Beverly Cross University of Memphis

 You can determine the quality of any city/community by the way it treats its children  You can determine the future of a city/community by the way it treats it children  You can determine the ethics, morals and culture of a community by the way it treats its children  Education reflects the quality of leadership in a community  Education is a civil rights issue  A community either views its children and youth as an asset or a nuisance—there is no middle ground  Do we have faith in our kids? ( Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation & Improvement, US Department of Education, James Shelton III, 2/2011)

 A superior democracy cannot exist with inferior schools ( Corey Booker on Oprah, 9/24/2010)  Our future will be increasingly determined by our capacity & our will to educate all children well. (LDH), 2007  While the US is going backwards in educating its citizens, most of the rest of the world is moving forward.  We know that education is the foundation for our students’ success and ultimately our community’s success. (Cash, 2010 )

Fourteen million diverse children in poverty are currently being miseducated. The seven million in urban poverty (disproportionately represented by children of color), attend school in the 120 largest school districts. By many accounts, these districts are failing school systems in which greater size correlates positively with greater failure. Every miseducated child represents a personal tragedy. Each will have a lifelong struggle to ever have a job that pays enough to live in a safe neighborhood, have adequate health insurance, send their own children to better schools than they went to, or have a decent retirement. In most cases their lives are limited to dead end jobs or wasted away in street violence or prison. Living in the midst of the most prosperous nation on earth, the miseducated will live shorter, less healthy lives characterized by greater stress and limited life options. Miseducation is, in effect, a sentence of death carried out daily over a lifetime. It is the most powerful example I know of cruel and unusual punishment and it is exacted on children innocent of any crime. Haberman, 2006

 Education is the great equalizer in our society  We live in a meritocracy  Underachievement is individual or personal failure  Traditional middle class pathways to success are open to all  McLaren, P. Or  “Ensuring that young people, particularly low-income African Americans and Latinos, are fully equipped with the tools they need is a continuing civil rights issue  NAACP

 Parents don’t care  Students don’t value education  Lack of role models  They are poor & this limits their abilities  Single and/or broken households  Students are culturally deviant  Community disinvestment  A message of redundancy  Low/no expectations  Necessity for status quo & capitalism  Overwhelming presence of institutional mediocrity  Ignoring the gaps and breeches

 Between teachers and students  Between the curriculum and students  Between school culture student culture  Between school realities and student realities  Between schools and communities  Between Resources  Between opportunities to learn  All represented as performance Gaps rooted in eugenics

 Giving information  Asking questions  Giving directions  Monitoring work  Reviewing tests  Reviewing homework

 Keys to respect  Express interest  Value diversity  Be culturally self-aware  Limit barriers  Understand the dynamics of cultural interactions  Engage students in planning their experience  Ask students to reflect on their own lives & how they came to believe, understand and feel as they do  Foster relationship building  Appreciate identity development  Encourage academic excellence + identity formation

 Require rigor & high expectations  Believe the student can achieve  Be persistent in tutoring  Help students see major content & big ideas rather than isolated facts  Get students actively involved  Ask students to question common sense or assumptions  Engage students in applying ideas to the problems of living  Allow students to redo, polish, & perfect their work  Help students build vocabulary

 Create relevance  Connect content to vital & current concerns & issues  Relate content to human differences  Assist students in applying ideals such as fairness, equity or justice to the world  Connect to real-world & real-life experiences  Use technology

 I Won’t Learn from You by Herbert Kohl  Culturally Relevant Pedagogy by Gloria Ladson-Billings  Star Teachers of Children in Poverty by Martin Haberman