in the same classroom, all students can take advantage of the benefits and instructional expertise that may have been reserved previously for “upper-track” (that is, white middle-class) students.
Separate Schools or Special Schooling?
As a member of the baby boom generation, I went to urban schools that were bursting at the seams; every classroom had at least thirty students. Further, almost all of the children and most of the teachers were black. But the important thing was that the teachers were not strangers in the community. We students knew them and they knew us. We saw them at church, in the beauty parlor, in the grocery store. One of the sixth-grade teachers had served in the Army with my father. Most importantly, the teachers knew our families and had a sense of their dreams and aspirations for us.
Let us suppose that the legal, moral, and ethical concerns about special separate schools could either be suspended or reconciled with the American ideal of equality. Let us further suppose that every major urban center with a large number of African American students would set about developing separate schools for these children. One fundamental question would remain. Who would teach the children?
The uproar over separate schools has masked the debate about the quality and qualifications of the teachers who teach African American students. There is very little reliable literature on preparing teachers for diversity.22 And almost nothing exists on teacher preparation specifically for African American students.23
Although the 1960s produced a large body of literature on teaching the “disadvantaged”24 and the 1970s produced a body of literature about “effective schools,”25 none of it was aimed specifically at preparing teachers to meet the needs of African American students. Even today some of the more popular educational innovations, such as cooperative learning and whole-language approaches to literacy, were developed and refined to improve achievement among “disadvantaged” students. Unfortunately, the relationship of these practices to African American learners is rarely made clear.
Elizabeth Cohen, a Stanford University sociologist, is one of the pioneers in the research of cooperative or small-group learning. Although her work in designing such classroom structures has received critical acclaim throughout the educational community, its link to her early work in facilitating school desegregation in Northern California is rarely acknowledged.26
When I searched the ERIC database for the years 1980 to 1990 using the descriptors “teacher education” and “black education,” a mere twenty-seven cites emerged.27 These cites included seven journal articles, ten conference papers, six reports, one book, and three teaching guides. Nine were based on empirical research. Not one dealt specifically with preparing teachers to teach African American students.
One of the greatest hindrances to finding literature that addresses the needs of teachers of African American students is the language used to describe public school attempts to educate African Americans. As already mentioned, the literature of the 1960s and 1970s is filled with works about teaching the “culturally deprived28 and disadvantaged.”29 Even when the goal was to improve both student and teacher effectiveness, the use of such terms contributed to a perception of African American students as deprived, deficient, and deviant. Because of this, many proposed educational interventions were designed to remove the students from their homes, communities, and cultures in an effort to mitigate against their alleged damaging effects.30 Educational interventions, in the form of compensatory education (to compensate for the deprivation and disadvantage assumed to be inherent in African American homes and communities), often were based on a view of African American children as deficient white children.
When I was a child, Johnny Cromwell was one of the poorest children in our neighborhood. His parents worked hard at a number of menial jobs but there never seemed to be enough money to go around for him and his two sisters. He often showed up at school unkempt and unwashed. With the cruelty of children, we teased him and called him names. “Hey peasy head. Where'd you get them peas in your head? Is your father a farmer? He's gonna have a big ole crop of early June peas to pick, just pickin’ at your head!” Although such teasing was very much a ritual of African American childhood, our teachers had a keen sense of when it hit too close to home. Regularly, Johnny was whisked into the teachers’ room where his hair was combed, his face washed, and his disheveled clothes made more presentable. Our teachers understood the need to preserve the little dignity as a student that he had.
By the 1980s the language of deprivation had changed, but the negative connotations remained. According to Cuban, the term at-risk is now used to describe certain students and their families in much the same way that they had been described for almost two hundred years. Cuban further suggests that “the two most popular explanations for low academic achievement of at-risk children locate the problem in the children themselves or in their families.”31 Even the Educational Index continues to cross-reference African American student issues with the phrase “culturally deprived.”
Given the long history of the poor academic performance of African American students one might ask why almost no literature exists to address their specific educational needs. One reason is a stubborn refusal in American education to recognize African Americans as a distinct cultural group. While it is recognized that African Americans make up a distinct racial group, the acknowledgment that this racial group has a distinct culture is still not recognized. It is presumed that African American children are exactly like white children but just need a little extra help. Rarely investigated are the possibilities of distinct cultural characteristics (requiring some specific attention) or the detrimental impact of systemic racism. Thus the reasons for their academic failure continue to be seen as wholly environmental and social. Poverty and lack of opportunity often are presented as the only plausible reasons for poor performance. And the kinds of interventions and remedies proposed attempt to compensate for these deficiencies.
“When you sing in our school choir, you sing as proud Negro children” boomed the voice of Mrs. Benn, my fifth-grade teacher. “Don't you know that Marian Anderson, a cultured colored woman, is the finest contralto ever? Haven't you ever heard Paul Robeson sing? It can just take your breath away. We are not shiftless and lazy folk. We are hard-working, God-fearing people. You can't sing in this choir unless you want to hold up the good name of our people.”
It never occurred to me in those days that African Americans were not a special people. My education both at home and at school reinforced that idea. We were a people who overcame incredible odds. I knew that we were discriminated against but I witnessed too much competence—and excellence—to believe that African Americans didn't have distinctly valuable attributes.
Hollins has looked carefully at programs and strategies that have demonstrated a level of effectiveness with African American students.32 Her examination suggests that these programs fall into three broad categories—those designed to remediate or accelerate without attending to the students’ social or cultural needs; those designed to resocialize African American students to mainstream behaviors, values, and attitudes at the same time that they teach basic skills; and those designed to facilitate student
