Politics, Education, and Social Problems: Complicated Classroom Conversations 3030760847, 9783030760847

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Politics, Education, and Social Problems Complicated Classroom Conversations

Jennifer Rich

Politics, Education, and Social Problems

Jennifer Rich

Politics, Education, and Social Problems Complicated Classroom Conversations

Jennifer Rich Sociology and Anthropology Rowan University Glassboro, NJ, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-76084-7    ISBN 978-3-030-76085-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76085-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

The Problem with Education On November 9, 2016, the day after the presidential election, I woke early after a restless sleep. The news was still on in my room, and it confirmed what I heard as I nodded off: the American people had elected Donald Trump to be the forty-fifth president of the United States. Among my many concerns was a practical one: my colleagues and I had planned an event for our university’s Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights, of which I am the Executive Director. It was an open conversation, meant to allow students, faculty, and staff of both political affiliations to talk to one another, to come together after a particularly contentious election season. In all honesty, I had assumed, despite everything that had happened during the election season, that Hillary Clinton would win. I was unsure of how I would facilitate the lunchtime conversation when this was not the case, one that I thought I would be able to handle easily. I had imagined how magnanimous I could be in my liberal triumph, talking through with students how to reach out to the “other side.” Instead, I was distressed. What would happen to women? Muslims? Members of the LGBTQ+ communities? What would happen to those who opposed Trump? I couldn’t wrap my mind around what felt like a blow to fundamental human decency. Students piled into a classroom for the post-election conversation—so many students that we moved out all of the furniture, seating students in concentric circles, passing pizza and soda around until everyone was v

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settled and had something to eat. I was shocked by the number of students there, more than had joined us for any previous event. They all looked tired and were dressed similarly in baseball hats, hoodies, socks, and flip flops. As they wandered in and I greeted them, asking them how they were, they told me they were tired, depressed, vindicated, scared, and triumphant. These brief comments told me everything I needed to know before beginning: I was facilitating a conversation between those who had voted for Clinton and those who had voted for Trump. I am comfortable facilitating uncomfortable conversations, comfortable with debate and disagreement, comfortable with students (and other faculty) expressing beliefs that oppose my own—I see my role as being about facilitation, never indoctrination. This time, though, I hadn’t processed my own concerns about the election, and worried about staying open-minded. In the end, the conversation went well. Students were respectful; I did very little talking and a whole lot of listening. A Trump supporter and a Clinton supporter sat next to each other, and spoke with one another kindly. Though they attended the same university, and ended up sitting next to one another at the same event, they felt certain they had never met a supporter of the other candidate in person. They had mentally vilified the other but were able to see this one individual as human. Flash forward a few months, to the semester immediately following the inauguration of President Trump. Some students wore MAGA hats around campus, others kept their I’m With Her buttons and stickers in prominent places on backpacks and computers. The election was over, but the divisiveness of the politics was still very present. I was teaching a class that I regularly teach for education majors who are studying to become teachers. It focuses on schools and the communities in which they sit. Every semester I gave my students an assignment to cross a cultural boundary, to go to a place where they feel like an outsider. So, if they are straight, they can go to an LGBTQ+ event; if they are Christian, they can go to a service at a synagogue or mosque. I have had white students who went to Black Baptist churches, and Democrats who went to meetings of the Campus Republicans. The idea was to learn about people they consider to be different from them, think about how they are more similar than they might have assumed, and talk about how this might inform their future teaching. The semester that President Trump was elected, a student in my class wrote a paper saying that he goes through life as a conservative on a liberal

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campus. He didn’t go to a new place for the assignment or talk about how the experience informs his thinking; he just wrote about the fact that, in his opinion, he is a political minority. I gave him the opportunity to redo his paper because he didn’t complete the assignment. The student came to my office to talk about his work. He was trying to convince me that his paper was acceptable, that it met the criteria for the assignment. He began a sentence, “it’s like when you go to your church…” and I stopped him, explaining that I go to synagogue, that I’m Jewish. His response? “You’re a Jew Professor?” As he said this, he pushed his chair back from my desk, putting some physical space between the two of us. While I try not to assign motivation to students without asking directly for their perspective, in this instance the antisemitism was obvious to me. I wasn’t sure how to ask him why he pushed his chair back, why he used the words he did, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear what he might say. Instead, I told the student that I wouldn’t allow him to move from my class, and that we’d get through the semester together even though we both knew how he felt about me. (We did. It was uncomfortable.) I didn’t experience things like this before the 2016 election. I have no doubt that they did happen, but it was the first time I faced it. I’ve argued with colleagues (and myself) about whether it is positive or negative that the divisiveness and vitriol is out in the open, that our country and our classrooms are embroiled in such heated debate about things like race, religion, and nationalism. While I am deeply troubled by the politics of the nation, I am pleased that young people are engaging with political, social, and cultural issues—even though much of the debate centers around perspectives that are racist, antisemitic, and xenophobic. Ultimately, I take the perspective that open discussion is a good thing if we want to move forward as a society. Later that same semester, I undertook the facilitation of a series of challenging conversations on campus, which we called “Hearing Conservative Voices.” They were hour-long sessions meant to respond to students, like the one who called me a Jew Professor, who were telling me and some of my colleagues that they “felt marginalized.” We had heard just often enough that students who self-identify as “conservative” feel like they are the ones who can’t share their ideas and opinions, and wanted a place to air their thoughts. Our Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights decided to open up a dialogue on this subject, and give these students space to be heard.

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For the first meeting, we met in a classroom and had a full house. It was primarily a room full of students, but a handful of faculty and staff came to the conversation, too. I set some ground rules, the most important being that even though (especially because) there were both liberals and conservatives in the room, we’d all assume good intentions, listen, and students would speak, not faculty. I’d facilitate. The idea was to give the conservative students a voice in order to better understand why they felt they were not heard, and to give the liberal students a chance to respond. The first student who spoke was wearing a bright red Make America Great Again (MAGA) hat. He was unhappy because comments had been made to him about his hat, both around campus and in classes. He claimed that professors made him take his hat off, but not students wearing other hats. He said that students called him racist and “other names,” and they sneered at him. Other conservative students echoed these sentiments. They explained that “conservative” meant different things to different people. To some, it meant “Republican;” to others, it meant “Trump supporting,” “racist,” or even “Nazi.” They felt that to those on a college campus, there was no difference. Some reported having grades lowered for expressing traditionally conservative beliefs. Others wanted to wear MAGA hats around campus but were afraid of being ostracized. I mentally noted that the conservatives who spoke were all white men, while the liberals who responded were women, or men who were ethnic minorities. None of the liberal students used the space to talk about feeling marginalized on campus, and I wondered if it was because they are used to it, or because they feel comfortable on campus rather than marginalized. The white men who spoke about their marginalization did not speak of their privilege, and I did not raise the point. It was a flaw, perhaps, in my facilitation, though I’m not sure I was meant to take the students who spoke to task. I would have been proving their point. The more I thought about it, I could imagine them being asked to take their MAGA hats off in classes, professors intentionally or not grading them down for making conservative arguments. I think that must be uncomfortable for them. And, at the very same time, I wanted to ask them to look around, to think differently, and to imagine what it might be like to be born into another life or another body. After the first conversation, we had two more organized conversations and other, less formal meetings. We talked about the polarization in our country’s politics and all we could agree about is that we are, in fact,

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polarized. Many issues were raised, including systemic racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia, and gender identity, but the students didn’t seem to want to talk about the issues specifically; they wanted to vent. To get beyond the polarization, though, we would need to discuss the issues, one at a time. These experiences were the impetus for writing this book. It became clear that the vitriolic tone of the national conversation had become a part of everyday life. * * * I write this preface several years after the experiences just described, in the long, timeless period that is the spring and summer of 2020. America is now in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic and racial unrest, and I am forced to be unsentimental about education—public education in general, and my own. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, the unarmed African American man who died under the knee of a white police officer, the public conversation has focused on systemic racism and white privilege. Tens of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets to bring attention to the murder of Black Americans at the hands of the police, and the seemingly intractable system that brought us here. In contrast, over the past years, my white college students have lamented that they “are supposed to feel guilty for being white.” As a result, I’ve spent a good deal of time thinking about white privilege, and privilege more generally; thinking, in particular, about how I will teach a sociology course about social problems moving forward. Most, though not all, of the students I will teach are white. From past experiences, I expect many to question Black Lives Matter and the concepts of white privilege and white guilt. I feel it, too. Not guilt, but something else. The closest word I can find is discomfort. I am not uncomfortable with the concepts—I work hard to be anti-racist, and continually try to decenter my privilege. But race isn’t the only subject on my mind. The coronavirus pandemic has exposed giant gulfs in our healthcare system caused (in part) by wealth inequality. The past several years have been nonstop news cycles on repeat—shootings in schools and places of worship, and very public debates about sexual assault and harassment. All of these social problems weigh heavily on me, like so many other people in America, and across the globe.

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I am uncomfortable with how much I don’t know about how our country got to this place. I am overwhelmed by the unlearning and relearning that I have done, and need to continue. I grew up in New Jersey in the ‘80s and ‘90s and went through what is considered to be one of the best public school systems in the state. My hometown is overwhelmingly white, and relatively liberal. There, I learned that racism is a thing of the past, disappeared during Civil Rights and never likely to return. I did not learn that white Europeans colonized North America, not in such stark terms, instead I learned the “traditional” Thanksgiving story and the ways in which Europeans improved life for the Native Americans, the ways in which they “worked together and became friends.” I had no idea that I could question this, that there was another, historically accurate story I was missing (Silverman, 2019). I don’t remember hearing about Jim Crow until I was well out of high school. I don’t think I learned about systemic racism until graduate school. We never examined social class, despite living only a few miles from one of the most impoverished cities in America. The responsibility is mine to relearn American history, not American myth. I began my career as an elementary school teacher, and I see the ways in which I perpetuated the myths that I was taught. I did not talk to my students about Black history, except in February, never spoke with them about Juneteenth, despite the fact that school was still in session on June 19 each year. To make matters worse, I taught in two different public schools in New York City, one in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and the other in Tribeca, Manhattan. In Bushwick, almost all of my Hispanic students lived below the poverty line, had parents in prison, and came to school hungry each morning. In Tribeca, my students lived in multi-million-dollar duplex apartments, had famous parents, and vacationed in Europe. These were two public schools within the same system, and the experiences and opportunities for the students were polar opposite. I never thought about this as being about race; class, perhaps, but not race. In this period of social reckoning, it is so easy to see how wrong I was. What, though, is the responsibility of schools? Talking about race—or religion, class, or gender—in the classroom can feel like the equivalent of lighting a forest fire. Raising any of these issues in public schools can be seen as questioning all that is, quite legitimately, good about America. Everyone has an opinion, and students (not to mention parents and colleagues and administrators) are bound to disagree with one another. Further, bias and discrimination occur outside of the classroom; they

