”
I have a dream my four little children will one day live in a
nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but
by the content of their character.
”
~ Martin Luther King Jr.
“I have a dream my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
~ Martin Luther King Jr.
“Educational services is committed to inspire and support the achievement of academic excellence.”
~ Gilroy Unified School District
As a human being, as a parent, as a member of the Alliance for Academic Excellence, I fully support both of these noble goals.
Over the course of the past few years I began to suspect that our school district was hiring people who are not working on either of these goals. Our school district receives consultation and support from many outside interests. One is the Stupski Foundation.
The people at the Stupski Foundation are generous benefactors who form alliances with school districts which have high minority enrollment. Their mission statement informs us that “Social justice in America demands that children of color and poor children get a quality education.” I am hoping that they believe that all children get a quality education.
Our school district routinely hires new teachers and the teacher turnover rate is quite high at some of our schools. Our new teachers get training from the Santa Cruz New Teacher Center (NTC). While researching this group, I came across some material they have published which is at odds with the concept of academic excellence and is prejudicial to students who are not minorities.
Part of this teacher training is a focus on coaching for equity. Equity is described as “treating people differently in order to treat them fairly. Different treatment is needed because students from various social groups enter our schools on an uneven playing field.”
Enid Lee then provides her list of who is entitled to this “different” treatment: African American, Latino, Asian American, Arab American, Native American and “students of working class backgrounds of all races.” My children do not fit into any of these categories – they lose. Enid Lee goes on to state that “what passes for American history ought to be called the history of White America.” Houston, we have a problem.
In the spring of 2002, a Gilroy High School teacher wrote in the NTC publication “Reflections” that the students who participated in class, the enthusiastic students had learned to “play school.”
In the same article, she states that she and another Gilroy Unified employee were in the process of revamping the GHS Global Studies curriculum to make the content serve the cause of equity in the classroom.
I take issue with this because I believe that when you revamp a curriculum it should be done to serve the district goal of achieving academic excellence. Another Gilroy employee informs us that to monitor classroom discussion she likes to “code the seating chart with both the gender and ethnicity of the students to look for patterns in the data.”
Is this really necessary? Does she ask the students their ethnicity or does she just wing it?
The premise of this entire teacher training is that all new teachers come into the system as racists. I don’t buy it.
My children have had dozens of teachers over the years in GUSD, not one of whom was racist. The problem facing our school district is not that minorities are being underserved. Our school district has a majority of Hispanic students.
The minority is non-Hispanic white, African American, Asian, Filipino and Native American. The problem facing us is that the minority population in Gilroy Unified is doing well. They are doing so well that if our schools were only filled with these minorities, all of our schools would be distinguished schools.
Gilroy Unified does not fit well into the system which is put in place by the New Teacher Center, because where we have trouble is with our majority population.
Even when you take out the population of students who are still learning English, our Hispanic population lags behind academically. This is not because they are not as capable; there are too many Hispanic kids who are excelling academically for anyone to believe that is the case. Racist teachers are not to blame. Students who are succeeding – the ones from all backgrounds who are condescendingly referred to as “playing school” are not to blame.
I fervently believe in the American ideal that “all men are created equal.”
As a result, I do not want my children to be treated unfairly in the name of achieving equity. I want Gilroy Unified to cut all ties with Enid Lee and anyone else at the New Teacher Center who will encourage our teachers to judge students on the color of their skin instead of the content of their character.
