EducationWeek - The Policy Concerns That Keep Teachers Up at Night

We teachers have our hands full with our day-to-day classrooms, but education policies can have a major impact on our working lives.

Here are the policy issues some educators feel we should be most concerned about:

Restrictions on What Can Be Taught

Bryant Odega is a Los Angeles-based labor-rights activist and teacher-candidate fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education:

I think the most important education policy issue facing public schools today are the topics and curricula teachers are able to teach. There is a growing effort by conservatives to restrict teaching topics, even going as far as banning books that talk about gender, sexuality, or race; turning libraries into disciplinary centers’ and distorting the history of slavery and racism in order to minimize its impact.

However, this is not new; restricting knowledge, especially within the context of race, is an age-old issue within the United States. In his book, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, Harvard professor Jarvis R. Givens writes about how teachers in Virginia’s freedpeople’s schools were subject to terror following the Civil War. Furthermore, Black education itself was subject to violent white protest. These are experiences that continued during Woodson’s years as a student during the 1880-'90s. Racial progress too often begets resentment and backlash. Woodson would eventually launch what we now celebrate as Black History Month and popularize Black studies as an academic discipline. Nevertheless, efforts to halt the teaching of race continue today.

Cultural diversity in the classroom is important for students because culture informs the way people perceive themselves, each other, and the world. The lack of inclusion and diversity sends a message to students that their perspectives, cultures, and contributions to society are not significant, and as educators, this is an issue we must tackle head-on.

Professor Rudine Sims Bishop popularized the concept of Mirrors and Windows promoting a multicultural curriculum which “mirrors” the daily experiences of students and “windows” into the experiences of others. This approach engages students by including, affirming, and respecting their cultures and life experiences in the classroom. It also helps them learn about experiences different from theirs, even finding cross-cultural connections in ways they may not have considered before.

If we want to educate a civil society of critical thinkers and informed decisionmakers, then our students deserve all the opportunities possible to engage in knowledge that helps them recognize their own agency, respect others, and become change makers in their own lives and those of their communities.

As educators, it is important for us to reject conservative efforts to take us backward and instead teach and affirm the entire humanity of our students, to advance humanity forward. If we remove cultural diversity and awareness from our classrooms and curricula, we will be perpetuating a narrative that denies the cultural diversity and humanity of our students.

So how do we accomplish this? Teachers should continue teaching and reading from books that include cultural diversity and awareness. Here’s a list of books that can help. Additionally, teachers should discuss book bans and curriculum censorship with students so that they can analyze the impact of these efforts and reflect on how they would respond. Being able to apply skills developed in class to real-world events further helps students in their learning process.

Teachers should also get more civically engaged, whether it’s voting, attending school board meetings, or getting more involved in your labor union. Teachers’ unions are on the front lines of combating the current attacks on curriculum, and there’s been success in codifying culturally affirming policies for students within labor contracts with school districts as demonstrated by the teachers’ union within the Los Angeles Unified school district, the nation’s second largest district, United Teachers Los Angeles. UTLA succeeded in codifying support in advancing ethnic studies and culturally responsive curriculum within its labor contract with the district. These are just some ways to address this issue within and outside the classroom. Most importantly, continue to stay informed and alert in order to best serve the needs of your students...

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