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flourish in the hallways, at the lunch table, and in the locker rooms. Bias takes the form of disparaging comments and segregated friend groups, graffiti on lockers and incessant microaggressions. So many curricula are largely dominated by narratives of rich, white, Christian men (as a student points out in the coming pages). With minimal emphasis on the struggles and successes of all people, students leave high school and enter the “real world” with a skewed understanding of social dynamics. By teaching students in all grades about a variety of lived experiences, students will grow more empathetic and understanding towards the struggles faced by others today. This does not only mean adding more diverse authors to summer reading, but also means transforming the way education looks in this country. By adding more content related to the struggles and, more importantly, successes of all people, students will have a more empathetic and equitable understanding of contemporary social relationships. In this moment, America is being reimagined. This is made ever-more challenging by the acrimonious, racist politics coming from the populist, nationalist far right, which cloud every conversation and debate about race, religion, and what it means to be a good citizen. Politics, Education, and Social Problems is a reimagining of the goals of American public schools; it is also my way of raising my voice, not just as a protest against this set of ideas but as a roadmap for how we can move forward. Glassboro, NJ, USA

Jennifer Rich

Acknowledgments

This book would not be complete without the support of my colleagues, mentors, friends, and family. My colleagues and friends at Rowan University are a source of constant encouragement. Stephen Hague continues to be my first, last, and most thorough reader. In the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Emily Blanck, Jody Russell Manning, Debbie Sharnak, Harriet Hartman, and Nawal Ammar have supported my thinking, given me time, and emboldened me to keep writing. I came to Rowan as a faculty member in the College of Education, and spent countless hours talking about what good teaching is and ought to be with Brie Morettini, Casey Woodfield, Brent Elder, Lisa Vernon Dotson, and Cori Brown. This book is a product of the work that I have been doing all of my adult life, and I have learned to be a teacher from those who taught me along the way. I am grateful to my colleagues at P.S. 234  in lower Manhattan, particularly Namarata Joshi, Susan Detweiler, Pat Carney, Audrey Dursht, and Mara Sombrotto, who showed me what teaching and learning look like when exemplary teachers are in the classroom. My professors and friends at Bank Street College of Education helped my learning take root. Peggy McNamara, my mentor, is truly a model of what it means to live your work. At Rutgers, Alisa Belzer taught me to believe in myself, and Lauren Smith Opiela read every word I wrote, and still does today. I have been fortunate to write for amazing editors, and know that the polishing editors do is what makes a piece of writing sparkle. Two editors xiii

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in particular have given me more than my share of their time as I have written about education: Jennifer Shaw is a brilliant editor, and also a brilliant friend; Jamaal Abdul-Alim taught me that every detail matters. My friends have kept me going, cheering me on, encouraging me, and reminding me that I can’t do everything well, but that sometimes good enough is good enough. My parents, my sister, my mother-in-law, and brother- and sister-in-law have listened to me talk about my work over any number of holiday dinners and family parties. I am thankful they always take the time to listen. Of course, Jonathan, Ethan, and Holden... writing a book is a family affair. It takes my time and my energy, and I have asked you to do more than your share as I’ve been tucked away writing. Thank you for your support, your confidence, and your love. As always, this is for you.

Contents

1 Education as Politics  1 2 “White Privilege Is a Myth”: Tackling Race 11 3 “There Was a Christmas Tree but No Christmas”: Religion in Public Schools 23 4 “I Don’t Speak Poor”: Uncovering Social Class 39 5 “We Exist”: Gender and Education 49 6 Classroom Conversations about Sexual Assault 63 7 Classroom Conversations About Gun Violence 73 8 How Do We Get There? 81 References91 Index101

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CHAPTER 1

Education as Politics

Abstract  As America has become more polarized, many teachers are uncomfortable facilitating political discussions, and student teachers afraid to answer questions “the wrong way.” They are, fundamentally, uncomfortable holding complicated conversations about politics and social problems, and feel they do not have the skills to facilitate them anyway. This chapter argues that the only way to help young people develop into participatory citizens in our democratic society is by helping them engage in complicated conversations about politics and social problems, including, but not limited to, race, religion, social class, and gender. Keywords  Civics education • Classroom conversations • Democratic education To paraphrase civil rights icon and Congressman John Lewis (2020), who said “when historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war,” the role of schools is to engage the next generations in the hard work of actualizing the American dreams of peace and equality. This book argues that the central role of schools, their most critical and urgent job, is to help young people understand the ways in which some individuals are excluded from full participation in our democracy, as well © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Rich, Politics, Education, and Social Problems, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76085-4_1

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as to teach all individuals to act to create a more just society. One way to do this is to center complicated conversations that tackle head on these divisive, problematic issues in the nation’s public school classrooms. There is much in this core argument that others might disagree with, perhaps dismissing it as a liberal perspective that overlooks less egalitarian ideals. Critics might also say that the argument of this book should be rejected because not all Americans agree that schools should be preparing students for a civic life. Less than half of Americans believe that schools should prepare students to live in a democracy, while about 80 percent believe that basic academic knowledge in reading, math, and science is the most critical goal of schools (Galston, 2007). These different ideas about the fundamental point of schooling stem from a deep disagreement about what it means to be a good citizen, what American values are, and whether the diversity that is America should be celebrated or vilified. Politics, Education, and Social Problems stipulates that citizenship, democracy, equality, and diversity are complicated issues and should form the heart of the conversations that ought to be taking place in school on a regular basis. Another principle that grounds Politics, Education, and Social Problems is that schools are meant to foster a belief in intrinsic equality, the fundamental assumption that the good in every human being is intrinsically equal to that of any other (Dahl, 1998, p. 65). In order to help students better understand, and adopt a stance of, intrinsic equality, schools must engage them in public discussions of common social issues (Mansbridge, 1991). This book is based on wide-ranging research across several projects. It is, in many ways, the culmination of two decades’ worth of work as a teacher, a teacher educator, and a sociologist. When I first began teaching in Bushwick, Brooklyn, I had no background to understand the challenges that the students I worked with faced, nor did I know how to support them as they worked to overcome these challenges. My time in Bushwick set me on a path to better understand different social worlds and lived experiences, to see children as products of their families and communities, and to see communities as products of larger structural systems. I also began to think about how rarely people really listen to one another. I began to focus on facilitating conversations between students, and between colleagues, in order to encourage them to listen to and learn from each other. This work of facilitating courageous conversations (Singleton,

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2014) has changed throughout the years as I’ve moved from one setting to another, but has been a consistent focus of my work and research. As a way of exploring these issues in more detail, I conducted research as a participant observer in the education classes that I taught over the course of three years at Public University (PU). A participant observer collects data by participating in the daily life of those he or she is studying (Mac an Ghaill, 1994). Participant observation “is close to everyday interaction, involving conversations to discover participants’ interpretations of situations they are involved in” (Becker, 1958, p. 652). The goal of this research is to produce a “thick description” of social interaction within natural settings. At the same time, researchers are encouraged to use their own language and everyday concepts to describe what is going on in their lives. This process is meant to yield a nuanced picture of the research setting as a social system (Geertz, 2008). In other words, researchers who employ participant observation methods seek to find meaning in their everyday encounters and situations. My teaching in the College of Education at PU focused on schools and the communities where they are located, social justice and democratic education, social emotional learning, and teaching about hard histories. I engaged with this work through the lens that I started to develop as a public school teacher in New York City: teaching through and about complicated conversations and encouraging the undergraduates that I worked with to think about children in multiple, intersecting, sometimes contradicting ways, with rich lives outside of school. I undertook a focused study of the classes I taught in order to consider what was working well with the hard talk I was facilitating and to find areas where I could become a stronger teacher, mentor, and facilitator. Further, the topics covered in my classes were issues that were becoming more heated and political after the 2016 presidential election, and I wanted to observe how these conversations changed over time and how young people studying to become teachers thought about core issues. I conducted research in my classes by audio and video recording class sessions, analyzing anonymous comments and questions from students, and holding interviews and focus groups with students once they were no longer in my classes. PU is a large public university with approximately 20,000 students enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs. Just over 65 percent of the students are white, and many who make up the undergraduate population are first-generation college students. There are nine colleges and

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schools within the university, as well as specialized graduate programs and medical schools. PU has a growing campus. Over the past six years, student numbers have increased and, with this, new building has taken place on the campus and the surrounding areas. A mix of old buildings and new sit side by side, and students congregate in several central squares around campus. Upon observation, one can see that the students are largely self-segregated: Black students, Asian students, LatinX students, and white students are their own cliques. Fraternities and sororities often have booths in the square outside of the student center, and small tables inside are set up by student clubs selling baked goods to support various projects and causes. The town in which PU sits has grown, as well. There is a thriving public–private partnership and a bustling street abutting campus with bars, restaurants, a yoga studio, nail salon, and the campus bookstore. Student housing is also available on this street, giving students many options when deciding where to live and contributing to the sense of PU as a forward-­ looking institution. The second research project that informs this book took place at East School District (ESD). Several years ago, I was engaged to conduct an equity audit in ESD and developed relationships with administrators, faculty, students, and parents. These relationships facilitated the permission I was given to conduct research in the ESD schools. During my time conducting the equity audit, I became interested in what diverse groups ESD students experienced during their school day and within their community, and what they thought about issues of social (in)justice. ESD is an affluent, suburban school district on the East Coast with just under 4000 students in grades pre-kindergarten through twelfth. Approximately 96 percent of the students are white, and the median family income is $95,000. The students in ESD are well prepared for college, with numerous Advanced Placement (AP) classes offered along with wide-­ ranging electives, diverse clubs, and after-school activities. Teachers in East Middle School and East High School (EMS and EHS, respectively) are friendly, chatting with one another in the hallways and pulling the hoods off students’ heads as they pass from one class to the next. It is a school district where the administration plans countless programs about diversity and privilege and the students tune them all out because they don’t see the need for them. Research at ESD took several forms. I conducted many focus groups with students, faculty, and administration. I also observed classes,

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wandered the hallways in between classes with the students, and spent time in the cafeterias and gyms in EMS and EHS. In some ways, I utilized strategies of participant observation in this setting, too. I made use of focus group and observation protocols, but I am aware that I changed and influenced the dynamic of classrooms and conversations by being there. Over time, students would find me in the cafeteria and hallways to tell me about a racist joke they overheard or a comment that “may or may not be antisemitic.” They sought me out to share discriminatory jokes that I might not have heard or “tell on” a teacher who was “pushing her BS liberal lefty beliefs.” And so, over time, I became more of a participant in the life of the school district, rather than a detached researcher. While PU and ESD are different in many ways, they both talk a great deal about diversity and helping students “become agents of change.” Both institutions said the right things about social justice education, but I wondered how well the social justice perspective they espoused translated into their teaching and into the students’ perspectives and lived experiences. I wanted to know how public institutions help young people understand diversity and how responsible schools should be for this work. Further, I questioned how a school successfully educates for social change and what social change looks like. These questions animated this research and have become the core of this book. At both ESD and PU, it became evident that despite a stated focus on social justice, students struggled to understand what this meant and what part they played in creating a climate of equity and inclusion. As a result, as I analyzed my data, I began to frame what I learned as political. I am not talking about partisan politics but politics in the broadest sense of the word: the process of creating spaces where we can all live and work together (Hess & McAvoy, 2015). In this statement, all means all, regardless of race, religion, socioeconomic status, or gender. Creating spaces that are for all people is one fundamental purpose of social justice and social justice education, and it relies on a widespread belief in intrinsic equality. Talking about social (in)justice in schools can be challenging. For example, in focus groups, informal conversations, and classroom discussions about various social issues, EHS students struggled to find ways to talk that were factual and respectful. My initial conversations with students were hard to get through because they either kept worrying about offending others or said wildly offensive things without worrying at all. Additionally, opinions and big ideas substituted for facts, making discussions off balance and hard to follow. Because of this, I wanted to help

