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Ladson-Billings (2009) makes recommendations for helping all teachers become more effective teachers of African-American students. One recommendation she makes is providing opportunities for teacher candidates to observe culturally relevant teachers to one day be able to effectively teach African-American students. In this video, the author discusses an important culturally relevant teacher in her life who taught her wonderful stories and accomplishments of African-Americans. She taught what really mattered to her students.

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Council on Anthropology & Education of the American Anthropological Association

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Kellner Family Professor of Urban Education

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Future of Anthropology in Schools of Education

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Gloria Ladson-Billings is the Kellner Family Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the 2005-2006 president of the American Educational Research Association. Ladson-Billings' research examines the pedagogical practices of teachers who are successful with African American students.

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According to Ladson-Billings (2009), when beginning teachers come into minority communities, many are unable to understand the student's home language, social interaction patterns, histories, and cultures. In order to truly educate students, teachers must immerse themselves in the community. This will provide teachers with needed information on how to work with the community.  One great example of this is a teacher known as Jaime Escalante. He was very familiar with the community his students were in. He was immersed in their culture which allowed him to effectively educate his students

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Gloria Larson-Billings (2009) discusses how there is often a denial of African-American culture. For example, Instead of honoring the language that students bring with them, it is often seen as deficient. In this video, however, a teacher describes how her school celebrates and honors the fact that their students speak another language. In doing that, they are honoring the students who have a cultural background of speaking Spanish. The school has a Spanish only newspaper, where students are encouraged to participate in. The morning news is produced in Spanish on some days and in English in other days. These activities honor the students who have a cultural background of speaking Spanish at home and it helps them see their language as an incredible gift.

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Former School Improvement Network Channel

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Honoring students' cultures through success in both languages

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Jessica describes some of the bilingual activities at the school designed to help students succeed in both languages and celebrate all students' cultural backgrounds.

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Culturally Relevant Teaching: Erasing Biases

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Culturally Relevant Teaching: Erasing Biases

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In Dreamkeepers, Ladson-Billings raises a point that teachers must erase the biases they have towards students and their families and to develop multiple perspectives. She gives an example of a teacher that she has observed describe her students' parents as roadblocks to their child's education because they lack interest, fail to provide the adequate resources, and fail to attend conferences. The teacher makes assumptions while failing to recognize that life may be a struggle for those families on a daily basis. According to Ladson-Billings (2009), it's important for teachers to make a commitment to working with their students, regardless of parental participation. The article, Road Tested / Three Ways to Engage Parents in High-Poverty Settings by Tiffany Anderson recognizes that low parental involvement is generally not an indicator of low interest, but rather of community barriers that prevent schools from effectively engaging parents. As a school leader, she has found that it is possible to remove many of these barriers and engage families in meaningful ways. One example is hosting job fairs and workshops for parents on topics such as computer literacy, job placement, healthy cooking and eating, and earning a GED. Another example is notifying families of upcoming events through text messages, automated phone calls, and public service announcements on local radio stations in case they don't have access to the internet.

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Tiffany Anderson

All parents want to see their children succeed. Low parental involvement is generally not an indicator of low interest, but rather of community barriers that prevent schools from effectively engaging parents. As a school leader who has served in several high-poverty environments, I have found that it is possible to remove many of these barriers and engage families in meaningful ways.

Make Allies and Ask Questions

To begin building a positive rapport with your families, identify parents who have relationships across the community. Express how valuable their input is to your school's success and ask them to participate in a focus group. It is often hard for parents to explain why other parents are not involved, but asking specific questions can help identify barriers to engagement:

What are the challenges you face daily? (Our parents have expressed concerns about finding jobs, feeding their families, and even washing laundry.)

What is the most common complaint you hear from other parents about the community or its schools?

Are you active in any community events or organizations? If so, what are they and why are you involved?

Is the school or district a welcoming place?

What are the top three neighborhood issues that parents face in the district?

Where do you get information about the neighborhood?

What businesses do most families in the community frequent?

Gathering feedback and discussing solutions with these parents has helped our district generate further questions, conversations, and surveys to extend to all of our families. The more information our schools have, the more strategic we can be in providing families direct assistance through resources, education, and employment.

Creatively Publicize Information

If your families do not often read the newspaper, have access to the Internet, or read materials that come home, consider advertising school events in other venues. In addition to using traditional methods of communication, our district places flyers at the local chop suey restaurant and in our community grocery stores. We also notify families of upcoming events through text messages, automated phone calls, and public service announcements on local radio stations.

