Parents v. Seattle and Meredith v. Jefferson

Landmark case that directly comments/re-interprets Brown v. Board and forbids public schools for discriminating enrollment by race. Being (a) a minority, and (b) a teacher, of course I have something to say. But since I'm not in the country right now, and China is decidedly racially homogeneous, this is an issue that does not get a lot of coverage here, so, a brief opinion.

At first, my feelings were mixed. After all, as mentioned before, I don't like that race is such a big issue in the US, and the only way to make it less of an issue is to, well, make it less of an issue. In other words, stop discriminating by race, whether positive or negative. By that count, I should approve of the Supreme Court's decision. However, a likely result of this decision is greater de facto segregation in schools. Schools in predominantly white neighborhoods will remain white, and vice versa, since the incentive for busing is now diminished.

Which reaches the crux of the problem: just because public schools are not supposed to discriminate by race, the rest of society still does. Real estate agents and apartment landlords still consciously or subconsciously perpetrate de facto racial segregation. There is still the white flight to private schools, leaving the public schools more minority-dominant. And even though the entry into public school is no longer race-discriminant, the school system itself might still be, through teachers who encourage some students to take AP classes and other students to stay in the regular lane. Teachers who fail certain students while giving others the benefit of the doubt.

School is supposed to be the great equalizer, yes, but it's swimming against the current of society, and it is not independent from it. For example, there was a kid in my class who is very bright, and a natural history student -- inquisitive, asks all the right questions, thoughtful and makes the right connections, can judge the significance of events and evaluate the validity of their source. A solid B+ student in the class. But when he asked me if he should take AP US history the following year, I hesitated, and eventually said no. Why? The AP US History course is very heavy reading and a lot of writing. In-class writing. And 2 chapters a week of reading. Although he writes well, he hates writing in-class. (Whenever he turns in type-written essays, they're always beautiful. Whenever he turns in any class-work, he writes one word answers). Nor does he have the prior training and the home environment for him to read 2 chapters a week. I was worried that AP would not give him the opportunity to shine, and would just fail him because he can't handle the dry work load. AP is intense because that is what the standards require, and the only way to cover that much material in 8 months is to cram.

So in my choice in not recommending that he take AP, am I continuing all of the racial baggage that society has given him? (And thus lowering his chance at college) Or am I saving from failing in a track that wasn't designed for him and has no real bearing to real history anyways? I don't think I was personally racially motivated. If he was a white kid or an Asian kid and had the same temperament and background, I would have recommended the same thing. But fewer white kids and Asian kids need that additional boost in terms of work ethic and academic literacy.

Yes, I could have done more. I could have spent more effort this year getting him AP-ready. I could have had a more extended talk to him about the consequences of the choice, etc. I am learning, and I hope to do better next year. But this is also a case of race in the social sense, and how it connects with race in the school sense. How is this decision going to affect the society's discrimination of race? Is it going to start a domino-effect that changes how we think about race, or is it just going to perpetuate existing social inequities? I'm worried that it will be the latter, but hope that discussion around the case might start people thinking about the former. In any case, something needs to be done in society as a whole, and not just with public schools.

Defunding Race

Today, in-between my two classes (Teaching Special Needs and Readings on Differentiation), I attended a lecture about role of education in the social funding of race. It was a talk given by Gloria Ladson-Billings, who is a famous person in the education field. I'm not very familiar with her work at all. I think she pioneered the idea that it's not an education gap, but rather an education debt that gets accumulated.

Anyway, today she talked about race, which called to mind some ideas from first year at UChicago -- the social construction of race, but also the inevitability of dealing with race in the US. She also pulled out Foucault, which was a familiar entity in this field of unknown Education entities.
Some points of her argument: Race is fully-funded by society. This means that even though race is a social construction that we acknowledge, we all do things as a society that maintains this construction. Young children between the ages of 5 and 7 learn that colors have social meaning. They are introduced to the racial coding, even if race is not actually explicitly mentioned. (This is where Foucault comes in, with his regime of truth and his ideas about sex and the web of power that restricts thought). The example that GLB gave for something that was socially funded was literacy-- it is the currency of social interactions. Everyone is expected to know how to give directions, to read billboards, etc. (Not everyone is expected to know how to do calculus.) She talks about the importance of moving past the dichotomy of "racist" vs. "non-racist," and the need to "de-fund" race from society.

It was exciting to hear about this idea of "social funding", as in we as a society are playing this game, and contributing to the continued use of race as a discriminating factor in how we engage and rationalize society.

However, the second half of the lecture became slightly problematic. GLB moved on to talk about the gradual privatization of social funding since the 70s (okay...), the role that schools play in social funding (basically (a) school has the function to assimilate kids into the collective culture and to foster citizenship, and (b) being aware of which functions of school give implicitly racialized mental images, such as the at-risk students or the AP class, etc), and how to de-fund race.

It is at this "how to de-fund race" that the problem comes up. GLB lists a bunch of things that a teacher education program can do-- making "race in education" classes available to college freshmen, having deeper intellectual discussions, and fighting a good fight despite seemingly impossibility of the task.

Ummm...isn't there more we can do? More than half of the lecture attendees were STEP students. We didn't need to know how to de-fund race in a teacher education program. We need to know how to do it through our behavior and our curriculum. (Her suggestion is basically to talk about it directly with the students by eliciting concrete observations from the students ("What patterns do you see around school?"), and then asking the all-important Why question.)

More importantly, I am concerned with this idea of "de-funding". What happens to the funds? Does de-funding race mean that the funds get re-directly into, say, class, or ethnicity? Is there anything that *should* be funded? How do you de-fund? Is it a matter of stopping the deposits, or actually removing money from the pool?

To apply it to something concrete that has been rolling around in my head for the last week or so...

The Virginia Tech shooting. Incomprehensible horror committed by a mentally unstable Senior who was an English major. His name was Seung-Hui Cho, he immigrated to the US at the age of 8, grew up in Fairfax county, Virginia, and his parents owned a dry-cleaning business. He was a permanent resident of the United States, having spent 2/3 of his life here. Once his identity was revealed on Tuesday, we had:
- the media at first reporting his name as last-name first, to emphasize his afiliation to South Korea
- the South Koreans apologizing
- Asian Americans talking about the pressure on Asians to "represent", in that "oh no, not an Asian" sort of way
Can I say that I was secretly glad when analysis of the event shifted to his history of mental illness and the issue of gun control?

But the first reaction was to say "omg an Asian did it." That would be the social funding of race. To be even more specific, calling the shooting the "Cho's shooting" (vs. "Columbine shooting") would be a social funding of racing. But my problem is this: how do you "de-fund" this? Calling it the "Virginia Tech" shooting would transfer funds to this concept that "college campuses are unsafe and negligent". We're not calling it the "Mentally Unstable English Major" Shooting, but the media was definitely moving in that direction. I mean, we have to label it somehow. College campuses and mental illnesses do not have the baggage that race currently has, but if we de-fund race and fund those instead, then they will eventually acquire heavy implications themselves. Or is there a way to de-fund race without funding something else?

This is what I've been thinking about every time someone says "Cho's shooting". -- 1) Why are we labelling it this way? 2) Are there racial implications (or am I just being over-sensitive)? and 3) Would any other label be any better?