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students think about social issues through the political lens of creating shared spaces articulated above. Engaging in discussions of social problems, as long as there are people in the group with variant views, builds political tolerance, creates an informed citizenry, and may ultimately result in better policy decisions in the future (Hess, 2009). Diversity is not a social problem, but so often the rhetoric that surrounds issues of diversity frames it as negative and unwanted; different views are likely to be silenced, ignored, or disparaged. Talk among individuals with different views, sometimes referred to as cross-cutting talk, familiarizes people with legitimate rationales for opposing views and normalizes debate (Mutz, 2006). This sort of talk happens very infrequently in society because of an aversion to socio-political conflict, making it hard to integrate these conversations into schools (Hess & McAvoy, 2015). Schools, however, are good sites for this type of work because there are opportunities to engage in these hard conversations within existing curricula, there are teachers who are (or can become) skilled at teaching students to participate, and there is ideological diversity. Many teachers see the rhetoric around social issues as a threat to American democracy, and as a barrier to this sort of hard talk, but also as indicators of why schools must institute democratic education and act for social change (Hess, 2002; Hess & Posselt, 2002; Hess & Ganzler, 2007). They see challenging conversations as an authentic aspect of democratic education, as well as a way to teach specific skills of researching, listening, and speaking. Additionally, challenging conversations teach social emotional and cultural content that is not found on standardized tests, something that is increasingly minimized as schools focus on career readiness. Many teachers want to engage in complicated conversations about social (in)justice in classrooms, but they are confronted by numerous impediments. Classrooms are unique spaces—there is clearly a power differential between teachers and students. For example, students cannot simply leave a conversation if it crosses the line into partisan political education. Teachers may challenge the ideas, values, and beliefs that students are learning at home, which creates an ethical dilemma for the teacher and the students who are being introduced to new ideas. There is a real fear of anger from parents and administrators when socio-political issues are discussed in classrooms, and it can be painful for students to give up old ways of thinking (hooks, 1994). Teachers ought to consider their motivation for bringing such topics into the classroom so they can answer hard

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questions about what they are trying to accomplish and how they will engage in the conversation without pushing their own beliefs on their students. Teachers also need to consider the difference between discussion and deliberation—both vital forms of discourse with very different goals. Discussion is a form of shared inquiry, with the goal of expressing and considering different points of view; deliberation aims to develop a plan of action to resolve a common problem (Parker, 2003). Both discussion and deliberation belong in conversations about social issues that are in the political realm. If the goal of complicated conversations, and social justice-­ oriented classrooms more broadly, is to determine how we should all live together, understanding opposing points of view and working toward mutually satisfying solutions to social problems is critical. To do this well, to encourage students to engage more fully in complicated conversations about social issues, including discussion and deliberation, regardless of their political beliefs, education in America needs to change. Teachers need to be empowered to create classroom communities in which there is a “shared commitment and a common good” that binds students together (hooks, 1994, p. 40). Schools, even elementary schools, must institute ways to engage young people in the hard work of living together harmoniously. It is possible to shift classroom and school culture to be inherently political (though not partisan). Young students can begin to make reasonable choices for which there is no wrong answer. Teachers might ask them what a class treat should be (bringing stuffed animals or board games in one day) or what book should be a class read aloud next. Children, even very young children, are able to consider issues of “what is fair” and can learn to develop solutions to common school problems. For example, they can work together to find solutions to authentic problems as they arise: the hallways are too noisy and students get distracted when classes pass through, it has become routine for class supplies to be put away in the wrong spots, or there are kids upset because they have been left out at recess. These early steps teach young students to listen to and consider multiple ideas for problem solving and help them accept that their own initial idea might not, in the end, be the best; they learn to be flexible and fair in their thinking. Older students—those in middle and high school—can work together to create and uphold rules and policies that address more substantial issues. They might, for example, consider working to address

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zero-tolerance policies or cheating. Neither of these issues is clear-cut and each deserves an in-depth discussion with multiple perspectives being shared and considered. Perhaps even more critically, students can also begin to determine consequences when bias, discrimination, and bullying do occur. Rather than formal democratic solutions—the creation of student council positions with one vote per council member, for example— individual classes and whole schools can engage in open conversations to build trust, form connections, and reinforce the value of community. Engaging in these open conversations is another skill that will need to be taught, especially when thinking about controversial, social, or socio-­ political issues. Families, sometimes, have differing opinions within them, but very often either steer clear of having complicated conversations in front of young children or share only one point of view. Children then miss opportunities to learn how to talk about complicated topics that have multiple “right” answers. It is time consuming, but critical, to teach young people to have these conversations. One powerful way to begin is to decide on a topic for discussion, something low stakes like “the best season is summer,” and give them sentence starters like “I agree with so-and-so because…” or “I disagree with so-and-so because…” Asking open-ended questions about socio-political issues (without bias) can happen once young people have become comfortable expressing their ideas. Finally, allowing these conversations to remain open, without coming to a conclusion as a class, is a vitally important “final” step. There cannot be any perceived winners or losers. The idea is to teach children to engage, to help them understand that social justice is for everyone and that everyone gets a say. Politics, Education, and Social Problems proceeds in the following way. Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5, one each dedicated to race, religion, social class, and gender, examine knotty, multidimensional, systemic problems in America and in American education. There are any number of thorny, endemic issues that could be examined and added to this book (e.g., disability or immigration), but the topics that are included here represent what the students who participated in this research spoke about. These chapters focus on the words, experiences, hopes, fears, and desires of students in ESD in order to bring these complex problems to life. The words and reflections from the undergraduates at PU, as well as my own as a

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course instructor, are included sporadically to give voice to what pre-­ service teachers think and worry about when confronted with issues of social (in)justice. Chapters 6 and 7 use PU classes that I taught as examples of complicated conversation in action, as well as what it means to create a “radical space of possibility” (hooks, 1994, p.  12) where students listen to and learn from one another. I engaged undergraduate students at PU in recurring conversations about sexual assault and gun violence, each a dominating topic in the national conversation when we spoke about them. Through recordings of the class sessions, detailed notes and personal reflections that I took after each class session, and student reflections, I offer a rich description of these complicated conversations. Finally, Chap. 8 offers broad suggestions for how to move education from where it is now to a more inclusive, democratic vision of education. With deep commitment from administrators, teachers, community members, families, and students, schools and classrooms can be reimagined into more equitable, inclusive, and honest spaces for all students.

CHAPTER 2

“White Privilege Is a Myth”: Tackling Race

Abstract  This chapter considers, first, what young white students think about race, as well as their assertions that “white privilege is a myth” and “people are reverse racist against white people.” White students in middle and high school generally share a perception that they are made to feel guilty about being white and that they are losing opportunities for the same reason. The ideas expressed by these students are compared to those of young African American students as they engage in an open and honest conversation about their experiences in a primarily white school district. Keywords  White privilege • African American students

Race ought not to be a political issue, nor a “social problem.” In America, however, there is very little more political or politicized than race. It is seen in inequitable incarceration rates, the lasting effects of separate but equal and redlining, and the legacy of Jim Crow (Kendi, 2017; Alexander, 2012; Rothstein, 2018). When white people are asked about race and racism in America, however, the answers tend to run toward all or some combination of “I’m not racist… I have a Black friend… I like rap music… white privilege is just a myth anyway; my life is hard and skin color has nothing to do with it… if Black people worked harder, they would be fine…” © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Rich, Politics, Education, and Social Problems, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76085-4_2

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Young people in America might begin with lessons about racial equality in the lower grades (I clearly remember my young children breaking brown eggs and white eggs to see that they are the same inside), but these ideas do not make a lasting impression. Instead, they are written off as “sweet” lessons that occur in February, the shortest month of the year and Black History Month. What young people miss when they are taught about Martin Luther King, Jr., Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks in February is an honest, accurate, and nuanced discussion of America’s dark history with race. This history informs current politics and policy and can be taught in school just like any other social justice issue using the framework of discussion and deliberation discussed in Chap. 1. * * * I often teach about race and racism in America as a part of the work I do with pre-service teachers. On one of the first days of the semester, I ask them to define “diversity.” They look at me with blank stares and I am met with silence. I wait, and eventually someone raises her hand (it’s always a young woman) and she whispers “skin color.” This is the answer I expect—it is the same every semester—and I always react the same way. I pause, consider, and say, “Skin color? What do you mean by that, exactly?” The embarrassed young woman, put on the spot, turns a deep shade of red and doesn’t respond. Someone eventually answers, also whispering, “like, black and white?” This goes on for a long while. Students whispering, me pushing. Eventually I have a board full of words like “skin color, black, white, brown, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, straight or gay, bi, trans, family life, ways to learn, shy or outgoing, …” The list is long, with lots of exclamation points and questions marks and words that are not “politically correct,” since I capture the language my students use. This activity lets students know, right off the bat, that in class we are going to grapple with issues that are going to make them uncomfortable. This is important because they are going to be teachers. It’s especially important because they are mostly young, white women. On average, I have 25 students in each class. Generally, but not always, at least 20 of them are white women. This mirrors the national numbers of white female teachers (Loewus, 2017). I then move to ask my undergraduates if America is systemically racist, and they are generally in consensus: it is not, they tell me. Those who

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dissent with this opinion are students of color. Sometimes, depending on the group, a student will assert that America has become racist, but racist against white people. Before long, even the students who rarely speak up in class are engaged in debate about what racism is, about the role of enslaved individuals in the creation of America, and about whether or not America is “more racist” to white people or people of color. These primarily white young people advocate for color-blindness when teaching and when interacting with others more generally. They mean this as a way to assert that they are post-racial and believe all people should be treated equally. Instead, though, what they imply is that they do not, or are unwilling to, acknowledge the hardships that people of color face on a regular basis in America. Fundamentally, racial stratification has implications on education, healthcare, job opportunities, and housing. To live in a color-blind world does not allow conversations about these discriminatory processes. It is often perceived as a virtue for white people to profess to be color-blind; refusing to notice color when color clearly matters prevents racism and racist behaviors from being noticed and interrogated (Lewis, 2001; Applebaum, 2010). In early twenty-first-century America, color does matter. We might want to argue that it should not, but it does. * * * Racism is a systemic societal problem in the United States (Kendi, 2017; Rothstein, 2018; Coates, 2015; Alexander, 2012). The very first step to redressing racism comes from admitting it (still) exists. Not only do white students struggle to admit that racism is alive and well in America but, over the course of this research, mostly white teachers, professors, and school administrators expressed their belief that “America is not a systemically racist country, but there may be some racist people.” Or that “saying that America is systemically racist is a liberal talking point, nothing else.” We can’t begin to change our system if we don’t acknowledge that it is deeply flawed. Once we admit there is a problem, we ought to take a hard look at the system of education that teaches and reinforces societal, institutionalized racism. Racism can act as a constant, overarching threat to students of color in schools (Tuitt & Carter, 2008). All communities are not created equal, and all students cannot be protected from the ongoing effects of systemic racism, which include stated policies and unstated—but institutionalized—practices (Bullard, 1999). Switching the lens through which

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racial microaggressions are viewed may help redress the systems in which they exist (Solorzano et al., 2000; Sue et al., 2007); if these microaggressions are thought of as small amounts of poison filtering through the air each time they occur, it is easy to see how a school environment might quickly become toxic. Racism doesn’t only live in the policies and practices of education; it also lives within the curriculum. Teaching about slavery seems like it might be a reasonable and agreed-upon starting point; in fact, 90 percent of teachers say they feel comfortable teaching about slavery in their classrooms (SPLC, 2018). However, in recent years, there have been a number of appalling stories about teaching slavery that have reached local, state, and even national news. For example, a fifth grader was “sold” at a mock slave auction in a New Jersey school (Mazza, 2017); Georgia students were encouraged to dress in Civil War-era costumes, and a white student dressed as a plantation owner told a ten-year-old Black student, “you are my slave” (Martin, 2017); a California teacher staged a classroom simulation of conditions on a slaver’s ship to provide a “unique learning experience” (Branigin, 2017); and a fourth grader checked with his mother when his English homework asked him to “give three ‘good’ reasons for slavery” (Lemoine, 2018). These are egregious examples of some of the ways that slavery is taught in American public schools today. Perhaps more troubling is how widespread the lack of knowledge about slavery is. In 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a ground-breaking study that reported results of their investigation into how slavery is taught (SPLC, 2018). The key findings of this study include: • Only eight percent of high school seniors surveyed can identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War. • Two-thirds of high school seniors don’t know that it took a constitutional amendment to formally end slavery. • Fewer than one in four students can correctly identify how provisions in the Constitution gave advantages to slaveholders. • Fifty-eight percent of teachers find their textbooks inadequate. • Of the 15 sets of state standards analyzed, none addresses how the ideology of white supremacy rose to justify the institution of slavery; most fail to lay out meaningful requirements for learning about slavery, about the lives of the millions of enslaved people, or about how their labor was essential to the American economy.

