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A Guide to Social Justice Story Telling. Edited by Cliff Mayotte and Claire Kiefer. 2018. Voice of Witness (Dave Eggers).

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A powerful tool for teaching reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Connie Dierking and Sherra Jones. 2014. Heinemann.

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Effective Strategies for School Transformation. Elena Aguilar. 2013. Jossey-Bass.

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What's Different About Teaching Reading to Students Learning English?

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What's Different About Teaching Reading to Students Learning English?

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CAL Study Guide. 2007. Delta Publishing.

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Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teaching and Learning.  

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Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teaching and Learning.  

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Classroom practices for student success. Sharroky Hollie. 2012. Shell Education. (TCM)

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Tools to Engage Students in Meaning Making. Jay McTighe and Harvey F. Silver. 2020. ASCD.

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Hamilton Co. ESC. Equity

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Strategies for ELs. Andrea Honigsfeld. 2019. Heinemann.

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Word study for phonics, vocabulary, and spelling. Lori Helman, Donald R. Bear, Shane Templeton, Marcia Invernizzi, Francine Johnston. 2012. Pearson.

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Collaboration and Co-Teaching.  Strategies for ELs.

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Collaboration and Co-Teaching.  Strategies for ELs.

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Andrea Honigsfeld and Maria G. Dove.  2010.  Corwin.

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Collaboration and Co-Teaching for ELs.  A Leader's Guide.

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Collaboration and Co-Teaching for ELs.  A Leader's Guide.

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Andrea Honigsfeld and Maria G. Dove. 2015. Corwin.

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Vernita Mayfield

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by Vernita Mayfield

There are few things more frustrating than being misunderstood. Imagine having your intentions questioned every time you walk into a room, make a purchase, or drive down the street; your humanity questioned and assessed like a relentless pop quiz; your successes met with disbelief, anger, or denial. Imagine having every behavior, emotion, nuance, and physicality scrutinized, labeled, criticized, demonized, criminalized, or mocked-at times with clear intention and other times with complicit indifference. Imagine having your aspirations mocked, your progress chastised, your self-worth ridiculed, your identity deprived, your accomplishments minimalized, your culture bastardized, your talents narrowly defined, and your intellect derided. Without a word, you are deemed a menace as peers shrink away in fear or stare with indignance.

Such are the experiences of many people of color who live their lives being misunderstood. How did things get this way?

Students of Color in Public Schools (This Isn't Pretty)

The American social, economic, and educational system was intentionally designed to have a ruling elite class and a subservient class destined to serve them (Apple, 2009; Watkins, 2001). To educate everyone equally would have been counterproductive to a socioeconomic structure in which power, wealth, and status were granted on the basis of your ability to assimilate within a dominant class. The dominant class, whose domination was established by brutal force and the crafting of clever narratives to deflect from that force, established schooling for their children while initially denying schooling for all others. Like so many policies that guided the establishment of America, keeping the perceived underclass in ignorance was legislatively established and legally enforced (Abul, 2008). Teaching a person of color to read or write could result in severe fines or imprisonment if the perpetrator was white. Whippings or worse punishments were rendered if the perpetrator was Black (Blackmon, 2009; King, 2005).

During the period of slavery in America, educated African Americans were a novelty. The educated few, however, were powerful and compelling rebuttals to the narrative of white supremacy. Their voices resounded with bitter clarity the evils of institutional racism, and many were active in the abolitionist movement (Lerone, 1975).

After emancipation, African Americans did not fare better in terms of educational opportunity. Many whites still opposed the education of ex-slaves (Hart, 2002). Schools that did so were burned and their teachers threatened, and any person of color who demonstrated agency, resolve, dignity, or intellect was often summarily murdered or lynched (Watson, 2012). These kinds of intimidating practices imparted fear, distrust, and a legacy of generational trauma among African Americans that is still evidenced in modern-day behaviors.

There were few exceptions, but most notable were the Rosenwald Schools, the brainchild of Tuskegee Institute's Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald, an American businessman and philanthropist. Nearly 5,000 schools were built in the U.S. rural South to educate poor Black children. The schools were built with modern architectural features and admitted generous natural light, but they lacked updated textbooks, materials, and resources, which exacerbated an already growing gap between academic quality measures in Black and white schools (Carruthers & Wanamaker, 2013). The teachers, however, promoted a rigorous curriculum and encouraged the students to achieve at high levels. Some of the distinguished alumni include Maya Angelou and Representative John Lewis of Georgia.

