"Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People¿s Children

From the MacArthur Award–winning education reformer and author of the bestselling Other People's Children, a long-awaited new book on how to fix the persistent black/white achievement gap in America's public schoolsAs MacArthur Award–winning educator Lisa Delpit reminds us—and as all research shows—there is no achievement gap at birth. In her long-awaited second book, Delpit presents a striking picture of the elements of contemporary public education that conspire against the prospects for poor children of color, creating a persistent gap in achievement during the school years that has eluded several decades of reform. Delpit's bestselling and paradigm-shifting first book, Other People's Children, focused on cultural slippage in the classroom between white teachers and students of color. Now, in "Multiplication Is for White People", Delpit reflects on two decades of reform efforts—including No Child Left Behind, standardized testing, the creation of alternative teacher certification paths, and the charter school movement—that have still left a generation of poor children of color feeling that higher educational achievement isn't for them. In chapters covering primary, middle, and high school, as well as college, Delpit concludes that it's not that difficult to explain the persistence of the achievement gap. In her wonderful trademark style, punctuated with telling classroom anecdotes and informed by time spent at dozens of schools across the country, Delpit outlines an inspiring and uplifting blueprint for raising expectations for other people's children, based on the simple premise that multiplication—and every aspect of advanced education—is for everyone. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9781595588982 Media Type: Paperback Publisher: New Press - The Publication Date: 03-05-2013 Pages: 256 Product Dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)About the Author MacArthur "genius" award winner Lisa Delpit's article on "Other People's Children" for Harvard Magazine was the single most requested reprint in the magazine's history following its publication. Delpit expanded her ideas into a groundbreaking book with the same name, which won a Critics' Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association, Choice magazine's Outstanding Academic Title award, and was voted one of Teacher Magazine's "great books." A recipient of the Harvard School of Education's award for an Outstanding Contribution to Education, she is dedicated to providing excellent education to communities both in the United States and abroad. She is a co-editor of The Real Ebonics Debate, Quality Education as a Constitutional Right, and The Skin That We Speak(The New Press). Currently the Felton G. Clark Professor of Education at Southern University, she lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.Read an Excerpt Read an Excerpt INTRODUCTION:YES, DIANE, I'M STILL ANGRY Recently I was invited by education activist Dr. RaynardSanders to New Orleans for an educational summit. Thespeaker, the renowned and controversial Diane Ravitch, had toldDr. Sanders that she wanted to meet me. Dr. Ravitch, currently aprofessor at New York University, has made headlines with herabout-face on many issues related to public education. Ravitchwas the assistant secretary of education in the George H.W. Bushadministration, where she made her conservative intellectual andpolitical reputation with her staunch support of standardized testing,charter schools, the No Child Left Behind Act, and free marketcompetition for schools. She has now repudiated many of herearlier positions, stated both in public presentations and in herbook The Death and Life of the Great American School System:How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. This courageousscholar has resigned from influential conservative policygroups and has incited many powerful enemies. As a result, in contrastto her former life as a popular conservative commentator, shehas now found herself barred from expressing her new views inmany popular venues. Before the speech began, I joined Diane, Raynard, and a fewinvited guests in an adjoining room. Diane and I talked about thedevastation of public schools in post-Katrina New Orleans andhow politicians and educational entrepreneurs hawking privatizationare claiming the travesty of New Orleans education to be anational model. Diane asked me why I hadn't spoken out nationally against whatwas happening. I told her about my work in New Orleans and mymodestly successful attempts to engage other African Americanscholars in the struggle against what was happening there. I addedthat the sense of futility in the battle for rational education policyfor African American children had gone on for so long and thatI had come to feel so tired, that I now needed to focus on thoseareas where I felt I could actually make a difference: working withteachers and children in an African American school. I was so angryfrom the sensation of butting my head against a brick wall, Itold her, that I needed to give my “anger muscles” a rest. Dianelooked at me squarely and said, “You don't look angry.” I realized two things at that moment. One was that Diane's angerwas relatively raw and still fresh and hadn't yet needed to bemodulated. It must have been quite a shock to go from being aninfluential authority whose views were sought and valued in mostpolitical circles to being a virtual outcast. While it was undeniablycourageous to reanalyze one's positions and come to a significantlydifferent stance, it has to be anger-provoking to realize that thepower elite seem less