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• Forty percent of teachers believe their state offers insufficient support for teaching about slavery. After acknowledging that America has a problem confronting its racist history, teaching about racism and racist laws is the next crucial step. It is hard for students to understand two narratives about America almost simultaneously: the standard narrative about the greatness and goodness of the United States and a different narrative that the United States committed horrible crimes against enslaved and Indigenous peoples. What is important is to teach the full picture of America’s past, not just the version that makes us the “good guys.” Eddie Glaude, Jr. explains that “disremembering blots out horrible loss, but it also distorts who the characters take themselves to be… It is this sense of the word that strikes me at this particular moment. Disremembering is active forgetting” (2016, p. 47). In other words, “disremembering,” or ignoring, a part of our country’s history changes the entire story. Holding the different narratives of America’s past next to one another is complicated. For example, many of our first 16 presidents were slaveholders or sympathizers; I argue that young people should learn this. They can learn that Thomas Jefferson was an enslaver and that he was the brilliant mind behind the Declaration of Independence. People today are imperfect, and so were America’s Founding Fathers. This is not too much for young people to grapple with. The abolition of slavery might have legally freed enslaved peoples, but America’s racist system was not dismantled. The consequences of slavery and Jim Crow laws can be seen in current race relations in America. Public schools, despite desegregation, are still largely segregated. Neighborhoods are, as well, because of redlining and white flight (Rothstein, 2018). In the larger current national conversation, there are vitriolic debates, and there was a violent confrontation in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, about monuments to the Confederacy that were built in the 1950s and 1960s and whether or not they should be taken down. Black men are four times more likely to be incarcerated per capita than white men, perpetuating voter suppression and income inequality. Racism is very real today, and all of this is political. In the face of the examples above, it becomes easier for well-­intentioned white people to declare themselves “not racist.” However, we are all likely racist to differing degrees (Beech, 2020). We have absorbed cultural messages throughout our lives and, therefore, are likely to hold some

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stereotypes, biases, and forms of oppressive thinking (Beech, 2020). Directly challenging these implicit assumptions is another critical step in becoming actively anti-racist. * * * Having heard from white undergraduates about race and racism in America, I wanted to hear from African American students, as well, to better make sense of their experiences and perceptions. To do this, I conducted a focus group with African American students at EHS, which is an overwhelmingly white school. Our conversation was long, and it is one of the most honest conversations I’ve heard about what it is like to be Black in a predominately white school. They spoke about racism from teachers and students, the exhaustion that comes from “acting white,” and being expected not only to tolerate but also to participate in racist joke telling. One student, Patricia, began the focus group by looking around the room, grinning broadly, and stating, “This is the best it’s ever felt to be in a room in this school. I don’t even have to pretend!” This was met with nods, fist bumps, and silent snaps by the others in the group, and broke the ice, giving the students space to open up. Patricia’s comment was a natural entry point into asking the group to talk a bit about what it’s like for them, overall, to be students in a school where African Americans make up less than four percent of the population. They began by thinking back to their elementary school days, where—because of the number of elementary schools—they were even more isolated. Stacy shared that “in elementary school I was really the only Black person in my whole entire grade each year, so I didn’t really feel too welcome there.” Jen added on to this, saying that it was so awkward because I didn’t make friends and all that, and I just felt different. It was weird for me because we would take class or grade pictures and, really, you could easily point me out because I was the only Black person out of a crowd full of kids. That’s weird, you know?

Again, the group gave silent snaps to show agreement, with other students sharing similar experiences and perceptions. Jayden moved the conversation to middle and high school, explaining that it was better when the schools combined into one, saying, “it got better in middle school where the elementary schools were combined, and even better in high school

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because there are more kids here than in EMS. We still all stick out, but there are more of us. We can form our own group.” Middle and high school students form friend groups of young people who are, generally, similar to them in some way. While this is a positive occurrence, being a part of a group requires conformity; this means looking like the rest of the group, along with behaving like them and going along with the consensus (Pickhardt, 2017). The young people I spoke with addressed the idea that they fit in best with other Black students— because they looked alike, had similar experiences with racism, and “just got it”—even when they wanted to befriend people in other, primarily white, social groups. When young people are different from the “desirable” social norm, they become more common targets for bullying. Of the students who participated in the focus group, every single one talked about teasing and bullying they faced because of their race. The girls spoke about white classmates asking to touch their hair, or just touching it without permission. Patricia spoke about a white classmate exclaiming one day in a full class of students that “I love your ghetto braids! I wish I had hair your texture so I could get that too.” When she didn’t respond, or smile, or laugh, the white student added, “What? You’re mad at me now? I said I liked your braids…” Risa added that “we can’t get mad or we’re a living ‘angry black woman’ stereotype. So, when someone touches my hair and asks if I’m mad – and I am – I smile a big white smile and say no. It’s the only way to get on in this school.” Perhaps more disturbing are the “jokes” about absentee fathers. These stereotypes are commonplace, so much so that the students in the focus group had a name for the comments and jokes they heard: “the deadbeat dad jokes.” James explained this “genre” of joke to me, with the rest of the group chiming in to assent. He said, If you’re out and some white kid sees you, they ask you questions or make a joke like, ‘where’s your dad?’ And you gotta make it funny, like, ‘Oh yeah my dad died, but it’s cool’ and then they start laughing. And, really, you’re just like okay… that’s f’ed up… And then you laugh with ’em because you don’t want them to think that you’re really mad at them, even though sometimes you are kinda mad. You have to be calm with it.

Elijah confirmed this with a story that was almost exactly the same, and the rest of the group confirmed that they all had “deadbeat dad joke” experiences.

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Two other common experiences highlight the constant nature of the “jokes” that cross the line into racial bullying. First is the “lights off” joke, which Stacy explains is “if you’re in the dark the white kids will be like, ‘we can’t even see you,’ or they’ll switch the light switch off and be like, ‘where did you go?’ And you know they can see you.” Scott added, that’s what I’m saying, ’cause you know for a fact that they can see you… But we can’t say that if we’re all standing outside and it’s snowing; we can’t say that about them. That’s why I’m like, you know what [shaking his head] … Everybody laughs about it and we have to let it go.

This joke is so common place, they explained, that they can’t remember a time they hadn’t heard it. White students, as the Black participants in the focus group explained, like to “act Black.” They ask for an “n- pass,” meaning the “permission” to use the n- word freely. Jared and Elijah spoke about this, with the others in the room shaking their heads in agreement. Elijah: I get asked for an n- pass pretty much every day. I don’t understand, I don’t even use that word, I make it a point not to use it in front of people, I don’t know why people want to use it. I’d feel uncomfortable using it in front of people. Especially white kids. I don’t know why. Jared: I think it’s because people tell you not to say it, and so they’re like ‘I want to say it because you told me I can’t.’ Elijah: I don’t understand why white people want to say it so bad. Black people use it as a sign of power that white people took from us. I mean… those white kids have enough power! Jared: I think I’ve gotten to the point where I just tell people no. I really just… I feel like this is my breaking point. There is so much lowkey racist stuff that I have to put up with, but this is really outward racism. I am making it a point to be like you will not get a pass from me for that. At the end of the day I just refuse to let that happen near me. Elijah: Do the white kids get pissed? Jared: Ummhmm (affirmative). But I just can’t.

Even as some of the white students try to “act Black,” and make jokes at the expense of the Black students, the Black students exhaust themselves trying to act white. They feel that they need to act white in order to

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get along and succeed in school. The most obvious, and exhausting, way that they do this is by code switching. The Oxford English Dictionary defines code switching as “the practice of alternating between two or more languages or varieties of language in conversation.” This can relate to switching between a native and foreign language or moving back and forth between standard English and African American English. This code switching is part of a larger picture of African American students expressing a need to “act white” to fit in with their classmates. Acting white, as the group described it, includes speaking in standard English, not being too serious, and being overly friendly. A protracted conversation illuminates what these young people experience every day as they move through school while Black. Ali: You end up having two different groups of friends; you have those friends back at home, then you got those friends here. And you act very different around both groups. So, either you’re slipping up or remembering to act a certain way. You’re acting all white with one group and then you slip and act Black and they ask ‘you okay?’ Elijah: Yeah, I talk very different at school, the way I’m talking right now – very different than the way I talk at home. It’s like a switch, my mom described it as a switch because she said that she does it too, when she goes to work, she puts on a voice and an act and it’s not even something that you can really control, it’s just natural. Because if I would talk the way I talk at home when I’m in school then everyone would look at me different, especially after knowing me all these years. It’s just different. Jared: It’s sort of something that you’re like expected to do, and it’s like if you don’t, then I don’t know, it almost might just be worse. I know because my mom called me the other day when she was at work, but she just sounded so weird, but it’s because I know she doesn’t talk to me in the same way that she has to talk to people that she works with. And it’s the same way at school, it’s like if you don’t act in a certain way, you know either people are going to be weird about it, or they’ll make fun of you, or – Dang! The worst! – they’re going to try to do the same thing or talk the same way and then it’s just uncomfortable. Elijah: I think it’s probably only Black people that switch on and off in the way they talk. It’s just the way someone talks and