Become a Vehicle for the Community

When concerns about crime in our community were increasing, our district decided to sponsor a town hall meeting. We leveraged the opportunity to not only address the issue of crime, but to also engage families in sessions on achievement, community services, and school volunteerism. There are many ways to foster parental engagement, but we have been especially successful through events like these and by providing our families with basic resources.

To make your schools a true vehicle for the community, consider offering the following services:

Host job fairs and workshops for parents on topics such as computer literacy, job placement, healthy cooking and eating, and earning a GED. These workshops, led by volunteer staff and community members, can be offered at PTA meetings or during school hours (which has the added bonus of increasing family visibility within the school). Schools can waive admission fees for workshops in exchange for school volunteer hours.

Provide bus passes for students and parents to ride to school together, or provide bus passes or cabs for parents to attend school events.

Allow parents to wash clothing with supplies provided by the school in exchange for volunteering (one load of laundry equals one hour of volunteering in the school).

Offer employment when possible to families within the community.

Collaborate with community agencies such as the YMCA, neighborhood watch, local library, and recreation center-and offer to host events sponsored by these groups.

Partner with a local thrift store or food pantry-or open one in your school-to supply families with clothing and regular access to groceries. Our district operates a school-based pantry that is run by students and staff members and stocked by the St. Louis Area Foodbank.

In addition to providing a full meal at parent activities (workshops, parent-teacher conferences, book clubs, etc.), provide a bag of groceries to parents in attendance. We offer groceries to the first 30 families who show up at an event, and we always have more parents in attendance than groceries. Most of our elementary schools receive more than 100 families at these activities.

Help build home libraries by providing a book to families at every parent function or every time a parent volunteers at the school. We prioritize funding for this initiative in our school operating budget, and also through donations and grants.

Partner with social services to provide resources to families within the school such as family counseling services, mental health supports, and welfare services.

The key to high parental involvement is removing barriers by building genuine relationships that result in a culture of understanding, support, and collaboration. As our district has discovered, when we support our families, our families have been instrumental in supporting our schools.
Tiffany Anderson is the superintendent of the Jennings School District and an adjunct professor at the University of Missouri.

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Three Ways to Engage Parents in High-Poverty Settings

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Tiffany Anderson All parents want to see their children succeed. Low parental involvement is generally not an indicator of low interest, but rather of community barriers that prevent schools from effectively engaging parents. As a school leader who has served in several high-poverty environments, I have found that it is possible to remove many of these barriers and engage families in meaningful ways.

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The article Racial Inequities: What Schools Can Do, discusses the importance of creating an educational environment that is culturally relevant and respectful. (Education World, 2012). There are  incredible disparities between the educational outcomes of children of color and their White counterparts (Education World, 2012). Changes can be made in the area of leadership to challenge racial inequities. In Dreamkeepers, Ladson-Billings mentions how teachers working in opposition to the system is the most likely road to success for students who have been discounted and disregarded by the system

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EducationWorld is pleased to present this resource shared by the State Education Resource Center (SERC) in CT. This adapted material originally appeared in the SERC document Equity in Education: A Transformational Approach.

This article offers an overview of the problem of racial inequities in education and discusses changes that can be made in the area of leadership in order to meet this challenge. See part 2 of the article for additional strategies in the areas of professional capacity, school climate, school-family-community partnerships and teaching and learning.

W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1903 that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line-the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea." Over 100 years later, we continue to see that problem of the color-line in our schools today: incredible disparities between the educational outcomes of children of color and their White counterparts. "In nearly every category associated with positive academic outcomes," according to Pedro Noguera of New York University, "students of color typically are underrepresented, and in categories associated with negative outcomes, they are overrepresented."

The State Education Resource Center (SERC), as part of its commitment to improve the achievement of Connecticut's children and youth, provides professional development and information dissemination in the latest research and best practices to educators, service providers, and families throughout the state, as well as job-embedded technical assistance and training within schools, programs, and districts.

The state of Connecticut and the nation as a whole are currently confronted by what is being called the civil rights crisis of our time: the loss of our students of color to the racial predictability of the achievement gaps. But students of color are not failing; our educational system is failing them.

