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Towards that end, this past week
we heard from the African American Parents’ Association (AAPA),
which Community Conversations described as “an essential
voice in Toledo schooling.”
Charles Brown, a founding
member and president of AAPA, recounted the history of the
organization. “We started in 1995 with the goal to be like a
union,” representing first and foremost the interests of
parents and children, but also working with teachers and
principals. Even though it is ethnically African American in
name, the organization included and includes non- African
American members, and has worked across racial lines to help
all students, parents and teachers, not just black students,
parents and teachers.
Significantly, the AAPA has
operated for 21 years without receiving funding from any
sources. Leadership and advocacy has been entirely on a
volunteer basis. The leadership is motivated largely by
citizenship.
Twila Page, another founding
member of AAPA, noted that none of the AAPA leadership
currently has children in the system, “but we know that if a
child isn’t educated, they can’t contribute to society in
any positive way.”
The AAPA has worked toward
improving children’s schooling by educating parents to
navigate the system, identifying equity concerns, and
supporting teachers.
Educating parents to
navigate the system
In 1995, AAPA members saw
transparency of the system as the major issue. Their
activities at that time, and still into the present, mostly
involved going to hearings for teachers, principals,
parents, and students. As Brown stated, their goal was “to
make sure everybody is able to navigate the system when the
system is often complex.”
The group developed
connections and expertise to find necessary information and
to file required paperwork in order to ensure all involved
received due process. Along with working with individuals on
their cases, the AAPA held forums for the public on the
themes:
Know the rules
Know the law
Know your
rights
Know how to
advocate for your student
“The goal was to get parents
on their feet so they would be able to do what we could do,”
said Brown. In this way, AAPA has functioned, and continues
to function, as an important community educator of parents.
Educating parents is a way to
support children. Page stated the group’s mantra: “We are
unashamedly for children.” As an AAPA member, Page has
worked with children whose disciplinary hearings stem from
referrals such as “disturbance in the hallway,” “arguing
with another,” “threw a penny in the classroom,” or
“inciting others to curse or yell.” Page noted that these
are, of course, unacceptable behaviors, but “these are no
reasons for a child to be put in a cell.”
Of course, the teacher and
school were not literally putting children in cells. Page’s
“put in a cell” refers to what is metaphorically called “the
school to prison pipeline.” The “pipeline” refers to the
path starting with referrals to the principal’s office,
continuing with longer exclusions from the classroom such as
suspensions and expulsions, and often ending in placement in
the juvenile justice system, or dropping out and ending up
in the adult justice system.
A barrier to stemming the
flow of children into the pipeline is a lack of
understanding among the population at large of how it
works—that it begins with one teacher’s referral to the
principal’s office, and with one principal’s referral for
exclusionary disciplinary action. And, as we discuss later,
what merits a trip to the principal’s office depends greatly
on a teacher’s worldview.
The AAPA has recognized and
acted on the understanding that early intervention in the
process, starting with insistence on due process, is
essential to avoiding students’ ending up in the pipeline.
Page noted that the AAPA has
worked effectively with area districts including Maumee,
Perrysburg, Sylvania, and Springfield, and with districts as
far away as Maryland. In most of these cases, the districts
“have accepted us and we’ve gotten resolutions,” Page said.
Addressing inequities in
educational opportunity
Members of the AAPA have also
worked with other local organizations to help assure equity
for all students in public schooling. Inequities that the
AAPA has brought up to the schools include a disparity
between elementary schools in library access and policies
for checking out books, and a disparity between high schools
in the number of advanced classes necessary for college
success.
Page noted that, too often,
“Once we raise a problem, a firewall goes up. When that
happens, we have to go around it to the state.” Or sometimes
to the federal government: AAPA members contributed data
toward a 2009 complaint to the U.S. Department of Education
that recently reached agreement (see the Toledo Blade
report, (http://www.toledoblade.com/
Education/2016/01/22/U-S-orders-TPS-to-giveequal-
access.html).
Related to equity issues
raised by the DOE, longtime AAPA member Steven Flagg showed
data indicating that nearly twice as many new teachers and
more than twice as many vacancies among teaching staff in
the TPS schools scoring in the bottom 10 percent than in
those in the top 10 percent.
The turnover rate for schools
in the bottom 10 percent is, according to Flagg, nearly
three times that of the top 10 percent: the bottom 10
percent has a 17.98 percent turnover rate while the top 10
percent has a 5.84 percent turnover. Staffing schools with
teachers who have experience and advanced degrees, at the
same rate whether a school is low-performing or
high-performing, is an equity issue.
Supporting teachers
A third role the AAPA has
taken has been supporting teachers. The AAPA has worked with
both black and white teachers over the years, again with the
effort to help them “navigate the system” when facing
disciplinary hearings and possible dismissal.
AAPA member Gloria Sturdivant
recounted how often, when a teacher faces a disciplinary
hearing, it is for the charge of poor “classroom
management.”
This cuts to the core of one
of the main problems cited in research on urban schooling: a
cultural mismatch not only between a teacher and her/his
students and their parents, but also, sometimes between
school policies and practices, and a teacher’s cultural
knowledge.
