Tearing Down Barriers By Building Up People
Written by Marquita Brown for Teach for America
There’s no denying the difficulty Black students and teachers face while navigating the coronavirus pandemic and systemic racism that disproportionately burden or claim their lives.
One thing that can help, at least at school, is creating trauma-informed, antiracist classrooms and spaces to mitigate the educational disparities that have worsened for Black students during the past year, some Black educators say.
And while there is some discussion of the obstacles Black teachers face, there does not seem to be enough, said Keiyonna Dubashi, a longtime educator, Teach For America staff member, and founder of Profound Ladies, a North Carolina-based nonprofit organization.
“Our kids are definitely having challenges. Our families are having challenges too,” she said. “This is a traumatic time to live through.”
To help teachers discuss and process that trauma, Profound Ladies and partner organization Profound Gentlemen provide teachers—particularly Black ones—professional development and other support. In classrooms, Black teachers also are fostering difficult conversations about world events and stepping up efforts to help students and families with needs such as food and internet access that would inhibit academic engagement.
That’s all part of the reality that, about a year after the first U.S. cases of COVID-19 were detected, schools across the country still are grappling with how to maintain relationships with students and families and support them even when they can’t gather in the same spaces. Longstanding inequities such as the digital divide and quality of instruction have persisted, particularly for Black students and other students of color.
Falling behind now could affect students not only for the rest of their academic careers but also their lives.
Teachers and administrators need to be able to identify systemic barriers that are working against families, Dubashi said. To better serve their students, educators need to understand the historical context behind longstanding disparities, and they need to be aware of their own biases, she said.
Otherwise, she said, it’s easy for educators to think that students and families don’t care about education. But “they’re doing the very best with what they have."
Finding Balance and Encouraging Empathy Amid the Pandemic
Sufficient technology was one of the most obvious things many students lacked when schools pivoted to full-time remote learning. The homework gap predates COVID-19, but school and district leaders had to scramble to secure tools such as computers and hotspots for students and teachers who needed them for online classes.
The digital divide did eventually narrow, falling from a high of 42 percent to about 31 percent in the fall, according to a recently released report from the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge. But, the researchers found, significant racial inequities remained. In the fall semester, Black and Latinx students were 1.3 to 1.4 times more likely to have limited accessibility than their non-Latinx white peers, according to the report. That disparity is even more pronounced among low-income households, “with more than 2 in 5 having only limited access to a computer or the internet,” the report notes.
At KIPP Voyage Academy for Girls in Houston, Texas, school leaders initially confirmed the need for computers and hotspots for remote learning by sending surveys to parents and families of the students enrolled. They have continued that effort, sending surveys almost weekly, Principal Fabeah Newton (Houston ‘11) said.
Are you OK, they typically ask. What can we do? What do you need?
“If we didn’t have a number that worked, we emailed. If we couldn’t email them, we would go to their house,” Newton said. Some teachers dropped off food for families if it was needed.
“At the end of the day, if our kids don’t have what they need in terms of the internet, in terms of food, in terms of even financial support, then they’re not going to learn.”
Aside from technology, other disparities that have emerged or worsened during the pandemic include chronic absenteeism, academic failure rates for students, and declining college enrollment.
“What are we really measuring? I cannot understand districts that are still insisting on testing during this time and setting benchmarks,” Dubashi said. “The only thing that we're going to collect out of this is a measure of how much more of a gap, a lack of opportunity, exists for our kids. There's something about the testing of kids that just seems so racist in its implementation. Yet I hear it over and over again: Kids still are expected to take tests and perform in the middle of all of this. I just can't wrap my head around that.”
“Why are we not having more conversations around canceling that? It just doesn’t seem culturally responsive.”
Newton has had conversations with her manager and others about how to be as flexible and innovative as possible during this time. “We’re not going to get to every single lesson,” she said. “How can we just go deeper into certain texts or standards as opposed to being like, ‘This is the curriculum. Do the whole curriculum.’”
Such demands would be difficult for students, especially if they already are dealing with other academic gaps as well as emotional and financial struggles, Newton said. “Balancing all of that is just a lot right now."