School district starts classes separated by race.

[ecstatic]

56. I think they're focused on the wrong things

I've attended schools that were 99% white and 99% black. In my opinion, it's not about the race of the kid sitting next to you. It's about the teacher standing in front of the room. Is that teacher holding every student accountable and believing that every student has the potential to succeed?

Or is that teacher standing at the board like a robot, barely turning around and barely interacting with the students?

For example, I took advanced classes in high school and my teachers challenged us. Well, all except one. If I turned in a paper, I would get detailed feedback on what needed to improve. In math class, teachers would engage us and even do pop quizzes. They expected us to perform and held us accountable.

The flip side of that is when a teacher clearly does not want to be there and s/he has low or even no expectations of the students. Or maybe the teacher does want to be there, but s/he only provides valuable feedback to white students while incorrectly assuming that students of color have no desire or ability to improve. It could be due to a lack of awareness, unconscious bias, incompetence or even racism on the teacher's part.

Regardless of the reason, not many people can learn in an environment like that, and unfortunately I've seen it way too often with friends and family members who had teachers that would literally face the board while students talked and played in their seats.

The first step in fixing the problem is to have teachers who actually give a fuck working in those classrooms. The second step is to make sure that those teachers have training on unconscious bias to make sure that they are not holding different students to different standards.