In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson ruled that public facilities, such as schools, that were separated by race were legal if they were equal. Alleged separate but equal educational institutions were established for minorities. These schools were often controlled with the hegemonic values and beliefs of white superiority. The dominant class largely wrote the curriculum in which the ingenuity, intellect, tenacity, and accomplishments of people of color were deliberately omitted. The curriculum, resources, and facilities for people of color were conveniently inferior to those available to the dominant class (Cross, 2007). The culture, values, and identity of people of color were denigrated and negatively dictated. Cultural repression was leveraged within the education system to make the oppressed ashamed of themselves, their values, and their history (Lerone, 1975).

Meanwhile, white scientists conducted studies theorizing that people of color were biologically and cognitively inferior to whites. This kind of rationalization of Black intellectual inferiority provided a framework for the denial of social privileges during the 20th century and rationalized the colonial plundering of their assets, economic domination, and denial of equitable educational opportunities (Watkins, 2001).

Postsecondary institutions for Black people also differed vastly from their white counterparts (Condron, 2009; Lerone, 1975). First, they were structured to be highly regimented. Students were expected to adhere to a strict course of discipline. (If that sounds eerily familiar to you, you might want to reexamine the discipline policy in your school.) Black people were taught how to cook, clean, perform physically challenging work, and do mentally menial tasks (Watkins, 2001). Schools that chose to deviate from the established curriculum by offering courses in the hard sciences were denied funding from their wealthy white benefactors (Anderson, 1980). The goal for Black education was to create an obedient and stable semiskilled workforce (Hart, 2002). According to Darder (2002), education was thus used as an "institutionalized politicizing process for conditioning students to subscribe to the dominant ideological norms and political assumptions of the prevailing social order" (p. 156).

During the Jim Crow years, institutions such as Harvard or Columbia admitted and graduated limited numbers of Black students, but those students were typically barred from teaching in these institutions. And although some Black students attended classes along with white students, they were usually prevented from using the campus libraries and laboratories or attending scholarly association meetings.

After World War II, the G.I. bill provided all veterans with eligibility for low-cost mortgages, low-cost loans to start a business, and tuition and living expenses to attend college. The bill also entitled veterans to receive one year of unemployment compensation. Although responsible for creating an American middle class, the bill also created the largest divide in economic status between whites and people of color. G.I. bill grants were distributed to states and local agencies, including those that practiced Jim Crow laws (laws that supported American apartheid). Thus, many soldiers of color were denied access to the funds. Even though they had served their country in the same way as all other soldiers, they were unable to advance economically, as the white soldiers did. People of color were denied well-paying jobs, retirement pensions, competitive educational degrees, and business capital-all of which resulted in their inability to gain middle-class status as easily as their white counterparts.

Soldiers of color who were granted access to G.I. funding pursued education but were limited in their choices. Not all colleges and universities accepted people of color, and those that did limited the number of slots available. Historically Black colleges and universities accepted students, but they were not as numerous as white institutions.

Veterans of color who were granted G.I. funds for housing were limited in where they could purchase a home. Certain neighborhoods prevented the sale of homes to people of color. The mortgage industry redlined areas where people of color lived and made it difficult for them to get reasonable mortgage rates or lines of credit. Schools in the redlined neighborhoods were crippled with inferior levels of funding and quality of education. As Watkins (2001) stated, "Black education experienced a separate tradition in funding, administration, teacher training, and curriculum" (p. 180). The inability to advance economically through home ownership or quality education prevented many people of color from pursuing postsecondary education.

By the end of the 1940s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began a class action suit for the integration of schools, which ended with a 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision (Brown v. Board of Education) to abolish segregated schools with "deliberate speed" (King, 2005, p. 157). This legislation, however, did little to sway public opinion about integrating schools, and many districts simply ignored the mandate (Atkinson, 1993). In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower was forced to send federal troops to ensure the personal security of nine students determined to integrate Central High School in Arkansas. Additional support for desegregating schools would arrive in the form of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which provided financial assistance to schools and districts attempting to desegregate.

President Lyndon Johnson's declaration in 1964 of an unconditional war on poverty in America was followed by one of the most influential pieces of educational legislation in American history-the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 (Haycock, 2006). This bill would more than triple the amount of federal dollars allocated to support poor citizens in public school systems, many of whom were people of color. Supported by mandated busing, people of color began integrating into educational institutions at an increasing rate (Atkinson, 1993).

