At a recent community outreach meeting at the new Lincoln High School, I suggested that we should institute a policy of reflective representation. My rational is that, 'reflective levels of ethno-representation in the teaching staff and administration personnel [in which those student populations were centralized] appeared to contribute to a marked improvement in their performance and success.' This assertion may be supported by reviewing policy changes which have increased African American teachers and African American administrative personnel in schools where the majority of the students are African American. You will find that excuses and rationales were used as reasons to argue that this policy could not be put into place. But, eventually such policies and practices were put into place – and the results of those policies can be easily found (1).
This has to do with many aspects of our human condition: bio-politics, human metrics, authorized knowledge sets, culturally specific knowledge transmitters. These are cultural attributes included in the construction of curriculum. In this email, I am not going to attempt to explain all these aspects of education to you. I will assume that you have researched these (and many other) aspects of education before taking up your positions representative of the public as members of our school board.
“For anyone who has an interest in education, the term 'curriculum' is unavoidable. Few people, however, stop to think about curriculum; what it means, or what is required to implement curriculum. Even fewer people ask these questions; what is curriculum is for, what should serve as the proper foundation for curriculum-making, and how we should go about making curriculum decisions that benefit our communities? This book answers these questions. (“The Pursuit of Curriculum” - “Schooling and the Public Interest” William A. Reid)
Curriculum vs. Education
Curriculum is at the heart of education. Curriculum defines what should be taught. On the other hand, education is a much more abstract, nebulous concept. Education takes place in the home through the family, in the larger community, in churches and other social spaces, education is even affected by the media. In essence, education is shaped by wide array of cultural factors that surround children every day. Curriculum, however, is a more specific, tangible activity that is always tied to decision-making processes. Curriculum is designated by specific institutions; whether they are schools, churches, non-profit agencies, or governmental and non-governmental programs that seek to educate. Unlike education, curriculum also requires that educators address what subject matter is to be taught. No discussion of curriculum can ignore the subject matter that must be included as part of any proposed curriculum.'
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http://liberatingcurriculum.blogspot.com/ - I believe Dr. Null is the founder of the group 'History of Curriculum''
It appears that there is a movement in our university system to control the flow of information and knowledge. This entity functions as the gatekeeper of research and theoretical knowledge, and oversees the training programs of teachers and administrative staffs. They authorize, what they feel is the 'Right' 'knowledge worthy of teaching,' and ensure that the 'Right' culture is transmitted to our students through a curriculum sanctioned and authorized by themselves. They feel that they not only have the 'Right' but also the 'Responsibility' to insure what is authorized. These conditions instantly insure that all but the very brightest and most able students succeed in 'making it through' our educational system, which is not an easy task. In order for disenfranchised groups to gain the right to teach students who share their same ethnicity/culture/society, who are equally disenfranchised as themselves, they must pass the same requirements as everyone else. This means they must pass a general baccalaureate program in a university, a teacher education program, and various tests – the educational component. On top of that, they need to pass the application and interview processes, all of which can be an extremely daunting task for students who come from a disenfranchised background.
The local reality is that less than 4% of the teaching staff (grades K though 12) in the southwestern states, and less than 3% of the teaching staff (grades k through 12) nation-wide, are self-identified as Latino (Mexicana/o, Chicano/a…, of Latin Origin). It is the objective research of sociologists of every ethnicity, which support the statements, not the results of selection-based or subjective self-serving research. (2)
Just as in the 1970's the educational hegemony fought against reflective representations of African Americans, the need for African American educators and administrators in predominantly African American classrooms and schools systems, today they resist the absolute imperative of having reflective representation of student populations in our classrooms and educational systems. The supporters of the educational hegemony today use the exact same rhetoric and excuses they used during the 1970s. The excuses they used to justify they could not hire African American professionals in the 1970s is shown in their refusal to hire Latinos today.
The NAACP sent me data that shows that while the average black person has a net worth of some $10,000 - the average Latino has a net worth of some $3,000. The Latino exists, on average, and a social-economic level some three times more difficult and impoverished than the African American, yet nothing is being done to correct this obscene social problem. The unequal levels of suffrage in our general society as well as in our educational system are preserved twofold. Latinos currently suffer the repression not only of the mainstream political apparatus but also under the hands of our own brothers and sisters of color who won their own positions of power as a result of affirmative action. They act as gatekeepers, and are now part of the very structure which under-serves our population. Are these rates reflected in our state's prison population? (www.piqe.org)
Since we lack the social capital to be hired by our friends and transported en masse to a different city to take over the educational system, we will continue to suffer the negative effects of not sharing in the attributes of the same field of power the elite belong to. At a local meeting a man proudly proclaimed, 'We were all hired from Long Beach because we were the most qualified to do this job.' This supports the claim of social-capital being the largest contributor to being judged qualified to do a job in the United States – at least the job of running a school system. Again, we find it comfortable to work and deal with people who look, act, or hold similar sets of cultural imperatives. Unless the structures of power are populated with people that reflect the demographic of the populations they serve, equality and inclusion will never be achieved. We must make an effort to overcome this tendency for natural ethnic/culture bias if we wish to overcome unequal levels of suffrage that fragment our local populations.(3)
What is more interesting to some of us is that it appears that the average length of time for a superintended to hold that post in the educational systems in the U.S. is approximately 16 months. (according to dialogues with Director Green) What is even more interesting is how the professional educator is willing to implement the ideologies and policies of people hired to represent the people (note: I did not write 'people who represent the people' as private ideologies and opinions do not in more cases reflect the parents and people populating those areas.) –just remove this) Is it not strange that the said representatives of the people - feel they can dictate policies to the 'paid professionals' whom they hire to run our school systems, without input from the populations they are said to represent? One must ask – who has the highest level of educational training and exactly why do people who appear to win popular votes displace the researched and extensively investigated policies of a highly paid professional educator?
Seemingly, politically motivated programs such as 'Teaching Teachers How to Teach' place all non-mainstream encultured educators at a disadvantage due to the exclusion of culturally sensitive teaching practices which are unique to every ethnic/non-mainstream population. Likewise, it could be said that 'No Child Left behind' and that the 'National Standards' insure that all non-mainstream children suffer extreme hardships. It is no wonder that in many nations across our globe, almost every country in which there is ethnic diversity, the nations that excl are those where ethnicity is most represented in the power structures.
As we move toward facing the budget cuts caused by years of poor leadership and unreasonable fiscal policies, it seems that those teachers of color (in the southwestern United States of America – the Latina/o) face lay-offs. This will take place not only because they are typically the teachers/administrators with the least amount of time in service (as a result of years of exclusion from the failures in many university educational programs) but also because they lack the social / cultural capital and support from senior union members as well as senior administrate personnel.
As reflective representation in the education system decreases, even below the already low levels, the rates of Latina/o failures will increase. As failures increase, the number of disenfranchised young Latino men and women without prospects of gaining access to education and the job markets will increase. Lastly, since Latinos represent the single largest minority group in the United States of America, we are, by action and design, allowing for the conditions of anarchy within a functioning civil society.
- If we really wanted students to have success, would we not be spending more money on them, than the people we house in our prisons? How wrong is it, that any state in the United States would use the failure rate of third grade level reading exams to project future prison populations? How wrong is it, that the wealthy and powerful of any society would create a condition in which the only sure attainable life expectations of a whole large and still growing group of people, is to become a part of the industrial prison complex? Very.
"Education either... is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity, or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world." --Paulo Freire
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“Sourcebook of Equal Educational Opportunity”
By Marquis Academic Media
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2)
“Hispanic Education in the United States: Raices Y Alas,” By Eugene E. Garcia
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“Latinos in higher education: Many enroll, too few graduate,” R Fry - Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center, 2002
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“Telling Stories About School: Using Critical Race and Latino Critical Theories to Document Latina/Latino Education and Resistance” Lilia Fernández, University of California, San Diego
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3)
(and as may be discovered in) http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/disciplinegap/61967_staff13.shtml
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Dembo Mayron, “Teaching for Learning: Applying Educational Psychology in the Classroom”
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“Contemporary Education”
By Indiana State University School of Education
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