For centuries, we have avoided discussing institutionalized racism and its detrimental effects on our students of color as well as their White peers. Such avoidance is mainly due to the uncomfortable feelings and reactions brought about by racial discourse. Feelings of resentment and guilt are some of the most common emotions experienced by people who engage in racial discourse.

Conversations about race and culture are not meant to be easy, but without them we will never begin to understand the root causes of our racial disparities and challenge our current thinking.

Educators within our school systems ask repeatedly for prescriptive strategies that will help them improve the academic achievement of students of color on high-stakes tests. What we need is a pedagogical approach that focuses not on racialized instructional strategies but on creating an educational environment that is culturally relevant and respectful. Based upon the work of researchers and practitioners in the field, SERC [State Education Resource Center in CT] defines a culturally relevant and respectful environment as having the following elements:

1. Teachers who are highly aware of their own beliefs, attitudes, and biases and those of others;

2. Students who are empowered to use their own cultural characteristics, experiences, and perspectives for academic success; and

3. A curriculum that engages and affirms both students' and teachers' identities, cultural and experiential reference points, and world views in the process of learning.

Only when instructional strategies are implemented in a context of mutual respect will we begin to see the impact of our efforts. A culturally and racially relevant approach allows educators to relate to students and allows students to connect to the curriculum and demonstrate their knowledge in meaningful ways.

Potential Solutions to Addressing Systemic Inequities

Creating equity at the district, school, and classroom levels requires this systemic and culturally relevant approach. The literature is replete with information on the essential elements of educational reform. Based upon the work of the Consortium on Chicago School Research, SERC has considered five critical elements: Leadership, Professional Capacity, School Climate, School-Family-Community Partnerships, and Teaching & Learning. These elements are essential in order to achieve systemic transformation in education and ensure an equitable education for all children.

Leadership

According to Hilliard (1995), in order to eradicate the racial predictability of the achievement gaps, leaders must have the skill, will, and knowledge to uproot the underlying factors that contribute to them - qualities that are often overlooked. Educators need to examine the structural practices that perpetuate the isolation of students of color in an educational system that historically was not created for them. This requires leadership positioned to provide the necessary pressures and supports for the development of this skill, will, and knowledge.

Almost every approach to educational reform acknowledges the role of leaders in directing efficient and sustainable change. Therefore, educational reform efforts must begin with leaders who demand high expectations for all students. Any tendency of a district, school administration, faculty, and/or staff to rationalize the failure of students of color as "normal" must not be tolerated.

Whether that rationalization is one of complacency because of a history of persistent and pervasive failure, or abdication of responsibility because of poverty, or a misperception that certain families do not value education, does not matter. Leaders must challenge any attitudes and beliefs, including their own, that accept the failure of students of color.

To move to a climate of high expectations and achievement for all students, leadership must focus on assessment and instruction that are effective for all students and ensure that results are continually monitored against the goals set forward to improve academic outcomes. Leaders must facilitate opportunities for members of their staff and community to courageously dialogue about the intersection of race and education. The understandings generated by such dialogue will serve as the platform to develop structural systems, policies, and practices that lead to higher student achievement. Leaders must assist school personnel and community members to clarify their understanding of what the Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change (2004) referred to as the "forces that maintain the racial disparity status quo and constrain the potential success of strategies for change." We refer to this understanding as professional capacity.

References (in order of mention)

Du Bois, W.E.B. (1903). The souls of black folk. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co.

Noguera, P. A. and J. Y. Wing, Eds. (2006). Unfinished business: Closing the racial achievement gap in our schools. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

State Education Resource Center. (2009). Culturally responsive pedagogy working definition. Middletown, CT: SERC.

Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago (CCSR). (2010). Organizing schools for improvement: Lessons from Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hilliard, A. (1995). The maroon within us: Selected essays on African American community socialization. Halethorpe, MD: Black Classic Press.

Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change. (2004). Structural racism and community building. Washington, DC: Aspen Institute.

Related resource

Part 2 of this article offers additional systems-level strategies--in the areas of professional capacity, school climate, school-family-community partnerships and teaching and learning--that can help eliminate racial inequities.

Education World®
Copyright © 2012 Education World

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EducationWorld is pleased to present this resource shared by the State Education Resource Center (SERC) in CT. This adapted material originally appeared in the SERC document Equity in Education: A Transformational Approach. This article offers an overview of the problem of racial inequities in education and discusses changes that can be made in the area of leadership in order to meet this challenge.