When President Johnson signed an executive order for affirmative action, many white colleges and universities began actively recruiting minorities and offering financial assistance. Consequently, enrollment of minorities increased in colleges and universities across the United States.

However, by the mid-1960s and early 1970s, disturbing trends and patterns emerged. White families began to flee districts that were forced to integrate schools. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests in reading and math confirmed that minority children were not performing as well academically as their white counterparts in both lower-income and middle-class schools (Raffel, 1980). If that wasn't alarming enough, in 1972, the National Education Association reported that Black children were being pushed out of school, suspended, harassed, and arrested. African American students in desegregated schools were systematically excluded from extracurricular activities, tracked into vocational classes, and confronted with condescension or hostility (Atkinson, 1993). Twenty-five years after Brown v. Board of Education, school desegregation was briefly achieved. However, equity and the underlying beliefs enabling it had not withstood the trial (Atkinson, 1993).

Incentivized Achievement

The unfunded No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) legislated schools and districts to examine the achievement of minority subgroups in schools (Haycock, 2006). However, this legislation simplified the complexity of factors that brought education to this vortex (Bae, Holloway, Li, & Bempechat, 2008). Few questioned the deeply ingrained belief systems of teachers and staff who were now teaching diverse student populations (Berliner, 2010).

During fiscal year 2009-2010, the Obama administration allocated an unprecedented amount of stimulus dollars for school reform (McGuinn, 2012). For the first time in U.S. history, schools would be given both the ideals of equity and excellence in schools and the financial support to achieve them. Over $7 billion was allocated for turning around chronically low-performing schools and supporting innovation through a program titled Race to the Top, which incentivized educational innovation.

Grant recipients crafted school improvement plans designed to address academic achievement gaps, yet few schools used the monies to help teachers understand minority students and the families with whom they had little interaction in their social or private lives. Thus, many educators were endeavoring to close achievement gaps that they could neither define nor explain (Andrews, 2007). Schools with high minority student populations worked tirelessly to address teacher shortages and high staff turnover, but few used the grant monies to address the influence of their students' culture in the environment-a phenomenon that greatly influenced teacher retention, as teachers were often baffled by the seemingly odd behaviors of their minority students (Allen, 2008; Ford & Moore, 2013).

Teachers and faculty largely ignored race, privilege, and inequity while seeking to improve schools through strict and regimented systems that privileged some, disciplined most, and disenfranchised others (Hart, 2002; Howley, Woodrum, Burgess, & Rhodes, 2009). School staff claimed color blindness while simultaneously instituting policies and programs that perpetuated the inequitable suspension and expulsion of minority children. Staff convened around improving schools and student learning while largely ignoring the effect of culture, poverty, generational trauma, violence, poor nutrition, and an absence of regular health care on the students they were serving (Day-Vines & Day-Hairston, 2005; Epstein, Galindo, & Sheldon, 2011; Gay, 2002; Ware, 2006; Weinstein, Curran, & Tomlinson-Clarke, 2003).

Dismantling Inequity for Improved Outcomes

Creating equitable educational opportunities for all has been an espoused goal of American educational policy since 1954 (Blackmore, 2009). But history has demonstrated that the ability to achieve it will take more than legislation (Orfield & Eaton, 1996). We tried desegregation. We tried busing. We tried testing. We tried financial support. What we have not tried with reasonable effort, intention, and consistency is confronting the values and beliefs that established inequity as a way of life in America.

What we're afraid to talk about is how race has been used to establish economic and educational advantage for a ruling class while perpetuating economic and educational subservience for others. What don't we want to talk about? How we, as educators, treat children and their parents who look, act, and behave differently than we do. What are we avoiding in school improvement planning? The examination of practices and policies that perpetuate privilege and benefits for some while disadvantaging others. Too often when the history of educational racism in this country is presented to many educators, they plug their fingers in their ears, close their eyes, and endeavor to drown out the hum of pain from the oppressed.

Some educators blame the victims and point to the current circumstances of the victims as somehow being their own fault, rather than examine the mare's nest of deliberate havoc that created those circumstances. More than ever, we need an army of educators with the political, moral, and professional will to dismantle systems of oppression that have historically crippled opportunity and access for students of color. We need champions of children who are willing to be temporarily uncomfortable so that all children might be enduringly celebrated and educated equitably. We need advocates for educational advancement who are willing to examine themselves, their behaviors, and their values as part of school improvement efforts. We need culturally competent educators. We need you.

