Identity-Conscious Educator by Liza A. Talusan

Author:Liza A. Talusan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Solution Tree Press
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Awakening to Inequity

As teachers and school leaders, we have ample opportunities to witness the reality that education is an inequitable system. While our daily work is about building knowledge and skills for young people, we do this in different ways, with different resources, and with different challenges. For example, some teachers work in schools that are well resourced while others work in schools that have not had structural updates since the 1970s. These inequities have long existed, and the global pandemic only amplified them.

When the pandemic hit, many of the private and independent schools I partner with easily moved to remote learning. Their students and teachers had access to technology in their homes and classrooms and had daily practice with navigating online platforms. The well-resourced schools I partner with already had a 1:1 device program implemented as early as elementary school. Students at those schools had a distinct advantage over students attending some of the public and charter schools I partner with. Those students share technology carts and have limited internet access in their homes. When schools moved to remote learning, it took months to provide digital access to students in districts that did not have adequate resources.

Once we got through those final months of the school year, I saw firsthand how some of my client schools spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to update their HVAC systems over the summer so that the buildings were ready for students to return in person by the fall of 2020. In contrast, many public schools spent nearly three months trying to get internet availability in student homes; they struggled to get technology in the hands of students and teachers. Many students, displaced to different homes, were difficult to locate. When the fall 2020 semester started, many students continued remote learning; my own children didn’t return in person until April 2021—over thirteen months after their school buildings closed. In their case, this was due to lack of proper ventilation and the inability to socially distance in an already overcrowded school, an ongoing health concern that disproportionately affected lower-income and predominantly Black and Brown communities.

I was navigating both worlds. I saw up close how disparities were playing out each day. While the global pandemic exacerbated these inequities, it didn’t create them; the education system has never been fair, it has never been equally distributed, and it has not provided common outcomes.

In addition, K–12 schools tend to adopt curricula that are rooted in Whiteness and continue to perpetuate only one type of excellence—White excellence—in books, history lessons (Utt, 2018), science knowledge (Higgins, 2016), and mathematics problems (Kokka, 2020). It has left out Black and Brown people, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, and people who identify as gender nonconforming or gender fluid, and it tells single stories about those who have wealth and those who experience poverty.

So, as concerned educators, how do we respond to these examples of inequity? We can simply say to ourselves, “That’s too bad,” and continue on with our teaching and leading, allowing the system to continue unchallenged.

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