Schools to look inward for institutionalized racism
11:35 PM 8/22/03
Doug Erickson Education reporter

Frustrated by a nagging achievement gap that separates minorities from their white peers, the Madison School District is confronting the unpleasant possibility that institutionalized racism holds back students of color.

The district has hired Glenn Singleton, a nationally known anti-racism educator, to lead a live, half-day telecast Sept. 30 from the Doyle Administration Building auditorium. The workshop will be broadcast simultaneously to more than two dozen sites, with all of the district's nearly 6,000 employees - cooks to janitors, teachers to accountants - expected to participate. Students will have the day off.

From there, schools will take on race relations as a major, ongoing focus this school year and beyond, with teams of staff members initiating what Singleton dubs "courageous conversations" about race.

It's an approach that goes far beyond traditional diversity training and assumes that there are policies and behaviors embedded in the district that benefit the dominant white race over others.

"We, as a district, have not talked about this issue and how it affects student achievement," said project leader Diane Crear, a special assistant to Superintendent Art Rainwater. "We've danced around it - we've talked about diversity, we've talked about sensitivity - but we've not talked about institutionalized racism."

Discussions about race may be uncomfortable, but they need to happen, she said. "People want to be finished with this subject, but we're not, because our students tell us that we're not."

Vivian Keith's heart sank when she walked into the advanced math classroom at Madison Memorial High School last fall.

Of the 27 pupils taking Algebra III, only three were students of color like herself, she said. It was a depressingly familiar sight.

"Even minority students who are smart enough to get into those classes don't take them because there's no one there to talk to or relate to," said Keith, 17, who is African American and will be a senior when classes begin Sept. 2. "No one tells them, 'Yes, you can do this.'"

Keith said she's found a mentor in the school's minority services coordinator, Rosalyn Greer, but she said she feels some teachers hold low expectations for minority students. "They'll look at a student based on color, not on who they are or what they've done, and say, 'You're not going to make it in my class.' I've had that happen to me."

Travis Knight, 18, who is biracial and a 2003 graduate of Madison La Follette High School, said he too has seen that kind of stereotyping, which he likens to racial profiling. "If you have cornrows or wear baggy jeans and big chains, the first assumption is that you don't want to be at school or you can't learn."

He never felt victimized - he dresses more mainstream - but he saw friends struggle with stereotyping. "I never once got stopped in the hallways to see if I had a pass. But the - quote-unquote - ghetto-looking people were stopped all the time."

Knight added that some students of color are too quick to view every interaction with a staff member as racially charged, and he said students in general need to respect teachers more.

Rainwater said he's concluded that the way staff members relate to students is just as important as the district's academic strategies. He's been through Singleton's workshop and calls it "life-changing."

"Many of our children of color see the world through a different lens than we do, and it's our obligation to understand that," Rainwater said. "It's going to be a long process, because it's really a change in how we do our jobs effectively. But until we can deal with the race issue, we're never going to completely resolve the student achievement gap."

Singleton, a former admissions director at the University of Pennsylvania who now runs a consulting business in San Francisco, argues that to close the gap, educators must be aggressively anti-racist, not merely non-racist.

He describes institutionalized racism as "a system of advantage and privilege - both consciously and unconsciously, in precise and imprecise ways - that promotes white skin, white culture and white consciousness over other experiences."

The goal isn't to become colorblind - it's to recognize that race affects how we relate to each other and how we view the world, he said. That's tough to do in a society that's "really terrified, in some ways, to deal with race," he said. "We like to redefine the issue so that it falls under a category like poverty."

But poverty can't fully explain the racial achievement gap, Singleton said. Even students of color from middle- and upper-class families score, on average, lower than white middle- and upper-class students on standardized tests, so something else is going on, he said.

Pamala Noli, a San Francisco educational consultant who has worked with Singleton, said it's particularly tough to discuss race with white liberals - a group that she includes herself in - because they think that just loving the child is enough.

"White liberals want everything to be right in the world, and we really believe we're going to change the world," she said. "It makes us very self-righteous - we know we're on the side of right, so then we take actions and make decisions based on that without knowing anything really about the lives of the kids we're serving."

The district will pay Singleton about $50,000 in fees and expenses this school year for the Sept. 30 workshop and three other visits, Crear said. The money comes from an endowment dedicated to staff development. No tax money is involved, the district said.

Madison has a 39 percent minority student population. While the district has made some progress in closing the achievement gap, test scores for minority students, on average, still trail those of their white peers.

The district's teachers union strongly backs the training, as does a majority of the School Board. Board member Ray Allen said he supports cultural training but wonders if the money would be better spent tapping local experts who know the community and its children.

Carmen Pacheco, a Mexican-American parent who also taught second grade last year at the district's Lapham Elementary School, applauds the effort and said a key to its success will be how well the topic plays out at each school on a practical level. "Unfortunately, sometimes these situations are better received by people who are already accepting of the philosophy and open to it," she said. "How do you reach people who don't see race as an issue?"

All district employees should be evaluated on how well they work with groups of people that are different from themselves, said Barbara Golden, chairwoman of the Madison Area Family Advisory/Advocacy Council, an organization that formed last year to push for an improved educational climate for minority students.
The group plans to develop an "alternative student handbook" that would address institutionalized racism, she said. There are many practices inherently known to white, middle-class parents - the ability to argue for different grades or to have your child moved to a different class - that are not obvious to parents who don't know the system, said Golden, who is African American.
Golden said she's seen many race relations initiatives come and go in the district over the years. "I'm waiting to see with this one. But that's what I've been doing for 20 years - waiting to see results."