Cultural competency, as I define it, is the ability to use critical-thinking skills to interpret how cultural values and beliefs influence conscious and unconscious behavior; the understanding of how inequity can be and has been perpetuated through socialized behaviors; and the knowledge and determined disposition to disrupt inequitable practices to achieve greater personal and professional success for yourself and others (Clark, Zygmunt, & Howard, 2016; Gay, 2010; Howard, 2010).

To examine this definition more closely, culture, as defined by Howard (2010), is "a complex constellation of values, mores, norms, customs, ways of being, ways of knowing, and traditions that provide a general design for living, is passed from generation to generation, and serves as a pattern for interpreting reality" (p. 51). Culture, therefore, influences how people think, the decisions they make, how they learn, what they believe is important to learn, how they speak, how they dress-in a nutshell, the values, beliefs, and behaviors on which they operate daily. We learn cultural values, mores, norms, and ways of being through people around us, media messages, common events, celebrations, and observances. We are immersed in a culture, sometimes several at once, from the time we are born until the time we die. Some of the behaviors, values, and beliefs we hold are conscious to us and espoused with regularity. Sometimes they are unconscious to us; they have become such a part of our belief system that we operate on them without critically examining why.

I prefer the term cultural competence to antiracist education because it embodies the comprehensive nature of culture, which is inclusive of the multiple identities one assumes or nurtures. The culture of an individual is complex in terms of what people learn or reject within their environment, including factors such as implicit bias, racism, privilege, and identity. The term competence suggests that you are endeavoring to become fluent in a set of practices or skills that advance your professionality. We are all competent in something. We can be competent in understanding cultural influences and challenging ones that are socially unjust.

Understanding how we are socialized through culture and subcultures is a distinctive knowledge set. Knowing how to examine those cultural values and beliefs as they manifest in school settings and dismantle the practices that perpetuate inequity is a level of competency that all educators need in order for students to succeed. It is possible to learn how to do this. And that is what this book is about.

As a young mother, I was eating an ice cream cone with my sons when I bit down to the bottom of the cone and threw it away. "Why did you do that?" J.R. asked me. "Do what?" I retorted. "Throw the bottom of your cone away, Mom. Why do you do that?" I paused for a moment and had to think about it. As a child, my aunt had worked at an ice cream cone factory in the 1950s and would never eat the bottom of the cone. She swore it to be unsanitary. We were never allowed to do so either. Twenty years later, my lips had never touched the bottom of a cone, and I was operating on autopilot.

Don't laugh too hard. There are things you have done without thinking about them, too. There are beliefs you hold that influence the decisions you have made-some of them made on autopilot as well. If you can understand how the messages you receive, both verbal and nonverbal, influence the things you do, you can comprehend the importance of culture in both teaching and learning. Cultural competency, therefore, prompts you to examine the cultural values that are influencing people's behavior. You must understand your own values and beliefs, but it is important for you to also understand the cultural values and beliefs of your students. When the messages people have received result in behaviors that perpetuate inequity within our society (and many of them do), a culturally competent educator moves into action, disrupting practices that advantage some and disadvantage others.

Cultural competency is the calling of every reasonably competent educator who believes in the value of education to elevate everyone and who desires the critical skills to do so. Culturally competent educators are a positive, disruptive force; they construct the future through their actions and words. With an idealized vision of the future, they wield their knowledge and influence to challenge the normalization of oppression and examine their role in the system. They are willing to break down barriers to opportunities for historically underserved learners and create a generation of educated advocates.

What Knowledge, Skills, and Dispositions Do We Need?

Awakening the deeply embedded values and beliefs on which we are operating and assessing where we are, personally, in terms of cultural competency is the first step in becoming culturally competent. The second step is understanding the cultural, social, economic, and legislative environments that create and perpetuate a system of inequitable treatment, opportunities, and outcomes for groups of people with common physical characteristics and applying and acting on that knowledge to examine false narratives perpetuated within our cultural context. The third step is analyzing policies and practices for inequitable outcomes, elevating the humanity of everyone, alleviating the daily indignities suffered by oppressed populations, and aligning new policies and practices with resources. The final step is advocating and leading, as well as mentoring and sharing power with others, and collaboratively working with others to dismantle inequitable systems.