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how it pertains to race, I think this particular group, our group, experiences that the most. Risa: Yeah, yeah. Because I know I don’t really… I kind of assimilated every attribute that you could have to fit in with white people, and that’s important when you go to this school. I know a lot of people that are friendly with me because I’m so good at acting white. I’ve learned how to deal and how to make people accept me, maybe not for how I am at home but what I can act like. … It’s tiring. Stacy: Girl, yes! It makes me exhausted sometimes because I have certain groups in school that think I’m so serious, but when I get home it’s a totally different side of me. And like some of my friends here they’ll see that goofy side of me and they’ll be like, ‘are you okay?’ But I’m just scared to be myself in this school, so I’ll go back to being really serious in this school. Interviewer: Why do you feel scared to be yourself here? Stacy: I don’t know, ’cause people get judged a lot. I feel like one thing that I have learned over the years is, an example is, when I used to walk in the hallways and someone bumped into me, I would not say anything at all. In my head I would be like, ‘okay can you watch out.’ But now after being here for so many years, now when someone bumps into me, I say, ‘oh my god, I’m so sorry, are you okay?’ Even if it wasn’t my fault, that’s what I have to do in this school to be cool with people. Elijah: I was just gonna say ... I don’t know if I’m ‘scared’ to talk or be a certain way, but sometimes I talk like I do at home. Like, the other day, I think I said something like ‘they ain’t even have it’ by accident and then everybody was using it ironically. Jared: Yeah! I hate that because that happens to me all the time. If I slip up with words or say something stupid, the white kids’ll sit there and look at me and they’ll all start ­laughing, thinking I was joking but, really, I was just being my home self. It’s always complicated, it’s always tiring. Jen: I feel like I have to be extra friendly, like super friendly to teachers and other people, otherwise a lot of the time people are like, ‘You look really mean.’ And I’m like ‘I’m not, that’s just the way that my face is!’ Stacy: YES! Like someone would walk up to me and be like, ‘I’m afraid to talk to you,’ and I’m like why and they’re like, ‘oh,

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because you always sit there you looking so pissed.’ I mean, they think I’m angry but really I’m just thinking about the funniest stuff. Like I can be thinking about old memes and I can be sitting here, and they’re like, ‘what’s wrong with your face?’ Elijah: For the girls it’s not being an angry black woman, for me it’s being non-threatening. Being a man and Black and going to school with all white kids, just becoming non-­ threatening is my biggest thing. I wanna be known as not threatening because, obviously, the connotation is a big, hulking Black man. Especially playing sports, playing football, playing basketball you don’t want people to assume that that’s all you are. I’m a huge nerd really. But people wouldn’t know that if they just saw the side of me that’s just the football player. Jen: We just always have to be funny. Like, ‘Jen, we have a class together, you were so funny in my class.’ And that’s only because if we’re quiet and normal, they’ll think we’re weird. If we’re funny and act White, they’ll like us.

None of these students is trying to “pass as white”; they are trying to fit in, avoid bullying, and find a way to succeed in school. Their conclusion is that to be successful in school, they have to act white. To do this, they have learned to “speak like white kids,” laugh at things that are offensive, and smile and be friendly without letting their real feelings out. Elijah explained that the teachers don’t intervene, even when they see the bullying or teasing going on. The students in the focus group spoke about teachers singling them out to ask about Kwanzaa, forcing them to give a special presentation during Black History Month, and mistaking them for other Black kids in the school. They shared that Black girls with braids, for example, who otherwise look nothing alike, get confused for each other on a regular basis. Risa stated that she “used to think the teachers knew better, but they don’t. In this place, no one knows how to be around Black people. Doesn’t matter how old they are.” * * * Race and racism have received a good amount of time and attention in the national conversation since the 2016 presidential election. While many of these conversations have been fraught, the good news is that America is at

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a moment when there can be large-scale social change. There is momentum to consider socio-political issues in schools, including race and racism. It is reasonable to assume that, at times, problematic perspectives may remain in place; however, “given the opportunity, our students learn in ways that make sense to them, and often in ways that we cannot predict. Likewise, it is our students who will decide what to take and leave from our classes” (Simpson, 2006, p.  89). As teachers, we need to become more comfortable with not knowing the answers, nor the outcomes. Similar entrenched perspectives can be found when considering religion in public schools and religion in society more generally. Religion is less frequently discussed and debated than race, despite it becoming more politicized in recent years. This is examined in the next chapter.

CHAPTER 3

“There Was a Christmas Tree but No Christmas”: Religion in Public Schools

Abstract  This chapter is an analysis of what happened when pre-service teachers at a large public university were asked about religion. Young adults, studying to become teachers themselves, struggled to define the word “religion” and then went on to explain that growing up “they had Christmas trees but no religion” in their public school classrooms. As a result, they, like millions of students around the country, grew up in classrooms that perpetuate the idea that Christianity is the national religion, with Christmas being the national holiday. This chapter takes on the oft-­ stigmatized topic of religion, arguing that schools need to do a better job of helping young people learn about a variety of religions in order to take away the fear they report feeling when they talk about this subject. Keywords  Religion • Religious education • Christianity

Several years ago, when my older son was in second grade, he came home from school with a gift nestled in homemade wrapping paper, covered in snowflakes. In his kindergarten and first-grade years, he had also brought gifts home from school before winter break and had always been excited about them. This time, though, he handed it over saying, “you don’t even have to open it.” We assured him that we would love anything he made © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Rich, Politics, Education, and Social Problems, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76085-4_3

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and couldn’t wait to see it. “Not this,” he said. “We can’t do anything with this.” I opened the package and inside sat a Jewish star made of popsicle sticks hanging from a red ribbon. I asked him to tell me more about it, and he related the following story. His class was making reindeer Christmas tree ornaments. He told his teacher that he didn’t have a Christmas tree, that he was Jewish. She told him to leave the reindeer decorations off and make a “menorah ornament.” Even in second grade he knew this was a bad idea; he explained that the ornament was made of wood and if he put it on our menorah, where candles are lit, it would burn. His teacher told him to do it anyway. I asked him what he thought of it, and he told me that “it’s dumb. I hate it. I made something different from everyone in my class, and we just have to throw it away because it will burn our whole house down.” We ended up hanging it around a door knob in our kitchen, but it made him uncomfortable and so we removed it. More recently in our predominantly Christian school district, there have been stories traded between parents, children, and on the community Facebook page about middle and high school kids dropping pennies in the hallway in front of their Jewish classmates and calling Muslim students “terrorists.” Every once in a while, swastikas appear on bathroom walls, classroom desks, or the back of the seats of school busses. My son, the same one who was upset about the menorah ornament, now sees these things and is desensitized; he doesn’t tell anyone or complain, only informing me as a brief footnote to other parts of his day. It is something that has become a part of his experience with the world. This happens despite a focus in sixth-grade social studies on religions of the world, which is ostensibly meant to encourage open-mindedness about other faith traditions. In that class, students listen to various religious guest speakers, including leaders from Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. They learn to compare major religions with one another, careful to look for similarities as well as key differences. In our hyper-­ competitive district, though, a course like this encourages students to focus on acing the unit test rather than developing a deeper knowledge of the religions. Instead of leaving the unit of study with even a basic understanding of different religious beliefs, the students in these classes memorize the names of different holy books and places of worship, just to forget them once the test is complete.

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These anecdotes, as well as the results of interviews, observations, and discussions with students and teachers in East School District and at Public University, provide a picture of the current tenor and content of attitudes toward religion. They also illustrate why teaching about religion is another complicated but essential conversation that teachers need to cultivate in classrooms. As with race, religion needs to be approached in classrooms regularly, and with clear intended outcomes. The purposes of teaching about religion include helping students learn about different people and belief systems and the ways religion shapes their own community and communities around the world. It also offers an authentic opportunity to engage in complex conversations about the world in which they live and the belief systems that motivate and direct people’s lives (Rogers, 2011). Despite these widely accepted benefits of teaching about religion, religion is an increasingly difficult topic to engage with in schools, particularly because of the rhetoric coming from our highest politicians (Schwartz, 2019; Jenkins, 2020; Hughes, 2019). The implicit question raised when considering religion in public schools is: Why teach about religion in schools at all? The key word in that question is “about.” The First Amendment established a separation of church and state, but case law stipulates that religion is permissible within a secular educational program (James, 2015; Kunzman, 2006; Feinberg & Layton, 2014). Teaching about religion means that education must be focused on teaching students about the role of religion in historical, cultural, literary, and social contexts of the United States and other countries (James, 2015; Kunzman, 2006; Haynes, 2007, 2008). The goal of teaching about religion, both in my estimation and as set forth by the American educational system, should be to help students understand and respect diverse religions with the goal of contributing to a pluralistic society. This form of religious education should focus on broadly accepted tenets rather than personal beliefs of the teacher. A course of study about religion generally discusses religious freedom as a core element of democracy in the United States and the ways in which the US Constitution supports this idea (ADL.org). On the contrary, teaching religious beliefs, rather than about religion, is a different type of instruction and is not permitted in public schools. Established case law considers this to be religious indoctrination. Public school curricula are not permitted to be devotional and cannot promote one religion over another or inhibit the religious beliefs of students (ADL. org). There has always been conflict surrounding the separation of church

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and state, the boundaries between religious freedom and freedom of speech, and how these distinctions play out practically in classroom spaces (Kunzman, 2006; Feinberg & Layton, 2014; Wertheimer, 2015). Despite the separation of church and state, religion looms large in America. Moreover, religion has become increasingly conflated with politics, making these lines fuzzy. Religion featured prominently on the presidential ballot in the 2016 election. Then-candidate Trump promised to “bring back Christmas,” intimating that previous administrations only used the more inclusive “happy holidays.” He drew on now-classic tropes of white, Christian men being left behind in America and argued that using the language of “Merry Christmas” would bring them back into the fold (Norris, 2018; Glasser & Thrush, 2016). While a quick Google search shows that every administration wished the American people a Merry Christmas, the rhetoric of candidate Trump ignited a national debate (Boorstein & Bailey, 2017; Sampathkumar, 2017; Fabian, 2018). Trump’s choice of a religious fundamentalist, Mike Pence, as his running mate further fueled these religious conflicts (Green, 2018; Boorstein, 2016; Coppins, 2018; Prather, 2019). After candidate Trump became President Trump, the United States saw a rise in hate crimes directly related to religion, including those fueled by antisemitism and Islamophobia (Kunzelman & Galvan, 2019). This might seem like a new phenomenon, or, if not new, one increasingly part of the public conversation. Religious pluralism has always been a fundamental American value, but increasingly even discussing religion is a minefield, yet another cultural wedge issue seemingly more pervasive after the election of President Trump. The debate about religion in American schools and the larger American culture is due to a struggle that pits a perceived, maybe mythical, white Christian against the “other” of Judaism, Islam, and additional world religions. It is Christian privilege in the same way so many have white privilege (Joshi, 2020). This is what makes the conversations about religion so complex. * * * Debates about religion in schools are not new, though they have become sharper, more heated. Since 1925, the Supreme Court has been hearing cases about this, focused primarily on prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance, religion in the curriculum, student and teacher rights, and religious activities on school grounds (PewResearch). Even cases that were settled

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decades ago are misunderstood or ignored by many teachers; for example, it has been legal since 1943 for students to skip saying the Pledge of Allegiance (Lupu et  al., 2007), but students who participated in the research at East School District and Public University continue to report being ostracized for this practice. The debate about teaching creationism is another example of the ways in which religion remains entangled with public education. Though historically bills permitting the teaching of “creation science” in public schools have been struck down in court, they continue to appear across the United States (Sullivan, 2019). The number of bills proposed has increased under the Trump administration (Sullivan, 2019), as many senior administration officials, including Betsy DeVos and Mike Pence, have stated that public schools should be permitted to “teach the controversy” (Strauss, 2017). The Trump administration, with its support of “alternative facts,” a phrase coined by senior White House advisor Kellyanne Conway at the beginning of the Trump presidency (Swaine, 2017), has encouraged creationism in the classroom. As a result of the embrace of alternative facts, state legislatures and individual teachers have revitalized their efforts to push forward religious legislation that denies accepted evolutionary science (Sullivan, 2019). This conflation of church and state is unconstitutional, and it allows students to reject science in order to maintain preexisting religious beliefs. There are many other examples of debates about the place of religion in public schools (Pew Research Center, 2019; Cole, 2004; Bill of Rights Institute). One group that has been at the center of some of these deliberations is the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA), which has a thriving chapter in East High School. Founded in 1954, the FCA’s vision and mission is to convey religion “to and through the coach.” They seek “ministry first to coaches hearts, marriages and families. Then, when ready, we minister through coaches to their fellow coaches, teams and athlete leaders.” In various places on their website they discuss the goal of reaching every coach and student athlete (fca.org). The FCA encourages prayer once a month before school, as well as prayer before all sporting events. The FCA is an influential and wide-reaching organization. As of 2018, the organization had a staff of over 1700 ministry personnel in more than 450 US offices and 62 countries (fca.org). There have been lawsuits both against and on behalf of FCA, some claiming that the FCA is exclusionary, others that it ought to have more privilege than it does. Nevertheless, the result of these court cases has been that the FCA is constitutionally

