Around this time last year, I wrote a post encouraging readers to examine race and how it impacts what they bring to their schools.  As a reminder, I am talking about race as a social construct that has assigned groups into a mythical hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, race as an ideology, race as power. Not multiculturalism, not differences. Instead, the idea that someone's skin color dictates the level of access they have to worthy educational opportunities.  In this three part series, I want literacy folks to examine race and literacy.  The first of the three part series is to focus on whom we teach and lead. Who is in our schools and what do we understand about them and their literate lives?

 

Literacy researchers, professors, librarians, and teachers (and our friends in cognitive psychology) have a very important voice in the education industry.  Our research and recommendations impact how children learn to read, what they read, how much access they have to books, and whether it can change people's behaviors even if it doesn't change their hearts.

 

How many of you used or were told to implement or try:

All of these things are fixtures in classrooms across Illinois.  So I'm asking folks to use their influence to start talking about race and literacy and unpack some of the things that we may be bringing into our schools and classrooms that have deleterious impact on student learning.  In the first part of this series I am asking you to examine whom you teach/lead and what are their outcomes.

 

I recently attended a professional development sponsored by the National Equity Project.  A statement about one of their beliefs around educational equity really stood out to me -- to erase the predictability of who succeeds and who fails. This is such a powerful statement in that every conversation about who is "succeeding" in reading and who is "failing" in reading has been the same EVERY YEAR for nearly 50 years.

 

So whom are we leading and teaching and do we have explicit and implicit bias that perpetuates the predictability of who succeeds and fails?

Take out your reading data for the past three to five years. Sort your data by race, gender, and free and reduced lunch. Think of other unique ways to group your data (e.g., if you use NWEA look at % at grade level by race over five years). Look at historical demographic data. Think about conversations you have had with families. Play around with the data until you can answer some questions about whom you teach/lead:

Go about this task with a NO EXCUSES approach.  We are not using the word "gap" in this conversation; we are not using "their parents don't support," we are not using "the families live in poverty," or "they are ELLs." If you cannot answer some of these questions, or you are finding that who succeeds in literacy at your school is too doggone predictable, it's time to start talking to families about their literate lives and reviewing more bits of data. Work on understanding WHO these children are and what narratives you might be missing that result in repeated low literacy learning and achievement.

 

If you are tired of the same results, I implore you to look within and see if you are bringing biases that create under-performing learning environments for the children you teach/lead. We will talk more about this in Part II of this series -- HOW we teach/lead.

 

Literate Life Update