Don't get so caught up in the semantics of the term cultural competency that you minimalize the scope of this work. It is justly grounded in culture because that is the context in which we learn and unlearn ideology and practices, but the outcome is educational justice, antiracist advocacy, and leadership for dismantling inequitable systems and practices. Culturally competent educators manifest discreet knowledge, skills, and dispositions as outlined in the Cultural Competency Continuum shown in Figure 1.1.

Do Racially/Ethnically Homogenous Schools Need Culturally Competent Teachers?

Yes, enthusiastically yes! And here's why: You can teach in a school with little or no racial or ethnic diversity and still have a culturally diverse student body. Race, after all, is merely a fluid, socially constructed way to identify which people will be granted power, influence, resources, and privileges and which ones will likely not. It has no biological basis, but there are vividly disparate social and economic outcomes for people with higher levels of melanin. Those outcomes and the systems, structures, institutions, or individuals who use their power to disproportionately and unfairly distribute opportunity, access, or resources to another based on their racial category are racist. Cultural competency can help one identify when racism is occurring because the design and infrastructure of social systems and institutions sustain or perpetuate it.

You need culturally competent educators because your school may have teachers and students who identify within identical racial categories and may seldom, if ever, face the emotional crush of racism, but the teachers may still grapple to understand the culture of the students and families at the school.

How does that happen? Culture-the shared values, beliefs, patterns, and communication styles of a group of people-has little to do with the amount of melanin in your skin. For example, a white person who grew up with a single parent in a small apartment in Aachen, Germany; a white person raised in a middle-class family in suburban Cabimas, Venezuela; and a white oil billionaire from Anchorage, Alaska, will likely have different values, beliefs, patterns, and communication styles. In fact, you are just as likely to find people who identify in the same racial background with dissimilar cultural values and beliefs as you are to find people who identify in the same racial categories with common cultural values and beliefs. The cultural values and beliefs you adopt are related to the messages you hear and learn about the world-what is important and what is not, who is important and who is not, things you should do and know and things you should not do or know, what is discussed and what is not, and so on. These messages are transmitted through your environment from parents, relatives, friends, media, school, and neighbors, to name a few. Sometimes they are communicated verbally, and other messages are observable through nonverbal behaviors.

Even then, culture is not static; it is an ever-evolving set of knowledge and beliefs evidenced through learned behavior and responses. You may move to a different community and adopt many of the practices, beliefs, values, or even communication styles of your new community that may conflict with previous beliefs. You may have life experiences that shift values and beliefs that you once held strongly.

There is also the issue of subcultures-cultural values that lie within very specific communities of larger cultural values. For example, if you live in the United States, there are common cultural values familiar to most residents. If you live in the southern part of the United States, there are cultural values that are unique to that part of the country. And if you belong to a religious sect within that southern community, there are still other unique theological beliefs and values specific to the culture of that organization that guide you.

Organizations with minimal racial diversity still need culturally competent staff who can demonstrate their understanding of the historical context, nuances, and dynamics of various cultural values and who can demonstrate skills that create an optimal learning environment for students from all types of cultures. Racial identity is important, but it's not the only influence in understanding the cultures of people. If your school does not have a great amount of racial diversity, it can still benefit from staff who are culturally competent in understanding the cultures of their students and who know how to use that knowledge to craft better learning experiences for them.

Cultural competency is not the work of an elite band of educators who happen to work with populations that have a significant number of minority students and families. Teaching is not a spectator sport where we can afford to have educators stand at the sidelines observing a game that clearly favors some and disadvantages others, but who fail to get involved because it is not their team. All the students on the field are playing for their future and yours. They are the future voters and community members who will determine what resources are provided for your retirement, which people immigrate to your community, how crime and order will be managed, and how educators will be compensated. In short, they will make fundamental decisions about your quality of life. To underestimate or mismanage your responsibility as an educator is shortsighted at best and foolhardy at worst.

There is nothing passive or dispassionate about being a culturally competent educator. It has nothing to do with your race, ethnicity, culture, class, position, school location, or student population. Culturally competent educators recognize the power of their influence to change the course of history for the better, and they work collaboratively with colleagues to strategically critique where we failed in the past and where we'll endeavor to navigate in the future.

There is a long history of racial, gender, social, and cultural hierarchy of human value in our society (Alexander, 2010; Anyon, 1997). There are people who perpetuate the myth of racial superiority and actively work to preserve its legacy and economic privilege-some of whom may teach at your school.