For example, Sturdivant
explained, a teacher might prefer to keep a child who is
having problems in the classroom, rather than send the child
to the principal’s office, knowing that she can allow the
child space and time to sooth away problems brought from
home. Another teacher might think the correct way to
“manage” that situation was to send the child to the
principal’s office.
What is good classroom
management to one teacher might be perceived as bad
classroom management to another. This has potential to
create—and has created—problems if a teacher with the latter
view has influence over the evaluation of a teacher with the
former.
Understanding that even
teachers within a system operate from different
understandings, and working with those understandings, can
require intervention from organizations like the AAPA. In
her profoundly influential book Other People’s Children:
Cultural Conflict in the Classroom (first published in 1995;
reissued in 2006), Dr. Lisa Delpit comments:
We [teachers] all carry
worlds in our heads, and those worlds are decidedly
different. We as educators set out to teach, but how can we
reach the worlds of others when we don’t even know they
exist? Indeed, many of us don’t even realize that our own
worlds exist only in our heads and in the cultural
institutions we have built to support them… the ‘realities’
displayed in various participants’ minds are entirely
different terrains. When one player moves right and up a
hill, the other player perceives him as moving left and into
a river. (2006, p. xxiv)
That is, the “reality” of
classroom management is not unitary and is always contested.
We have quoted here from Delpit’s introductory overview:
Delpit’s book, however, is full of scenarios similar to that
described by Sturdivant, in which teachers within schools
are operating with a cultural reality in mind completely
different from that of students, parents, and in some cases,
other teachers.
Sturdivant’s husband, Tyrone
Sturdivant, has also been an active AAPA member. He recalled
his own childhood experience, saying, “I went to Pickett,
and I can name all my teachers: they lived in my
neighborhood, they brought their kids to our school.”
Nowadays, teacher turnover is high, particularly in urban
districts where the majority of teacher drive into the
neighborhood for work, then drive back home to their own
communities.
With this memory of a
different era, Sturdivant identified a problem related to
equity that we all have to work together to solve. He
explained, “How do we get teachers into schools who will
stay? What can TPS do? We say we’re going to hire new
teachers in, but then they leave.” As Drs. Victoria Chou and
Steven Tozer explain in Partnering to prepare urban
teachers: A call to activism (2008), high teacher turnover
resulting in an over-representation of new, inexperienced
teachers is not a problem unique to Toledo but one shared by
urban districts throughout the U.S.
Moving forward together
As writers of this column, a
folklorist and an anthropologist, we know that the bits of
history recounted here are not the only history, but are
important histories of important events, as experienced and
told from individuals’ points of view.
It is essential that we as a
community and a society listen to all histories and learn
from all voices, because only when we heed all do we begin
to get a full picture of the reality we have made and an
understanding of the one we are charged with making. Indeed,
Delpit argues that the core problem in educational
institutions of all levels today is that “the worldviews of
those with privileged positions are taken as the only
reality, while the worldviews of those less powerful are
dismissed as inconsequential” (2006, p. xxv).
That is why we have Community
Conversations: for all to contribute their experiences and
all to listen to each other’s experiences. As a flexible
group, in which over 150 participants come and go as they
have time and interest, and otherwise stay informed via
email and Facebook, we are in a great position to be able to
hear histories from all perspectives.
For example, Community
Conversations participants include numerous individuals with
close ties to Toledo Public Schools and Toledo Federation of
Teachers. These participants know that they are invited to
offer to lead the conversation, or to invite representatives
from their organizations, in future weeks.
We have quoted before Martin
Luther King’s famous observation, “We must learn to live
together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
Conversation is essential if we are to learn to live
together—and work together— “unashamedly” for the good of
our students.
Works Cited
Chou, V., & Tozer, S. (2008).
What’s urban got to do with it? The meanings of urban in
urban teacher preparation and development. In F. Peterman
(Ed.), Partnering to prepare urban teachers: A call to
activism (pp. 1-20). New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Delpit, L. ([1995] 2006).
Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom.
New York: The New Press.
Everyone is welcome to join
in the Community Conversations, alternate Mondays, 6:30-8:00
pm, at various branches of the Toledo-Lucas County Public
Library system. The next conversation will take place at the
Kent Branch, 3101 Collingwood Blvd., on Monday, February 29.
Our program will be a discussion on “Equity and
Institutional Discrimination: Taking Responisbility for
Change.”
Programs are developed by the
Community Conversations Steering Committee, which vets ideas
for future speakers, develops the calendar of speakers, and
works with speakers to bring their knowledge into the
conversation. The Steering Committee has never told an
individual or group that their knowledge is not welcome or
needed: if you have an idea for a conversation, please let
us know.
The authors of this column
are faculty at the University of Toledo and facilitate the
group “Community Conversations for School Success.” Dr.
Lynne Hamer is Professor of Educational Foundations and
Leadership and directs UT@TPS. Dr. Willie McKether is
Associate Dean in the College of Language, Literature and
Social Science, and Special Assistant to the President for
Diversity. Email lynne.hamer@ utoledo.edu or willie.mckether@utoledo.
edu to get on the Community Conversations email list, or
join our public Facebook page at “Community Conversations
for School Success Toledo.” |
