{"id":22260,"date":"2014-06-23T06:32:00","date_gmt":"2014-06-23T10:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/?p=22260"},"modified":"2014-06-19T17:38:28","modified_gmt":"2014-06-19T21:38:28","slug":"essay-how-to-teach-brown-v-board-to-a-class-of-all-black-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/2014\/06\/23\/essay-how-to-teach-brown-v-board-to-a-class-of-all-black-students\/","title":{"rendered":"Essay: How To Teach Brown V. Board To A Class Of All Black Students"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Sixty<\/a>

stockimages \/ freedigitalphotos.net<\/p>

Sixty years after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, not all classrooms reflect the dream of desegregation.<\/p><\/div>\n

Here\u2019s a question: <\/b>How do you teach a class of all black students in an all black school that Brown v. Board of Education<\/i> ended segregation decades ago?<\/p>\n

That isn\u2019t a hypothetical question, but one I remember clearly asking myself. I was teaching American History for the first time in one of our nation\u2019s many embarrassingly homogeneous schools. I could not, with a straight face, teach my students that segregation had ended.\u00a0 They\u2019d think that either they or I didn\u2019t know what the word segregation meant.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

But, as a beginning teacher, I was afraid of telling too much truth.\u00a0 Brown<\/i>\u2019s legacy is not a hopeful story about law, or government, or progress, and it seemed like a particularly cruel lesson in power, racism, and injustice.\u00a0 I wanted to be both honest and gentle to my students and probably failed at both.<\/p>\n\nhttps:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/files\/2014\/06\/GlazerBrown_-_SD_-_Glazer_web-1.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

I bumbled my way through that particular year in that particular school, but the question of segregation comes up again and again for me.\u00a0 Brown<\/i> has always been in the background, whatever my students look like.<\/p>\n

And they\u2019ve looked very different.\u00a0 I have been privileged to teach in a wide range of environments\u2014city schools, suburban schools, public schools, and private\u2014and I\u2019ve worked with a wide range of students.\u00a0 In my travels I have found that mixed schools are exceedingly rare.\u00a0 That\u2019s unfortunate because if we are ever going to be a truly multicultural, tolerant society, we need to start by sitting next to each other.<\/p>\n

But proximity itself isn\u2019t the answer, it\u2019s just the beginning.\u00a0 Real mixing doesn\u2019t automatically happen even if different students are brought together.\u00a0 I learned this lesson in a suburban school filled with a range of ethnic groups.\u00a0 There I had an English class of mostly black and brown students first thing in the morning.\u00a0 I could never get them to listen to the announcements and one day I asked why they weren\u2019t interested in the events going on in the school.<\/p>\n

One kid told me, \u201cThose things aren\u2019t for us. Those are for the other kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was clear he meant the middle-class white kids, and that even though Brown<\/i> had succeeded in desegregating this school in body, we had failed to do so in spirit.<\/p>\n

I continue to believe in the ideals behind Brown, <\/i>which I think call for a truly democratic, equitable, public school system.\u00a0 That doesn\u2019t just mean putting different kinds of kids near each other.\u00a0 Physical desegregation is only the first of many steps.\u00a0 There\u2019s a lot of work after that.\u00a0 But the longer we put off that first step, the further behind we fall.<\/p>\n

In education, I see too many people looking to find silver bullets in vouchers, charter schools, or court decisions.\u00a0 There are no silver bullets.\u00a0 Schools can be a beacon, but more often they are a mirror.\u00a0 They show us who we are.\u00a0 As long as we live in a country where most of us only spend time with those who look like us, segregation remains a nightmare from which our schools cannot wake us.<\/p>\n

If we truly want to desegregate, then those of us with the power to choose need to decide that we no longer want to live separate, unequal lives.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s never too late to start.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jeremy Glazer is a former South Florida school teacher. \u00a0He\u2019s working on a doctorate in education at Stanford University.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

This essay was adapted from a chapter:\u00a0Glazer, J. (2012).\u00a0 \u201cTeaching Brown v. Board of Education in Segregated Classrooms.\u201d\u00a0 In Wynne, J., Delpit, L. & Miles, R. (eds.) (2012). Confessions of a white educator: Stories in search of justice and diversity. Kendall Hunt.\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s a question: How do you teach a class of all black students in an all black school that Brown v. Board of Education ended segregation decades ago? That isn\u2019t a hypothetical question, but one I remember clearly asking myself. I was teaching American History for the first time in one of our nation\u2019s many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":155,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15,16],"tags":[948,841,947],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22260"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/155"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22260"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22265,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22260\/revisions\/22265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}