As educators, we may have had no choice in how our society or school systems were constructed, but by our daily actions, we choose to perpetuate the existing system or redesign a better one. You can extend your influence beyond the boundaries of your classroom, school, or district. Exercising your talents through the lens of cultural competency is a vital tool in this effort.

Information is the currency of power, and schools are one of the social depositories that distributes or denies access to the currency. The more information one has, the more independent and autonomous a person becomes. Cultural competency is about distributing that currency equitably. Now, let's get to work!

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by Vernita Mayfield There are few things more frustrating than being misunderstood. Imagine having your intentions questioned every time you walk into a room, make a purchase, or drive down the street; your humanity questioned and assessed like a relentless pop quiz; your successes met with disbelief, anger, or denial.

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Elena Aguilar - new book 8/2020

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Education Week - The Art of Coaching Teachers

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Recently, I suggested that all coaches should be coaches for equity (see this blog post)--that it is our moral obligation and that if we aren't coaching for equity we are complicit in reproducing an inequitable system. I want offer some concrete ways in which we can coach teachers and leaders within our education system to build more equitable classrooms and schools.

What does it mean to be a coach for equity? I've landed on five broad domains which encompass coaching for equity: What you see in schools, where you look, who you listen to, your self-awareness, and finally, what you say about what you see and hear. In each of these areas there are specific actions that a coach for equity takes.

This blog will discuss what you see and where you look; next week I'll post Part 2 describing who you listen to and the kind of self-awareness that a coach for equity develops. And the following week, I'll post Part 3: what a coach for equity says about what he/she sees and hears.

1. It's What You See

Where does your gaze settle when you walk in to a classroom? Is it on the teacher and whatever he/she is doing? Is it on the students who are on-task or off-task? What draws your attention?

As a coach for equity, I scan the room for any child who seems left out, cast out, under-served or under-performing; for those who are socially, emotionally or academically not succeeding; for the vulnerable who need us to huddle around and help them get through childhood. Those are the children I look at first. I also see through a lens of power and systemic oppression because my gaze lands first on the children who may come from communities that have been disenfranchised for centuries, the children who may have more hurdles to jump across.

Then I pay attention to how the person with authority (usually the teacher) relates to these children. These highlight the first two indicators of equity in a classroom.

I have been in more classrooms than I can count where when I walk in the door, the first thing I see--right by the door--is a "time out" chair occupied by a black or brown male. The inequity stares me in the face. The symbolism of being by the door calls for a re-labeling of so called "drop outs"--I see those who may one day drop out being pushed out in the first, third, fourth grade. I have seen the same in the front office of many schools--black and brown boys (and a fair number of black girls) also being pushed out, waiting to be picked up because of a behavioral infraction. As a coach for equity, I take note of this.

When I go into classrooms, I also notice the following:

* Who is the teacher calling on? And are those students the "successful" ones? Or are they from the group of disengaged boys in the back of the class? And what is the nature of that interaction between the teacher and the students? If the teacher does call on one of those boys, is the interaction positive, neutral or negative?

* If students are doing group work, is every child meaningfully involved? Do they all have input into the work? Do they each contribute? Are each child's contributions appreciated and valued? How do students speak to each other? And are any students treated differently because they are perceived as being different?

* English Learners struggle in many ways when their learning needs aren't met. So I pay attention to how they are given access to the content and curriculum, how their specific language needs are met, and perhaps most importantly, whether they speak at all. We know that ELs need to speak a lot to become proficient in English, but I've been in dozens of classrooms in dozens of schools where many ELs can go an entire week without a single opportunity to speak. So I notice--who speaks? What do they say? How does the teacher respond?

In order to "see" inequities, you really need to know something about where to look--this is also part of the seeing. In other words, you need to have some information about what the inequities are in your school, district, state, and in your country. This information can be found in performance data, attendance rates, graduation rates, participation in AP classes, and so on. You'll usually have to disaggregate data in order to see the equity issues in your school and district. Look at the data by gender, race or ethnicity, English proficiency levels, socio-economic levels, and by students with disabilities of all kinds. You need to hone your ability to see inequities.
2. It's Where You Look
Inequities can be found in the classroom, in data reports, in participation in school sponsored parent events, and they also lurk within the structures and institutions of our system. You also need to refine your ability to spot and surface structural inequities--because they are the vessels for what our students experience, and as coaches for equity, it's also our responsibility to do whatever we can to interrupt those as well.

