Unintended consequences . . .

so, yesterday our district made ALL of its employees sit through a mandatory meeting. Much of the day was spent on racism.

Here are the facts in my district when it comes to race:
Almost 90% of the students are students of color (African-American, Hispanic, Filipino, and Asian), with the remaining 10% of students identifying as "white."

70% of the certificated staff (the teachers, counselors, nurses, speech pathologists, etc.) are "white."

The majority of referrals and expulsions are given to African American students with the next highest being our Hispanic students.

I am a white teacher who has chosen to teach in my district. Not because I want to "save" anyone, rather I strongly & fiercely believe that every child deserves a quality education & a quality educator standing before them, no matter the color of a child's skin, their socio-economic status, nor the number of their zip code.

I will say that unequivocally yesterday's meeting was an unmitigated disaster in trying to help me become a better educator.

Their grand scheme in holding these meetings was to have ALL employees broken up in several different locations. At each location, there were approximately 500 people in attendance. At different parts of the meeting, people were asked to discuss questions proposed & then share out their response to all 500 plus in attendance.

Can anyone guess what inevitably happened?

This is what I witnessed - the majority of those who were willing to get up to speak were people of color. In a group that large when the topic is on racism, most white people are not going to get up in a room with that many people, some of whom are district administration and talk openly about race.

Let me put it out there. I wholeheartedly agree that our African American & Hispanic students receive too many referrals. I also know that the solution to this problem is to not have a full day mandatory meeting on this issue & expect your targeted audience, "white teachers", to engage in open & honest dialogue.

The people who get it (& I'd like to think that I'm one of them) most likely need support, but not the same kind of support as their colleague who is writing all those referrals on our African-American & Hispanic students.

Not only that, having sat in many faculty rooms, it has been my experience that some of the worst "offenders" in writing so many referrals on students of color are my colleagues of color. The numbers of referrals written does not equal racism.

Yesterday's meeting reminded me of the discipline assemblies we routinely held at my middle school in which we gathered all the kids into the auditorium at the beginning of the year & hit them over the head with all of our rules for their behavior.

The kids who knew the rules became bored & we would lose them mid way through. The kids who needed to hear the message weren't going to listen in that format, so all it ends up doing is wasting time that many of us don't have time to waste.

If as educators, we are expected to differentiate our lessons, because we recognize that our students come to us with a wide range of experiences (both in school & out), then one would expect that same type of differentiation for adults.

Those who needed to hear this message never thought it was for them. Those who didn't, left the meeting feeling sad, discouraged, and frustrated.

I don't think that was the intended consequence.