By Harrison Blackmond, DFER Michigan State Director
My views about education are, like many others, informed by my own experiences. Born the son of a black sharecropper in rural Alabama near the end of WWII, I attended segregated schools for most of my early years of education, including the first three. And, my teachers in Alabama were all black, all female. The remainder of my primary and secondary schooling was in low income, mostly black communities in Cincinnati, Ohio. All of my teachers in Cincinnati were white and mostly female. I had both good and bad educational experiences in Alabama and Ohio. The one thing these experiences had in common was that those experiences, both good and bad, were determined by the quality of teachers I had. No surprise there.
What is surprising is that the good teachers I had overcame all the “social and economic disabilities” a student like me brought to class with him. My parents were typical of most black families: uneducated or under-educated. My father had no education and could not read or write. My mother had a fifth or sixth grade education. So she could read and write, but knew little about how urban education systems worked. We were very poor, living on the largess of the landowners where we lived in Alabama and on welfare most of the time in Cincinnati. I worked at school and after school from seventh grade on. My experience was not atypical. Most of my classmates had similar stories. Some of us succeeded against great odds. The ones who did succeed educationally did so because there were teachers along the way who encouraged, inspired, and demanded our best.
Not only did the good teachers know their pedagogy and subject matter, it was clear they cared about whether we learned or not. Our social and economic circumstances did not matter. They expected us to learn in spite of our circumstances. No parental involvement, no problem; students on welfare, no problem. Good, dedicated, and highly qualified professional teachers can successfully educate children regardless of their circumstances. I’ve seen it happen first hand. The problem is, good, dedicated, and highly qualified professional teachers are few and far between. But that need not be. We can identify teachers and future teachers with those qualities and provide incentives for them to teach in schools in distressed communities. (See DFER’s Ticket to Teach proposal.)