (A Public Education Primer, 2012, Center on Education Policy). In my local school district, 35% of enrolled students are white, 25% are black, 21% are Hispanic, and 12.5% of students are English Language Learners (The Fact Book 2011-12, MSDE). At my daughter's school, 49% of students are black, 16.5% white, 26% Hispanic, 33.5% are English Language Learners, and 60% of students quality for Free and Reduced Lunch. In our opening discussion last night about how and why diversity can enrich public schooling for all, several of my undergraduate students suggested that in order to be prepared to live in the broad "real" world as adults, it is important for young people to have exposure and practice in interacting with others of various customs, religion, language, and culture. At first glance it would seem that my older daughter's school is a wonderful example of such rich diversity, as the demographic statistics above suggest. However, this week I also learned that one of my older daughter's classmates--the only white child in her kindergarten class--has transferred to another school.
Upon learning of her white classmate's departure, I have been left wondering: Is it significant that in my daughter's kindergarten class there are no white children remaining? Which is more important -- for brown-skinned children to be educated alongside white children or for white children to be educated alongside brown-skinned children, or both, and why? If my daughter were white-skinned like me rather than brown-skinned like her father, would I be thinking more seriously about transferring her to a different, less "diverse", school, too?
As I reflect on my reaction to the departure of my Darling Daughter 1 (DD1)'s white classmate, and with report cards coming out this week, I find myself curious about the impact of the factors of diversity on students' individual and collective academic achievement at my older daughter's school. We have always expected that our DD1 will do well in school. And yet in a diverse setting like my daughter's neighborhood school, how much can the wonders of heterogeneous, public schooling mitigate against the predictive factors of race, language, and class? And how much of the correlating effect of achievement and SES is at play in the fact that many of the white families in our neighborhood appear to be opting for alternatives to our diverse, neighborhood school?
I wonder how much diversity really informs decisions about where parents send their children vs. looking at the actual/perceived quality of the program. We chose Sabin for Eliza not because it was much more racially diverse than Alameda but because we believed the classrooms would be smaller and the instruction was as good if not better than Alameda. The fact that it is racially diverse was a bonus but really not a deciding factor. Would we have made a different decision if Eliza were the only white girl in her class instead of an balanced racial mix? Maybe?
ReplyDeleteI look forward to having the opportunity in the years ahead to compare our niece's experience in a diverse, neighborhood elementary school with your niece's experiences in our local, neighborhood school!
DeleteWhile I agree with you wholeheartedly that individual parents care primarily about the quality of the school which they select for their child, when educational leaders, policy makers, and researchers consider the importance of diversity in our public school classrooms, they often theorize that classroom diversity is important to the collective acculturation of American children in a pluralist society. Perhaps your daughter is having the idealized diversity experience and your niece is not -- what I don't know is what difference this makes??
Hi Jean, this is PA writing on your computer. Just some thoughts on where you said if your child wasn't brown would you consider moving your child to a "less diverse" classroom. A lot of parents of white children who I talk to, struggle to find diverse schools to send their children to, and by that they mean they are trying to find a school with more than 3-5 % white. Your classroom actually doesn't sound diverse. 100% children of color isn't diverse, is it? The defecting parents might have been looking for more diversity, not less. I think diversity is the ideal for parents of all colors with children of all colors. A question might be, what percentage makes up diversity? 3-5% seems to be just a token representation. How many students in a classroom need to share a "background" before they are truly representing their culture?
ReplyDeleteI do love the fact that the other day when my DD1 made a passing comment that one her classmates was "prettier" than her, that this classmate is AFrican American and not a white "Shirley Temple" lookalike. I am glad that for my daughters they won't be described as "the" brown child in their class. And yet, as you point out, if my daughter were white like me and she was the only white child in her class (as was her departed classmate), what would compel us to stay and have our child serve as the token "only"?
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