I once worked in a middle school where the majority of our students came from a very low income African American neighborhood. Our school also served a small portion of mostly white upper middle class families. Those families (who made up the PTA and donated hundreds of thousands of dollars each year) allied with a very vocal, influential music teacher to demand that students who had taken music since first grade be provided an Advanced Band class. The African American students had attended an elementary school that, without a well-funded PTA, had been unable to offer music--so they couldn't take Advanced Band.

The music teacher and the PTA won this battle and this single decision dictated the entire master schedule, because only one Advanced Band class was offered each day. Because of this one decision, the school was tracked, students traveled in their segregated groups all day, and the level of instruction in other subject matters was also altered--and not for the better. There were other systemic issues at this school, many others that also had an equity-component, but this one programing decision caused ripples of inequities to spread throughout the school.

In order to be a coach for equity, you'll need to learn about and understand decisions in your district and school around funding, hiring, school assignments, programing and scheduling, course offerings, discipline, and much more. Start by naming the systems and institutions which impact your students. There's a system (sometimes formalized and sometimes not) by which a school district places teachers, administrators, and other staff. In some districts, an ineffective principal might not be fired, but might be moved to another school--perhaps a school with a parent population that is less likely to cause an uproar if the principal continues to be ineffective, perhaps because that population is primarily immigrant and reluctant to bring attention to themselves. I've seen this happen, time after time--the system perpetuates inequities and children don't get what they need and deserve. And we can say it's the "system," but there's also someone in that system making decisions and others in that system who aren't questioning or challenging those decisions. That's where we come in--that's the role of a coach for equity.

Next week: Coaching for equity is about who you listen to and the kind of self-awareness you develop.

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How to Coach for Equity in Schools, Part 1

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Recently, I suggested that all coaches should be coaches for equity--that it is our moral obligation and that if we aren't coaching for equity we are complicit in reproducing an inequitable system. I want offer some concrete ways in which we can coach teachers and leaders within our education system to build more equitable classrooms and schools.

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Basics of assets-based EL SLIFE instruction

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Basics of assets-based EL SLIFE instruction

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Jim Cummins

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Cummins article- Assets based multilingual ed

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Margaret Hageman

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American colleges struggle with racial tensions every year. Some white students -- in incidents that attract widespread attention or in everyday interactions with their minority peers -- convey a lack of understanding about race.