interested in logical analyses for the publicgood than in maintaining power and profit. Her anger had a differentquality than the anger of those of us who have struggledwith the same issues for many years. The second thing I realized was that, yes, I am still angry—despitemy attempts over the years to calm my spirit and to focuson the wonder of teaching and learning. I am angry at the machinationsof those who, with so little knowledge of learning, ofteachers, or of children, are twisting the life out of schools. I am angry that public schools, once a beacon of democracy,have been overrun by the antidemocratic forces of extreme wealth.Educational policy for the past decade has largely been determinedby the financial contributions of several very large corporatefoundations. Among a few others, the Broad, Gates, andWalton (Walmart) foundations have dictated various “reforms”by flooding the educational enterprise with capital. The ideas ofprivatization, charter schools, Teach for America, the extremes ofthe accountability movement, merit pay, increased standardizedtesting, free market competition—all are promulgated and financiallysupported by corporate foundations, which indeed have those funds because they can avoid paying the taxes that the rest ofus must foot. Thus, educational policy has been virtually hijackedby the wealthiest citizens, whom no one elected and who are unlikelyever to have had a child in the public schools. I am angry that with all of the corporate and taxpayers' moneythat is flowing into education, little-to-none is going to those valiantsouls who have toiled in urban educational settings for manyyears with proven track records. Instead, money typically goes tothose with little exposure to and even less experience in urbanschools. I am left in my more cynical moments with the thoughtthat poor black children have become the vehicle by which richwhite people give money to their friends. I am angry because of the way that the original idea of charterschools has been corrupted. In their first iteration, charter schoolswere to be beacons for what could happen in public schools. Theywere intended to develop models for working with the most challengingpopulations. What they discovered was to be shared andreproduced in other public school classrooms. Now, because of theinsertion of the “market model,” charter schools often shun thevery students they were intended to help. Special education students,students with behavioral issues, and students who need anykind of special assistance are excluded in a multiplicity of ways becausethey reduce the bottom line—they lower test scores and takemore time to educate properly. Charter schools have any numberof ways of “counseling” such students out of their programs. Ihave been told by parents that many charter schools accuse studentsof a series of often trivial rule infractions, then tell parentsthat the students will not be suspended if the parents voluntarilytransfer them to another school. Parents of a student with specialneeds are told that the charter is not prepared to meet their child'sneeds adequately and that he or she would be much better servedat the regular public school around the corner. (Schools in NewOrleans, the “model city” for charters, have devised an even moresinister scheme for keeping unwanted children out of the schools.The K-12 publicly funded charter schools, which are supposed tobe open to all through a lottery system of enrollment, are givingpreferential admission to children who have attended an affiliatedprivate preschool, one of which charges over $4,000 in tuition andthe other over $9,000.)1 In addition, the market-driven model insists that should charterschools actually discover workable, innovative ideas, they arenot to be shared with other public schools but held close to thevest to prevent “competitors” from “winning” the standardizedtest race. So now, charter schools are not meant to contribute to“regular” public education but to put it out of business. I am angry about the hypocrisy rampant in education policy.While schools and teachers are admonished to adhere to research-basedinstruction and data-driven planning, there is no research tosupport the proliferation of charter schools, pay-for-performanceplans, or market-based school competition. Indeed, where there isresearch, it largely suggests that we should do an about-face andrun in the opposite direction. I am angry that the conversation about educating our childrenhas become so restricted. What has happened to the societal desireto instill character? To develop creativity? To cultivate courageand kindness? How can we look at a small bundle of profound potentialand see only a number describing inadequacy? Why do wepunish our children with our inability to teach them? How can welive with the fact that in Miami—and I am certain in many othercities—ten-year-olds facing failure on the state-mandated FCATtest and being “left back” in third grade for the third time, havehad to be restrained from committing suicide? I am angry at what the inflexibility and wrong-headed single-mindednessof schools in this era have done to my child and toso many other children. There is little tolerance for difference, forcreativity, or for challenge. The current use of standardized tests, which has the goals of promotingcompetition between schools and of making teacher andprincipal salaries—and sometimes even employment—dependenton tests scores, seems to bring out the worst in adults as well. In localeafter locale—including Washington, DC; Georgia; Indiana;Massachusetts; Nevada; and Virginia, to name a few—there areinvestigations into widespread allegations of cheating by teachersand