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protected and permitted to receive “club status” in public schools across the country (ADF Legal). In 2018, student members of the FCA chapter at East High School engaged in a broad-ranging discussion about religion in schools and the role FCA plays in their life. Seventeen students, freshmen through seniors, piled into a school conference room for our conversation. The ten young men who walked into the room were all wearing sweatpants and sports hoodies, untied high tops or soccer sneakers; the young women had on leggings, Ugg boots, and short sweaters, hair pulled up into neat ponytails. Of the 17 students, 14 were wearing a cross on a piece of jewelry, either a necklace, bracelet, or ring. Donuts and bottles of water were on the conference table, and the young men eagerly grabbed the donuts, jockeying for the “best” flavors. The young women took water, all passing on the donuts. The students were polite with me, saying hello and chatting about the snow falling outside. Despite their good manners, the conversation was, on the whole, shockingly homophobic, antisemitic, and Islamophobic. Nevertheless, this represented a common opinion encountered during my time in East School District. The conversation began with one young man, Billy, a junior in high school, stating that “high school is messed up. All of a sudden I am uncomfortable in school because all of the things I think, other normal kids think, are off limits.” When pushed to explain what he meant, he said, like, I like to pray. Me and the other kids I hang around with pray at the flagpole once a month. I think it’s messed up that the teachers don’t do it, too. I also believe in science and religion, I’m not a religious freak or anything, I believe in science, too. So, this preferred pronoun stuff? It’s against what God intended, but it’s also not scientifically real. I’m not calling a dude ‘she’ no matter how he looks. I’m uncomfortable with that. No one cares.

A young woman in the group, Samantha, spoke quietly and said, “I don’t care what anyone else believes or does with their lives. But I don’t have to accept it.” She asked the group if it was just her who feels “outnumbered with all the kids who don’t accept Jesus? The Muslim kids, but also even the Jews? And the people who don’t believe in God at all? I don’t know which is worse.” She was far from alone, with most of the other students echoing her views.

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The students in this FCA chapter spoke about their experiences learning about religion in school, suggesting that Christianity was the least explored. They employed language very similar to what is heard in right-­ leaning media, about the sidelining and exclusion of white, Christian men (Joshi, 2020). Current rhetoric asserts that white men have fewer opportunities for advancement than “the minorities.” Nate, a sophomore, lamented what he called “reverse discrimination.” He said that earlier in the year they had learned about world religions as a part of their world history class. They studied excerpts, he said, of the Koran and Torah but barely talked about the Christian Bible. His teacher explained that she wanted everyone to feel comfortable in learning about different religions, so no question was off limits. When he asked why he needed to learn about religions that go against his religious beliefs and “breed terrorists,” his teacher requested he leave the classroom. Rather than reflecting on whether or not he had done anything wrong, he explained that the teacher was only inclusive of “the kids who need coddling, all the brown kids, the Jews.” It was striking how confident he was, that he felt emboldened to say this in his classroom, and repeated it to me, asserting that he was the wronged party. And, to some degree, I agree with him. Although it may be easy to disagree with what he said, to see it as offensive and way out of line, his expulsion from the classroom shut down exactly the sort of hard conversation that needs to be embraced. This conversation is evidence of the challenges that teachers face when teaching about religion in the classroom. I was not in the classroom when Nate told his teacher that “other religions breed terrorists,” but it’s not a stretch to imagine what this teacher was feeling. It is easy to understand an educator’s visceral reaction, and a deep reluctance to allow these words to go unchecked or unpunished, at the same time that there might be equal fear to tackle such a difficult statement head on. To explore this problematic interchange, I developed a texting relationship with the teacher in question, Kate, and asked her about the incident. Kate is a veteran teacher who has been in the classroom for 27 years. She teaches world history, an elective on the Holocaust, and, on occasion, US history courses. There is an intensity about her, a directness that came through in her text messages. I asked her about the unit she was teaching and what happened with Nate. She shared,

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it was still in the early days of the unit. I teach it every year and haven’t had issues. I had noticed that our students were becoming more polarized, but I still didn’t expect this. I always tell students that they can ask questions. When Nate said that he didn’t want to study religions that bred terrorists I was shocked. I asked him to leave.

I asked her what she thought of her decision in hindsight, if she stood by what she did. She wrote, “I wish I was calm enough to talk with him and the class about his statement. But I wasn’t. I had Muslim kids in my class and I knew Nate was referencing them. I wanted them to feel safe.” Balancing between difficult, potentially offensive conversations and the safety of students is a critical touchpoint for these sorts of discussions (Whitten, 2018; Weale, 2018). As Kate acknowledged, there are ways that she might have handled this differently, and more effectively. Certainly, this was not the first time her Muslim students had been exposed to Islamophobia. They need tools in order to counter this themselves, both in class and in the world outside school walls. In an alternate scenario, Kate would have taken a deep breath and said something like, “can you be specific about what you are saying? Give us your evidence for this.” Nate might have referenced the attacks of September 11 or nodded toward “Radical Islamic Terrorists,” which would have enabled push back from Kate and the other students. Ground rules for the classroom as a learning community might have been set up to enable the discussion of an offensive comment, focusing on the difference between fact and opinion. The ground rules would serve as useful tools for students in the “real world,” where they are bound to encounter offensive statements over the course of their lives. These include common-sense ideas for complicated conversations: stating points of agreement and disagreement with specificity and reasons, asking for sources for assertions, and articulating facts versus opinions. Dismissing a student from a complicated conversation gives undue weight to the offending ideas and allows students off the hook. No one needs to engage with the issue because the conversation is ended. If schools are meant to encourage growth and challenge complex socio-political and cultural ideas and opinions, we need to both engage and challenge students. More extended conversations, all via text, revealed that this incident bothered Kate and that she questioned her actions. She texted me several weeks later, just to let me know that she was wondering if we could “sit down together and talk about what to do differently.” “I don’t know how

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to teach about religion well right now. Everyone is so angry,” she said. She planned to find resources, including books, documentaries, and podcasts, to learn from over the summer in order to revamp her teaching the following school year. She did not receive district support for this but was going to do this work for herself, and her students. * * * It is enormously challenging to think about engaging students who are relatively young and so vitriolic in conversations about religion. I have faced similar challenges in teaching about religion in my undergraduate courses. This is because earlier in my career I did not see teaching about religion to be a complicated conversation and went about it without a structure in place to help students think critically. The building blocks were in place for a good discussion—strong community, time to talk, and support for openness and risk-taking. What was missing, though, was a structure for this sort of conversation: a clear beginning, middle, and end to the discussion. What follows is an example of a fairly typical classroom conversation about religion. In the early days of the 2016 presidential campaign, the Introduction to Education class I was teaching at Public University discussed religion. This class particularly focused on issues of social justice, inclusive practices, and the relationship between schools and communities. During one class session, the students worked with a partner to define the word “religion” without using any technology to help them. They were stumped. One student suggested that religion was a set of beliefs held by a group, while another said that it was a set of beliefs held by an individual. A third felt that it was “beliefs about God,” and a fourth argued that it was what you believe about death. “But – no! It’s not death, but afterlife,” said another. And yet another said it’s not only what you believe but what you don’t believe. And finally, a quiet voice shared that she had never spoken about this in a class before, was this okay? The goal was to help students feel comfortable sharing their religious ideas and experiences with one another, though I had some hesitancy about how to do this well. Other conversations had indicated that the class held one student who was atheist, one who was Fundamentalist Christian, and one who was Muslim, but beyond that, the religions of the students were unclear. During the next class, the students wrote about the ways in which their own religion was mirrored or absent from their school

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experience and then reflected upon ways in which religion more broadly was found in schools. After they wrote independently, they shared with a partner, then we spoke as a class. The very first comment was, “I’m Christian. Just, you know, Christian. Like, regular Catholic. There was always a Christmas tree up in my classroom and stuff, but there was never Christmas, or any real religion, in my schools or anything.” Hands began raising after this, as heads nodded in agreement. Student after student confirmed this experience: they were “regular Christian” and religion was never visible in their schools. Christmas trees were up, however, in the month of December, and they usually colored pictures of the Easter bunny in April, decorated eggs, and sometimes, “when they were lucky,” had Easter egg hunts in school or in their classes. They assured me and their classmates that their teachers never preached and “took the religion out of the holidays.” I decided to push on the issue of how students of other religions might feel in a classroom with a Christmas tree, asking, “how do you imagine a student of another religion might feel if they were in a classroom with a Christmas tree?” The first student who spoke pushed back on the question, saying that even though there might have been a Christmas tree, there wasn’t Christmas, and it didn’t mean they talked about the religion behind it. As heads nodded in agreement, I asked how they might feel if they came into a room with a large menorah or crescent moon and no Christmas tree, even if no one spoke about Chanukah or Eid. Hands went up immediately. “There were only one or two Jewish kids in my school and no Muslims, and they never minded.” “Christianity is the main religion in this country, so it, you know, it makes sense.” These comments reflected the general tenor of the students’ remarks. I shared the story of my son and the menorah ornament that he made in second grade and asked the class how they imagined this made my son feel and how they might have handled this differently as a teacher. Tentatively, a candidate offered that my son must have felt “badly,” and another said that he “maybe felt a little bit left out.” The room was quiet, until Ahmed said, “they should have just done a project. Not for Christmas or Chanukah, just… for winter.” Tina asked how many Jewish children were in his class, and I told her that my son was one of two, but there were also Muslim and Hindu students in his class who didn’t celebrate Christmas. Tina said that there wasn’t a project that would make everyone feel satisfied, and if Christmas was the holiday most students celebrated, why not make a fun project for

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the majority? I asked if anyone had a response to Tina, and the room was silent, with some heads nodding in agreement. At this point, I needed a moment to think about how to proceed, and I wanted to offer perspectives that were diverse. I stopped the conversation to have the students look at several articles relevant to the class. I split the class into four groups and shared news stories about a contested yoga class in an elementary school, an after-school Satan club, a Muslim family who wanted to opt out of music class, and an overview of the state of religion in public schools (Brennan, 2016; Stewart, 2016; Mehta, 2016; Pew Research Center, 2014). A conversation led by the “yoga in schools” group was illustrative of how students thought on the whole. They explained that some parents felt that saying “Namaste” and placing hands in a prayer position over your heart was religious. This, in particular, was the aspect of the practice that parents wanted omitted, rather than the stretching and the exercise that often goes along with a yoga practice. Most students dismissed this out of hand, commenting almost immediately, as one did, that “it’s really silly – it’s not religious at all – but, you know. It’s fine. If parents don’t want their kids to put their hands over their hearts during yoga, it’s really not the biggest deal.” Ahmed, one of the discussion leaders for this current event, then raised the following question: “So, if it’s okay to refrain from putting your hands over your heart during yoga, is it also okay to not put your hand over your heart during the Pledge? When we say ‘one nation under God?’ Or how about kneeling during the national anthem if you are protesting something? Is that different?” The conversation that took place from this point is excerpted below. It shows the ways in which students are unable or unwilling to grapple with the nature of religion in the public sphere. Lisa: Of course you put your hand on your heart during the pledge. It has nothing to do with religion. It’s patriotic. Tina: I agree with Lisa. In public schools in America, we should be teaching students to be patriotic. That’s all the pledge is. And the national anthem. Like, these football players who won’t stand during the national anthem. They’re just setting a bad example for kids. Taylor: Well, I never wanted to stand or put my hand on my heart during the pledge, but was told that if I didn’t, I would be suspended. So I did. Then, even when I stood and kept my hand on my

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heart, I didn’t say “under God” during the pledge, and I also had a teacher threaten to suspend me. She couldn’t, but I was singled out, and my classmates knew I didn’t say “under God,” and it really wasn’t their business. It had nothing to do with being patriotic or not patriotic. It had to do with my own personal beliefs. Cindy: I guess… well… if I were a teacher, I would have all my students stand, and put their hands on their hearts, and say the whole pledge. Because, Taylor, I get what you are saying or whatever, but the pledge is about our country and how it was created. It’s not really about God and religion and stuff. And I want students in my class who are good citizens and who respect the flag and our soldiers and, even God, if that’s what’s patriotic.