A new book, White Kids: Growing Up With Privilege in a Racially Divided America (New York University Press), explores how wealthy white children develop their ideas about race. The author, Margaret A. Hagerman, assistant professor of sociology at Mississippi State University, took a qualitative approach, following young white people as they grew up. She answered questions via email about the book and how her findings relate to current tensions at colleges.
Q: Would you describe your research method? How many white wealthy young people did you talk to? How did you define privilege as you were considering whom to interview?
A: White Kid s is based on a two-year ethnographic study of 30 families who identified as white and who lived in a medium-sized Midwest city. I interviewed 36 children who were between the ages of 10 and 13 as well as their parents, and I observed these families in their everyday lives. I drove kids to soccer practices and piano lessons, I went to birthday parties and private pools at country clubs, and so on. I also returned to this community a few years later when the youth were in high school and conducted follow-up interviews with a subset of them and their parents. In addition to their racial privilege, these families also experienced class privilege: at least one of the parents in these families, though oftentimes both, held a graduate or professional degree, worked in a professional occupation, and [they] owned a single-family home.
Q: High schools are increasingly segregated by race. How do young white people today learn about race?
A: Many people think that white kids learn about race based on what their parents say (or do not say) to them about the topic. For instance, after a racist hate crime, I often notice a surge in parenting blog posts and op-eds published that urge white parents to speak to their children about racism in America. One of the most important lessons of my research, though, is that "actions speak louder than words." Whether parents use colorblind language ("We don't see race") or color-conscious language ("We are antiracist"), what they say often matters far less than what they actually do -- and specifically, what they do to design their child's social environment. When parents move to a segregated white neighborhood because the kids in the integrated neighborhood are "too rough," or when they believe a "good" school is a whiter school, or when the only people in a child's life are also white with the exception of the economically marginalized black and brown people at the soup kitchen whom they are told they must help "save," white children notice and develop understandings of not only the position of others in society but also of themselves -- they learn about their own power and privilege through observing and interpreting this world around them. My book tries to highlight how kids are making meaning of race through these interpretive processes.
Q: You write about young people (and also their parents) saying that they are not racist, and then having stereotypical attitudes about black people or behaving in ways that reinforce racial inequality. How do you explain this?
A: None of the kids in this book want to be considered "racist," but I did find variations on why this was the case. Some children believed this label would mean that they were hurting their peers of color, which they knew was a real possibility, even if unintentional. Other kids did not believe it was even possible for them to be racist because racism is "no longer a problem." Race scholars like Eduardo Bonilla-Silva have documented extensively the prevalence of colorblind ideology in America. This research illustrates how white people can say racism is no longer a problem while simultaneously explaining the existence of inequality in our society by blaming people of color through the use of culturally racist stereotypes. Other scholars have also explored differences between what white people say about race and what they do. For instance, scholars like Amanda Lewis and John Diamond demonstrate how white parents advocate for their own children in ways that protect and defend the very systems of inequality they say they otherwise reject. Additionally, scholars like Joyce Bell and Douglas Hartmann show how white people engage in the "happy talk" of diversity while avoiding real confrontations with structural inequality and avoiding the realities of how they perpetuate inequality in their own lives. Certainly, in my research, I found similar patterns.
Q: We are in a period of intense national debate about affirmative action in college admissions. What attitudes did you see among young white people that would influence their view of this question?
A: I found variation in these affluent white kids' perspectives on programs or policies designed to promote equal opportunity and fight institutional racism. For instance, one child told me that she did not understand the relevance of spaces like that of a Black Student Union. In her words: "Like, this one high school has, like, the Black Student Union and the Asian Student Union. I don't really get it. Like, why do they have to be like, 'Oh, you're black, so you're in your own little union.' I mean, there's not like the White Student Union!" Similarly, I witnessed a brother tell his younger sibling with a tone of disgust that he would never get into a particular summer program because the program was more likely to accept "black and Mexican kids than white kids." And yet, other kids told me that they understood the need for policies and programs that would help make up for the legacy of racism in America. For instance, another child explained, "I think there is still a lot of discrimination in jobs and stuff, and there has been for a long time ... Some people are not given certain opportunities that maybe someone would give white people just because they look different, which I think is kind of bogus." This child was in favor of trying to find ways to fix these problems. "We need to do something about this," he told me.
Q: College leaders are stunned every year when white students (who deny being racist) pose in blackface or organize "illegal alien hunt" parties, etc. How do you explain this behavior, based on the attitudes you found?
A: Not only do many of the white kids in my study express limited awareness of the history of racism or the realities of contemporary forms of racism and racial inequality, but they also express what sociologist Tyrone Forman describes as "racial apathy" or the "lack of feeling or indifference toward societal racial and ethnic inequality and lack of engagement with race-related social issues." From my perspective, racial apathy is at the heart of the day-to-day exclusionary practices of white supremacy prevalent on college campuses (e.g., microaggressions) as well as the much more incendiary racist events that receive national attention. My research shows that such apathy manifests itself in white childhood -- like when some of the young people tell me that they "don't care" about black people who are killed by police because "when black people get shot, it is because they fucked up." Kids who do not care about the suffering of people of color in middle school may not see a problem with hosting an "illegal alien hunt" party in college.
Q: Based on what you learned, what would be your advice to college leaders who want to promote inclusive environments on their campuses?
A: My research shows that many white kids are unprepared for living and learning in a racially inclusive environment because of their own white racial socialization in childhood and early adolescence. Integrating my own research with the important work of my colleagues, I think all students should be required to take classes designed to build their empathy, understanding and capacity to act in the face of racial inequalities -- classes based in critical race studies that, as sociologist Jennifer Mueller puts it, make "ignorance [or apathy] more difficult." University leaders should support and value the faculty who teach these courses, recognizing the challenges of this work especially for faculty from racially marginalized groups. So too should university leaders work to address the consequences of racial apathy at all levels of the university -- e.g., syllabi that center white perspectives, administrative indifference to the concerns of students of color, uncritical hiring practices, inequitable service demands placed on faculty of color and so on. In order to challenge the normative nature of whiteness on college campuses, administrators first need to better understand the process of white racial socialization and the insidious power of racial apathy.

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Author discusses her new book on how white children develop ideas about race

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American colleges struggle with racial tensions every year. Some white students -- in incidents that attract widespread attention or in everyday interactions with their minority peers -- convey a lack of understanding about race. A new book, White Kids: Growing Up With Privilege in a Racially Divided America (New York University Press), explores how wealthy white children develop their ideas about race.

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Racial inequality in "good" schools

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John Diamond is interviewed about the book he co-authored, [Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools].