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CAN SCHOOLS NURTURE THE SOULS OF BLACK AND BROWN CHILDREN?

Combating the School-to-Prison Pipeline in Early Childhood Education

– Roberta Udoh –
Young Achievers Science and Math Pilot School,
Boston, Massachusetts

Roberta Udoh talks about her role as a black pre-K teacher committed to working with families, other teachers, students, and community activists to create schools in which black and brown children can flourish. As a union and community activist, she organizes to advocate for the school district to provide the resources and adopt the policies needed for schools to serve the holistic needs of urban children. In her classroom, she broadens the Eurocentric focus of the curriculum in order to nourish the souls of black and brown children, feed their psyches, and support their families. Roberta reflects on the role that teachers must play both in and out of the classroom as profound agents of social justice in the lives of children.

I GREW UP IN what can only be described as abject poverty in North London. The majority of students in my school were very poor, like my family, or living in homeless shelters. But the 1960s was an interesting time in public education. The school district where we lived was very progressive and innovative.

The schools offered a child-centered, progressive education that was part of a political agenda by the Labour Party aimed at lifting poor people out of poverty. The Labour Party was also building public housing and expanding national health care. There were social workers and nurses at my school. The meals were delicious and nutritional, which I remember because my brothers and I were dependent on those school meals.

I remember one of my elementary teachers, Ms. Woods at the Gillespie Primary School. She used a progressive, multicultural curriculum that was ahead of its time. I learned to sing social protest songs from the antipoverty marches of the 1930s in England. I also learned gospel spirituals. We learned about the US civil rights movement, the Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, and child labor during Victorian times, as well as the progressive movement that fought to give children the opportunity to be children.

The academic standard at Gillespie was very high. We read a lot. We had a lot of discussion about issues affecting children, and there was a lot of dialogue between students and teachers. We did a reenactment of the Aztec encounter with Europeans from the Aztec point of view and a reenactment of the colonization of Africa from the African point of view. We had lots of music and art. The school exposed us to cultures outside our experience to help us develop intellectually and emotionally.

My experience at Gillespie provides the model for me as a teacher today. I want my school to have the same kind of commitment to lift up poor children and children of color, to help them grow intellectually and socially-emotionally, and to teach them about systems of oppression and how people have fought against them.

DON’T BE “ONE OF THEM”

My decision to become a teacher was both personal and political. When my two daughters attended public schools in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I volunteered in the classroom and became active in the Parent Teacher Organization. The more involved I got, the more I became aware of the apartheid nature of the schools in Cambridge—how white and black children were treated quite differently. By the time our oldest daughter was in middle school, the administrators came down hard with discipline on black students and alienated them from school. I also started to think that maybe I could be a classroom teacher and do things differently.

At the time, I was working for Girls’ LEAP (Lifetime Empowerment and Awareness Program), an all-women’s organization that taught a violence-prevention curriculum to school-age girls. Girls’ LEAP helped girls deal with the misogyny and sexism in society, especially the violence that girls experience in schools. I became deeply concerned about the low standard of education girls received in urban public schools and their feeling that schools didn’t care about them.

When I asked a group of girls from Roxbury to write in their journals about their experiences, one fifth-grader asked me, “How do I spell ‘cat’?” I took a quick survey and discovered that many of the girls were not spelling or reading at grade level. One group of high school girls from East Boston told me, “Our schools suck. Our teachers are useless, and they don’t care about us.”

That’s when I decided to become a teacher. However, most of the girls were opposed to the idea. They were concerned that I would become like “one of them,” meaning teachers who didn’t care about them, who looked down on them because they were poor or of color or didn’t come from what was perceived as functional families, and who didn’t take their voices seriously. To hear this was profoundly sad to me, because my own schooling experience had been quite the opposite.

I have always kept in the forefront of my teaching not to become “one of them.”

BRINGING ACTIVISM INTO TEACHING

I blend my life and work experiences with my activism and bring them into my teaching practices. I always ask myself, How would students and families receive this? I work with a prescribed curriculum that doesn’t always align with my teaching philosophy, but I try to weave in other agendas. For example, I try to focus on issues of identity, such as how black and brown children or poor children see themselves, even as young as three.

I did my student teaching in a fourth-grade classroom in a Boston public school, where I designed a unit on child labor that the students loved. We studied photos by Louis Hine, who was a photographer for the National Child Labor Committee in the early 1900s. I also taught a unit on Cape Verdean sailors who were the backbone of the whaling industry in New England. We went on a trip to the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and the kids loved it—especially the Cape Verdean students. This kind of enrichment is essential to connecting learning to the souls of black and brown children.

While teaching fourth grade, I decided that there was absolutely no way I could administer the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, the annual statewide assessment test. I saw how it impacted students’ emotional and psychological well-being. Children started to doubt their intellectual capacity, further alienating them from school and learning.

I looked for a grade where I wouldn’t have to assess students in that way. I tried kindergarten but discovered that kindergarten is now the new first grade, where students can no longer engage in purposeful creative play that feeds their imagination and psyche. So I switched to teaching pre-K, and my classroom is known as the Guppy classroom. As children come into the institution of school, I’ve been able to lessen the impact of a dysfunctional school district like Boston and try to make their learning joyful. I use a lot of hands-on activities. I do a lot of nature activities with the Guppies, and I’ve been fortunate to be able to partner with the Audubon Society’s Boston Nature Center, where we go on field trips. We also have a classroom garden, and we talk about the importance of growing things and taking care of the natural world.

All children need to experience intellectual ideas outside of their normal worldview. I try to replicate the kinds of school experiences that I had as a child, nurturing student curiosity and making learning meaningful and joyful. This is especially important for children with distressing lives, including those who are homeless or dealing with violence.

I try to fill their souls and make the world look beautiful to them. Ultimately, all children are extremely curious, so eventually their curiosity takes over and they start participating. Even the most depressed children will start engaging with their peers if learning is accessible to them and joyful.

“TO KNOW THE CHILD, YOU MUST KNOW THE FAMILY”

Without the support of families, I couldn’t achieve much in the classroom. In my curriculum-night presentation, I tell families, “I have your child for a year. You have your child for the rest of their lives. What can I truly accomplish in a year without your support?”

I have to show families in my everyday teaching practices that I’m deeply committed to the well-being of their child. From the start, I make it clear to families that I am always open to them. This is not my classroom. It’s their classroom.

To know the child, you must know the family. I get to know the family in a way that is nonthreatening. I make home visits. Before I visit, I tell families, “Please don’t clean your house for me or lay out any food. I’m not social services coming in. We’re just going to have a chat about what you expect of me as a teacher in the upcoming year.”

I ask questions of families. I don’t lecture. I explain the curriculum and show parents where they can look it up online. I give away as much information as possible. I don’t hoard information, which can sometimes happen with teachers trying to protect their power.

Parents need to become advocates for their children. Urban school districts do not have the resources to provide all the supports that students need nor the extracurricular activities that middle-class families have. Parents must advocate for services or activities in the school. I tell them, “Join the parent council, and demand your rights”

I encourage families to see themselves as their child’s teacher. So I share with families what I have learned as a paid educator. That’s the kind of advocacy that I try to do with families, and then I support the family’s advocacy when they speak up for their child.

THE SCHOOL-TO-PRISON PIPELINE STARTS IN PRE-K

I believe that the school-to-prison pipeline starts in pre-K. The district does not provide the resources and support staff, such as counselors and social workers, that teachers need to address all the social-emotional issues children bring into class that can lead to “misbehavior.” Racial and gender bias and cultural incompetence are big parts of the problem. When poor black or brown children act up, they are seen as “troublemakers” and sent out into the hall or even suspended; when suburban white children do the same thing, they are called “precocious.” Black and brown boys especially are disciplined rather than supported to channel their energy into positive learning.

Schools of higher education are an important part of the problem, because they just churn out early childhood educators like in sausage factories, credentialing teachers who don’t understand that the needs of poor children of color are completely different from the needs of white middle-class kindergartners. The teaching model is based on middle-class students and the assumption that when children come to pre-K, they are “ready to learn.” That means they can sit and listen to a story, they can be safe with their bodies, and they can speak simple sentences.

The reality is that the “ready to learn” gap is profound. For example, I’ve had pre-K kids who cannot speak a full sentence at age three. They just say one word: “Ball.” “Table.” “Chair.”

Teachers who lack cultural competence label these children as “slow” and do not know how to support the students and their families. I have seen many cases where teachers push these children out of the classroom and they wander around the halls. They are not officially suspended, but they are excluded. This is the beginning of the school-to-prison pipeline for these children.

Teachers do not pay enough attention to the important role of families. You can work with families to achieve tremendous growth in a child in a short period of time. In my classroom, I’ve seen that you can change even the most challenging child in a few months if you have families supporting and teaching you about their child.

There is also the issue of cultural competency with regard to children’s families. Teachers cannot assume that families can sit down and read to their children for twenty minutes every day. Single moms don’t even have twenty minutes to themselves when they come home. So I encourage them to read when they can and suggest books for them to use, but I don’t assume anything or judge parents.

Other contributors to the school-to-prison pipeline are the lack of resources for students in schools and poverty in the community. There is a history of institutionalized racism and segregation in the Boston Public Schools. In 2016 Boston cut millions of dollars to schools, and we have a mayor, Marty Walsh, who’s increasingly gentrifying communities, so housing is really tough for a lot of working-poor families. Some families have to move in with grandparents or aunts and uncles, which can contribute to a more distressed family home life.

TEACHERS AS EDUCATION ACTIVISTS

These are exciting times for teachers’ unions. We now have models of unions working with communities and partnering with families and students to fight for resources and to promote restorative justice and positive behavior intervention and supports. The Chicago Teachers Union is leading this effort.

There is a growing critical mass of activists in the Boston Teachers Union (BTU) who are concerned about these issues too. In 2017 we elected a new president, Jessica Tang, and a slate of officers for the BTU that reflect the growing movement in unions to not just protect educators but to honor the voices of families and students too. In the past, educators have unfortunately seen families and students as uncaring and part of the problem; the new movement sees them as powerful partners in education and social change.

Being active in my union connects me. It takes me outside of the classroom, which can be isolating. As soon as the school day starts, I’m focused intently on my classroom. My union activism keeps me informed and connected to what is happening in other schools across the district and beyond.

I’m active on union committees, including the Early Childhood Education and Inclusion and Special Education committees. I bring not just my voice but also the voices of families and students to those spaces. We are working hard to address the racial and class inequities in the school district.

I am also active in the Boston Education Justice Alliance, which has been a real soul saver for me. BEJA gives me a space to connect with my deepest values. I get to connect with educators, other activists, and families and students from across the district. I get to hear what they’re dealing with and what they are doing.

Through BEJA I became involved in the Save Our Public Schools campaign. It was a campaign against charter school expansion, and we won! We stopped a corporate-funded ballot initiative that would have led to defunding public schools in Boston and eventually closing many of them. I met an incredible number of families and young people who were investing so much time and energy on this campaign, going door-to-door in the heat of summer in the fight for public education.

I also worked with BEJA to start a petition campaign against budget cuts in Boston Public Schools. The proposed cuts were devastating. Thousands of people signed the petition I wrote and sent out through MoveOn.org. However, it was the young people who organized a day of action when we protested outside city hall and delivered the petition to Boston mayor Marty Walsh. It was a powerful event, because we were all in alignment. Families, educators, community activists, and young people gathered at the state house and city hall to say, “We’re against these cuts and we want quality schools.”

That was a turning point for many of us, because we realized the potential for building alliances across the city.

SILENCING

I teach at Young Achievers Science and Math Pilot School, where I feel I have found a school with a commitment to social justice that honors all voices. But even here, there are challenges.

I can’t always talk about race and class with my teaching colleagues. As a person of African descent, this challenge is very personal for me. I recently had an experience where I silenced myself because I thought, “It’s going to take too much energy to explain to this white teacher why some of her teaching practices are culturally incompetent”

Many educators of color experience this kind of silencing, and it eats away at your soul. I have to feed my soul so that it doesn’t get depleted. That’s why I work on my activism inside and outside of the school. I have built alliances with supportive administrators and with other teachers in the school, so we have a stronger voice than that of the teachers who lack cultural competency. Our school is finding it harder and harder to hire teachers who are in alignment with its social justice values, because higher education doesn’t make the issues of race, class, and equity a priority in training teachers.

In order to create a climate where children don’t feel like they have to keep quiet about who they are, we must have a top-down policy to dismantle institutional racism. That has to be coupled with the bottom-up voices of families, students, and community activists who must participate in those policy discussions.

I am deeply concerned that more and more of our black and brown children are giving up on school because they feel silenced. Their social and emotional needs are not being met. Their psyche is not being nurtured. The typical approach to social-emotional learning is really about managing kids’ challenges so that they can carry out meaningless lessons, instead of enriching their lives by teaching the whole child, giving them exciting experiences and meaningful field trips, like to the Boston Nature Center.

What students get in an affluent suburb like Brookline, Massachusetts, should be what students in Boston get, both inside and outside of school. This requires money and resources. And it requires a vision of the kind of citizen you are preparing your student to be: is it someone who’s intellectually engaged with the world or just prison fodder? We can teach children to read, but what’s the point if we’re only preparing them to be passive consumers rather than fighters for social justice?

These are societal issues that will not be solved solely within schools. We have to take action to create a society that meets the needs of all children—in the community and in the school. We teachers have a critical role to play as educators and activists to support our children and families and to feed the souls of our students.