principals on state-mandated high-stakes tests. And finally—if there ever is a finally—I am angry at the racismthat, despite having a president who is half white and half black,still permeates our America. In my earlier days, I wrote about theproblem of cultural conflict—that one of the reasons that havingteachers and children of different cultural groups led to difficultiesin teaching and learning was a lack of understanding about theother group's culture. I now have a slightly different perspective.I still believe that the problem is cultural, but it is larger than thechildren or their teachers. The problem is that the cultural frameworkof our country has, almost since its inception, dictated that“black” is bad and less than and in all arenas “white” is good andsuperior. This perspective is so ingrained and so normalized thatwe all stumble through our days with eyes closed to avoid seeingit. We miss the pain in our children's eyes when they have internalizedthe societal belief that they are dumb, unmotivated, anddispensable. Nor can we see what happens to the psyches of young, oftenwell-meaning white people who have been told that theyare the best and brightest and that they are the saviors of blackchildren. Most inevitably fail because they haven't the trainingor the experience to navigate such unfamiliar territory successfully;nor are they taught to learn with humility from parents orfrom veteran African American and other teachers who knowthe children and the communities in which they teach. Othersburn out quickly from carrying the weight of salvation that hasbeen piled upon their young shoulders. Several young Teach forAmerica recruits have told me that their colleagues frequentlyrun back home or off to graduate school with the belief that thechildren they went to save are unsalvageable—not because ofpoor teaching but because of their students' parents, families, orcommunities. Yes, Diane, I am still angry. And that anger has fueled the twothemes that run throughout this book. The first is the symbioticinterplay between my personal life as a mother and my professionalwork as a scholar and hopeful activist. Within the chapters of thisvolume are stories that range from my daughter Maya's first yearsin elementary school through her admission to college. My concernsfor her educational struggles informed my work in schools.Feeling her frustration and pain opened my eyes to the frustrationand pain thriving in so many of the classrooms I visited. Revelingin her successes helped me to suggest potential modifications forschools where I saw damaging practices. In fact, Maya has morethan once over the years informed me that I wouldn't know half asmuch about education if I didn't have her! And she's right. The second theme that runs through the book, from the chapterson educating young children to those focused on college students,is the relevance of a list of ten factors I have formulated overa number of years that I believe can foster excellence in urban classrooms.These factors encapsulate my beliefs about black childrenand learning, about creating classrooms that speak to children'sstrengths rather than hammering them with their weaknesses,and about building connections to cultures and communities. Ibelieve that if we are to create excellence in urban classrooms, wemust do the following: 1. Recognize the importance of a teacher and goodteaching, especially for the “school dependent” childrenof low-income communities. 2. Recognize the brilliance of poor, urban children andteach them more content, not less. 3. Whatever methodology or instructional program isused, demand critical thinking while at the same timeassuring that all children gain access to “basic skills”—the conventions and strategies that are essential to successin American society. 4. Provide children with the emotional ego strength tochallenge racist societal views of their own competenceand worthiness and that of their families andcommunities. 5. Recognize and build on children's strengths. 6. Use familiar metaphors and experiences from the children'sworld to connect what students already know toschool-taught knowledge. 7. Create a sense of family and caring in the classroom. 8. Monitor and assess students' needs and then addressthem with a wealth of diverse strategies. 9. Honor and respect the children's home cultures. 10. Foster a sense of children's connection to community,to something greater than themselves. So, yes, Diane, I am still angry. But I am also still hopeful. . . . No matter how angry I get when I think about what the larger world may have in store for them, I owe my life to children, and I am forever grateful for the hope and joy their smiles and hugs engender. Show More Table of Contents Table of Contents Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Yes, Diane, I'm Still Angry xiii Part 1 Inherent Ability 1 There Is No Achievement Gap at Birth 3 2 Infinite Capacity 27 Part 2 Educating the Youngest 3 Stuff You Never Would Say: Successful Literacy Instruction in Elementary Classrooms 53 4 Warm Demanders: The Importance of Teachers in the Lives of Children of Poverty 71 5 Skin-Deep Learning: Teaching Those Who Learn Differently 89 6 "I Don't Like It When They Don't Say My Name Right": Why "Reforming" Can't Mean "Whitening" 105 Part 3 Teaching Adolescents 7 Picking Up the Broom: Demanding Critical Thinking 123 8 How Would a Fool Do It? Assessment 137 9 Shooting Hoops: What Can We Learn About the Drive for Excellence? 149 Part 4 University and Beyond 10 Invisibility, Disidentification, and Negotiating Blackness on Campus 169 11 Will It Help the Sheep? University, Community, and Purpose 193 Appendix 207 Notes 211 Show More