Much of the conversation excerpted here talks about patriotism as a goal of public education, ignoring the religious reference in the Pledge. The concept of patriotism remained unexplored in my class, to my regret. Issues about religion and patriotism, and separation of church and state, all would have been worthy to discuss and deliberate about (Joshi, 2020). Students engaged in the conversation about religion but were unable to come to a conclusion that was satisfying, for them or for me. The students wanted some “right answer,” while I wanted to see evidence of growth, or a willingness to be open-minded, even if minds weren’t, ultimately, changed. While unsatisfying, this is often the result of a complicated conversation; neither side is satisfied, but everyone is listened to and heard by peers with different ideas. Moving forward that semester, I worked to include teaching about religion into my class in more purposeful ways. Some students asked about the Jewish High Holidays, saying they never knew what they were but “loved the day off from school.” While the lack of knowledge felt shocking, I was pleased that they were able to ask the question. As time went on in our class, students kept going back to religion, asking questions during class time and in papers, challenging each other, themselves, and me. While we did not intentionally devote more class time to focused discussions about religion, their interest was piqued, and they became aware of all they did not know. They brought up current events that were about religion in public schools and consistently raised the issue of what they might do about all holidays, including more secular holidays like Thanksgiving. Despite their willingness to engage in these conversations, they always came back to a place of comfort for them: a Christmas

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tree doesn’t mean Christmas, and Christianity is the “mainstream” religion in America, which makes it appropriate for classrooms. At the conclusion of our discussions about religion, the majority of students expressed an unwillingness to bend on their stance that religion is absent in public education, despite being shown evidence to the contrary; I see this as a failure of this class. I did not want to change the views of students, but I did hope that they would consider multiple perspectives. Students asked questions that presented as curious, genuine, and open-­ minded, but even when given alternate points of view and asked to consider different ideas, they remained rigid in their thinking and unable to reframe their points of reference. I attribute this to my own teaching, a lack of structure to the conversation, and the actuality that no facts were introduced into the discussion—everyone was able to voice his or her opinion, and all were given equal discussion time. One student, McKenzie, shared what she called her “ultimate conclusion” when it came to considering religion and public education in a reflection paper. She wrote, the only time to talk about religion in a classroom is when an act of terrorism occurs, so that students know what religion the terrorists are. Otherwise, it’s too personal and no one’s business. As a teacher, I don’t even need to know the religions of my students. It’s just not something that ever needs to come up in a classroom, so I don’t need to know. We’ve talked about reasons why this would be different, but, at the end of the day, Christian is the main religion in America and if I am going to put anything up in my classroom to reflect a religion, it would just be cute Christmas or Easter stuff, to make most students feel comfortable.

I wish I could say that students’ views changed over time to become more open-minded and inclusive that semester, but they did not to any great extent. I continued to think about this class over time, considering what left me, and the students, feeling unsettled. * * * I began to wonder if conversations about religion could be handled differently. I did not want to indoctrinate students to think in specific ways but to move them to be more open-minded about religions outside of their own, to let go of some of the dangerous stereotypes they held. In other words, I did not want to push my own beliefs on students, nor any other

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set of beliefs about religion; instead, my goal was to help them ask questions and learn about new faith traditions. In each subsequent semester, six of them, I adopted a different approach. I decided to view teaching about religion as a controversial subject (Hess & McAvoy, 2015; Hess, 2009; Noddings & Brooks, 2017). This meant adopting a structure for this complicated conversation, rather than starting with a big question and facilitating open-ended discussion. I conducted the discussion in three parts, like a story with a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning is a framing of the question; it sets the parameters. The middle has two parts, discussion—a genuine engagement in shared inquiry—and deliberation—a back and forth about what the topic would look like in our shared community (Hess, 2009). Finally, the end of the conversation about controversial issues highlights agreed-upon conclusions, when possible, and articulates what might be revisited. For example, I have had classes that discussed the law that separates church and state and deliberated around what this looks like in good practice. Discussion and deliberation have been critical in developing a more successful approach, measured by observation and student reflection, with students being able to engage in a complicated conversation in a less emotional way. In one class that I teach focusing on Holocaust education, students engaged in a vigorous debate about antisemitism and the relationship between Israel and Palestine. This conversation came up organically one day when we were talking about antisemitism as part of our study of the Holocaust. A student raised his hand and asked if it is “really antisemitic to support Palestine?” I asked students what they thought, and the conversation began to become heated. We stepped back and discussed, then deliberated. The discussion focused on facts and was a shared inquiry where everyone was able to admit what they didn’t know. This was not a conversation I had planned for, so I made sense of what I could find from a quick Google search, talking out loud to my students about how I was looking for sources that showed different points of view. We watched several videos on this issue and read quick synopses of the situation, trying to find sources that were balanced (Ehrenfeld, 2012; Vox.com). The question we discussed was, “what is the situation faced by the Israelis? The Palestinians?” A sub-question of that was, “how does each group consider the founding of the state of Israel?” We spoke about how to uncover facts when so much of what we were considering was laden with emotional opinions and used examples from current events in America to illustrate this point. By sticking to the facts, by an insistence on this, our discussion

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was focused and unemotional. It was not contentious but truly a shared mission of using facts to construct agreed-upon understanding. Students were asked to use the new facts they had learned to support their opinion and to think about how those with opposing views might argue their own points. This was our deliberation, which was different from the shared experience of discussion. I asked each student in my class to write before deliberation in answer to the question we were struggling with: is it antisemitic to support Palestine? One Jewish student opened our discussion by saying that Israel was a symbol of Jewish strength, that she had traveled there on three occasions, and that she has always learned that it was rightfully the land of the Jewish people. She used facts from our articles, mostly cherry-picking facts that aligned with her views. This is a good example of confirmation bias, and the ways that students, like all of us, seek out sources that confirm their existing beliefs rather than challenge them. The next student who spoke said that he “supports Israel and also thinks Israel is committing crimes against Palestinian people.” This elicited more conversation, as he cut right to the heart of things. I continued to push students to go back to their sources, to defend their thinking, to think of how people “on the other side” might argue the same point. In the end, the class did not come to a place of agreement but spoke about a hot-button issue with measured emotion and based their deliberation on facts. This was a different experience than the Introduction to Education students and how they spoke about religion in the classroom because of the structure, the defined beginning, middle, and end, the creation of a shared goal. In the past, I had felt confident in my ability to facilitate an open-ended discussion, even one that was about a potentially contentious topic; as public discourse has become more fraught, my teaching has had to become more deliberate, more systematic. Ultimately, this was more successful, more satisfying, primarily because of the middle—the process of discussion and deliberation we went through. It is not only teaching about religion that is complex; simply talking about religion can also be a challenge. Outside of schools, religion is equally polarizing. On one end of the spectrum there are the highly religious; at the other end there are avowed secularists; the religious middle is shrinking (Campbell & Putnam, 2010). Despite this, America remains a religiously diverse country, divided more by public vitriol than individual differences (Campbell & Putnam, 2010). As young people learn to listen,

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understand, and respect religions that are different from their own, they become better able to participate fully in society outside of school. Religion is an under-discussed topic within public schools, and largely within society. However, social class is considered even less frequently. Talking about this taboo subject is explored in the next chapter, along with the results of several focus groups at East Middle and High Schools.

CHAPTER 4

“I Don’t Speak Poor”: Uncovering Social Class

Abstract  This chapter uncovers what young people know and understand about social class, and how it affects those who struggle with financial hardship in an affluent school district. Drawing heavily on case studies from middle and high school, this chapter shares what young people say about social class, the pressures that tie money in with popularity, and the ways in which schools stigmatize, and support, those who struggle financially. Keywords  Social class • Socioeconomic status

In one focus group at East Middle School, I asked the students directly what makes a person popular, as popularity came up as an “issue” in every conversation with the middle school students. They noted some things I was expecting; to be popular, one had to be athletic, good looking, skinny or muscular, and straight. They also noted that all popular kids need to “be rich.” I asked the students to say more about the connection between wealth and popularity. They explained that being popular means fitting in, and fitting in means having the same things as everyone else. In a district like East School District (ESD), to be popular is to own the best, newest, and most expensive technology, clothing, even water bottles. As Jake explained, “one day I was walking down the hallway with my earbuds in, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Rich, Politics, Education, and Social Problems, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76085-4_4

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going to my locker when I first got to school. I said hi to someone I knew and he pulled my earbud out of my ear and said ‘What? I couldn’t hear you. I don’t speak poor.’ He said it because I had earbuds and not Air Pods.” I asked the other students in the room if that was common, and they said that it was—they had all seen it, heard it, or said it. Jasmine admitted to saying “I don’t speak poor” when she was trying to fit in and knew when she said it that she was “being really mean. It just didn’t matter, I did it anyway, because if I didn’t say it, my friends would think I’m weird, you know?” In the middle school, more than anything else, money was associated with popularity. The students who shared their thinking in the focus group did not talk about the hardships young people whose families struggle financially might face beyond “being cool.” They were able to acknowledge and articulate where they all stood in the hierarchy of popularity, and they understood that the money, or the lack thereof, that their families had played a role in this. Pushing the conversation by asking them to think about if this was fair, or what they might do to shift the dynamic, wasn’t productive; as middle school students, they are less likely to challenge the status quo. * * * Class is largely ignored in the national conversation about social issues. The social critic and author Peter Sacks explains, Most Americans, in fact, are relatively blind to class, having faith in the upward mobility implicit in a supposedly classless society. Politicians can’t abide raising the class question in public because it’s a taboo subject. Besides, they’re far more electable if they can view their constituencies through the lens of gender, age, race, red state or blue state, or other such commonly discussed and socially accepted identities. Class, however, is the nation’s mad aunt, a troubling part of our past safely stashed away in the historical archives. (2007, p. 289)

