Lets talk about Race Baby

Lets talk about you and me. Lets talk period.

I stumbled upon an Edublogger by the name of Jose Vilson. He recently posted about the problem of not talking about race and other social identities in schools and especially in education reform. People who are making much of the policies for education happen to be of privilege. Many are advocating policies following neo-liberalist ideals such as the bill that lifted the cap of charter schools in Michigan.

Lets stop there for a second. I have a hard time believing in capitalism working for those without privilege. If we take Argentina under Carlos Menem's rule for example, he put into place various neo-liberal policies following the advise of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund which caused the collapse of an entire country! The lack of regulation had allowed international corporations and other individuals to siphon the money out of Argentina. So I have a problem with FOR-profit charters. Even without all the history, isn't there something wrong with benefiting and profiting from the education of the country's children? Shouldn't the maximum amount of money be put into use for the children? (And staff need to be paid reasonably too.)

This is where policy makers may find themselves blind, believing in what worked for them instead of working for those who were not so lucky or privileged to start with. The problem is that we aren't talking about privilege and social identities and how those are integrated into the well being of a school. The bigger problem is how do teachers or administrators even begin to bring up the issue? As you may know talking about social identities, race and sexual orientation in particular, can be "awkward" or have people on edge. No one wants to say the wrong thing and create an argument.

How do we find a way to portray that arguments are okay and that they build knowledge if approached in the right way. Just like in a classroom, making mistakes and being wrong is okay but you need to be able to build that culture in the classroom first. Those ground rules need to be set. A routine must be followed. The mindset and participation should come after. But it is different for adults is it not?

I commented on the post with an example of how my group of Residential Advisors had clashed over a one conversation. Ironically, we are trained to talk about such issues. I hope this is not the case for the majority. I hope that this is a case where expertise was a problem. Maybe the lack of social justice training in the teacher population will make it easier to set up a safe space. Hope.