It is fair to say that accumulating wealth is, or part of, the American dream. The concept of “movin’ on up,” the phrase made popular in the theme song of the 1970s sitcom The Jeffersons, has become a national obsession, with individuals in each social class wanting more. The “up” individuals

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are trying to attain, though, means different things to different people. It might mean attaining more education, more wealth, more social status, or some combination of all three. The question becomes, for the purposes of this book, how to talk about social class and social mobility in schools in order to help young people recognize the importance of social class and think critically about its implications for society. One of the richest sources of data about education comes from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS). A key report written from the ECLS, Inequalities at the Starting Gate (Garcia, 2015), uses data from the subset of students who were entering kindergarten in 2010. This study found that the most socioeconomically disadvantaged children are substantially behind their high-­ income peers in both reading and math skills and that skill levels rise along with social class. In plain terms, poor children face substantial and serious obstacles to academic success in school. This research makes clear that children in the highest socioeconomic group have reading and math scores that are significantly higher than scores of their peers in the lowest socioeconomic group. Since the middle of the twentieth century, America has been increasingly segregated by socioeconomic status, with the proportion of the Americans living in the middle class declining since 1970 (Massey et al., 2003; Bischoff & Reardon, 2013). This segregation of social classes causes problems. Some of these problems are related to the schools themselves because of the financial structure of public schools—taxes pay for schools, so lower income areas bring in fewer funds for public schools. Nationally, high-poverty districts spend almost 16 percent less per student than low-poverty districts do (U.S. Department of Education, 2015). A 20 percent increase in per-pupil spending a year for poor children can lead to an additional year of completed education, 25 percent higher earnings, and a 20-percentage point reduction in the incidence of poverty in adulthood (Semuels, 2016). High-poverty schools have less experienced teachers and lower teacher salaries, are less likely to have critical math, science, and advanced coursework, spend less per student on instructors and instructional materials with state and local dollars, and have fewer advanced courses (Duncombe, 2017). As a result, schools that serve poorer kids generally offer lower quality education. Beyond this, though, is the culture that is often fostered in low-income schools. For example, since children of low-income parents typically are less prepared for high school and college, low-income kids can benefit from going to school with kids whose

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parents are well educated and savvy about the college process (Isenberg, 2017), even as social problems for these young people might arise, as the opening of this chapter suggests. Class is, unsurprisingly, an intersectional issue. Anthony Abraham Jack, a professor of Education at Harvard, eloquently explains that Neighborhoods are more than a collection of homes and shops, more than uneven sidewalks or winding roads. Some communities protect us from hurt, harm and danger. Others provide no respite at all. This process is not random but the consequence of historical patterns of exclusion and racism. Life in privileged communities means that children traverse safer streets, have access to good schools and interact with neighbors who can supply more than the proverbial cup of sugar. Life in distressed communities can mean learning to distinguish between firecrackers and gunshots. (2019)

Research shows that socioeconomic inequality so disproportionately affects African American children that data around academic behaviors, such as verbal skills, cannot be reliably compared to white and LatinX children (Sampson et al., 2008). Poverty impacts young people of all races and backgrounds, but children of color face lasting consequences in the largest numbers (Jack, 2020). It is hard to argue against the idea that this is troubling data. The system of public education in America finds itself in a Catch-22 situation: to change the dramatic differences in social class, the education system needs to change; to change the inequitable education system, the social class system needs to change. Opening conversations about the implications of class is, therefore, critical in our schools. * * * One day as I was walking down the hall of East High School (EHS), a young woman came up to me. It was during a class period, and she found me in the hallway by happenstance. She told me that she heard that I was talking to different student groups at the school and wanted to know if I could talk to her and her friends. Her friends, she told me, were other kids who lived in the low-income housing in the district, and they felt that they had “really different experiences than other kids who live here.” The following week I sat down with a group assembled by the young woman, Hannah.

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I began by asking them to tell me a bit about their lives outside of school. I knew there was wealth inequality in ESD, and the middle school students had already talked about the relationship between money and popularity. I didn’t have a good grasp, however, on how these young people perceived their circumstances. They described food insecurity, lack of medical insurance, and time after school spent taking care of younger siblings when their parent(s) were at work. Hannah shared that she often has to “hand wash my clothes because we don’t have money for the machines. I know I wear the same stuff all the time, but I don’t want it to smell. I do the same with my little sisters’ clothes.” Adam added that one of his siblings had appendicitis and couldn’t have surgery so took antibiotics instead; now his brother has near-constant anxiety that his appendix will burst because the treatment he received wasn’t enough. Josie said, in a joking tone, “I’m a college stereotype, eating Ramen for all my meals, but I’ll never have enough money to go to college!” The students spoke of living in crowded spaces, not having consistent access to WiFi, rationing hot water, and not having the support they needed to get themselves and their siblings through school successfully. It was hard to reconcile this with the overall wealth of the district, with so many having so much. As I listened to the group speak about the ways in which they felt different from the majority in ESD, it became clear to me why Hannah had asked if I would speak with her and some of the kids who live in her community. After I asked them about their day-to-day lives, I opened space for them to share whatever was on their mind. They began by talking about the assumptions that teachers make. Much like other groups of students when they spoke about social issues they face, the kids from low-income families wanted their teachers to better understand their lived experiences without singling them out or making them feel uncomfortable. Hannah: You feel bad when you’re poor in ESD, because you’re like ‘I’m not the norm, I’m below the norm.’ And even the teachers do say, and I’m paraphrasing here but this is what a teacher said, ‘Yeah, I know none of you know what being on state insurance is like.’ Which I had at the time. I don’t even have insurance now. Because they’re all so wealthy and well off, that they’ll never have to experience that, hopefully. Not right now at least.

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Josie: Teachers assume that people have less problems, because they have money. And then they assume that every single kid who lives here has money. And no problems. It doesn’t make sense. Scott: I feel like the teachers think that the worst thing that’s going to happen to a student in the school, is that their parents are going to get divorced, or their dog’s going to die. Because it’s like we go to EHS, so we all have money, so we can just buy anything we want.

The low-income students perceive their teachers as unaware, or unsympathetic, to the students who live in their community. Adam said, “they know all the kids from our neighborhood go to this school. They know it’s all low-income housing, or subsidized housing. They can’t connect the dots, you know? Or they don’t even bother to try.” Admitting that ESD isn’t all bad, though, the students did talk about support from the district and individual teachers for things like lunch and library fines. Bran: Yeah, there’s a lot of lunch support, like you can get free lunches if you meet certain criteria, you don’t have to pay every day, which is really great, I think. And a lot of the teachers here, just personally, are really nice, and they will offer to buy you lunch if you don’t have the money for it. Rochelle: I don’t know how it could be fixed, where the poor kids get help from the school or whatever. Maybe if the teachers looked for students that they know, I guess people that do the thing that Bran said, the lunch support, and maybe talk to them about it. I don’t know, that’s the only way, I can think. Adam: Yeah, that’s a good idea, because I know there was something two years ago that happened, where churches gave my family, gave all the... probably all the students, I would guess, on free and reduced lunches, they gave them gift cards and stuff, and that was really nice. But it shows that they know all the kids that are on free and reduced lunches, they do keep records of that. It’s not, like, a hard to find thing.

In this portion of the conversation, the students were talking about the “essential” support they receive from the district and the broader community. They also acknowledged that there is a downside to receiving this sort of financial help.

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Josie: But I feel like also, let’s say the school does help you out with money for other stuff, like sports or anything, I feel like people are going to find out and you’re going to feel kind of ashamed about it, and the normal students will find out about it somehow. I don’t know, so I feel like that’s also kind of hard. Rochelle: Well I feel like you would just feel super ashamed. I don’t know. Like having everybody, I feel like, people would start looking at us differently maybe, like certain people. Or feeling bad for us, which is not… we don’t need people looking down at us. Josie: Like, for example, we want to just play sports, and not have people feel bad for us ’cause we can’t get, like, soccer cleats or whatever you need. Scott: Yeah. I think it definitely depends on the person, because you could either be... you could probably be really grateful for it, and also kind of ashamed of it in the same thing, but I don’t know, I don’t really know if there’s anything you could do to stop that, because people are just... Well, except for talking about it, and being poor, or not as financially stable as everyone else is, is not a bad thing, and not something to be ashamed of, and you shouldn’t be ashamed of other people for that.

There is a lot to unpack here. There is the shame that these students express about their socioeconomic status, even as they recognize that they should not be ashamed, and that other students shouldn’t shame them for circumstances out of their control. Josie, also, talked about the “normal kids” who might find out if she, or a member of her community, received financial support. It’s the “normal kids” verbiage that is especially troubling—she is putting herself, and all of the low-income students, outside of what is “normal.” I asked the group what “non-essential” things they struggle with that are not supported by the school, district, or community. Before answering, Hannah took me to task for my word choice. She told me that “the stuff I want to talk about now, like sports and prom and stuff, is essential. It’s not, like, food. But it’s a part of normal growing up, at least in ESD, and we don’t get to do it. We get left out. So, I think it’s essential.” She was right. Food and prom tickets aren’t equivalent, but in a wealthy district it does make the low-income students feel “abnormal” to be left out of school events because they can’t afford a ticket or appropriate clothing. The group went on to talk about the two areas Hannah brought up,

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school dances and sports, and how they wish they had financial support in some way for these activities. Hannah: I feel like the school, because they think that everybody here has so much money, like they kind of try to sell things more, or make things higher, like prom tickets, formal tickets, welcome back dance tickets. I don’t know, like stuff like that. Josie: I can get some of those things, the poor kids can, if you have a friend who buys it for you. That’s what my friend offered to do, because I can’t afford a prom ticket. Adam: I mean, I know there’s stuff built in for lunches and stuff, and, like, I think sometimes with library fines you can have help, but not with dances. But I feel like that’s really sad, because imagine a kid wanting to go to a dance or something, and then their parents just lost their jobs, and they can’t go. I don’t know. Bran: Yeah, I feel like if people are on reduced or whatever lunches, how are they really going to be able to afford a prom ticket, or two, if you want to bring someone? Rochelle: Exactly. Yeah, you can go, but if you’re poor especially, and you don’t have any good clothes because you don’t expect to ever get into anything like that, because it costs money, how are you going to buy good clothes, except for wearing your parent’s old stuff. Scott: Well, sports you just have to buy supplies for, and certain things like soccer, you have to buy cleats, and football you have to buy stuff. Hannah: Yeah, but I feel like if you’re signing up for the team, you kind of know that. I don’t know. Scott: The kids who don’t have money might feel bad for asking their parents ‘can I do this,’ or ‘can I do a sport,’ and then their parents might feel bad like ‘I can’t afford it,’ or whatever… that’s what happened to me, anyway. Josie: I mean, sometimes like other people mentioned here, asking your parents, if they’re poor, is not going to really work with your parents. Your parents might just get mad, or feel guilty that you can’t sign up.

This excerpt also shows the ways in which the students are emotionally supporting or protecting their parents. In the last portion of the transcript above, Scott and Josie both speak directly about not wanting to hurt their

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parents. This was the only conversation that I had where students spoke about how their parents might feel or what might be hard for them. * * * There is much conversation about systemic racism in America, but much less about systemic classism. America was created, in part, by prisoners and others who did not fit into English society. In grand fashion, promoters imagined America not as an Eden of opportunity but as a giant rubbish heap that could be transformed into productive terrain. Expendable people  – waste people  – would be unloaded from England; their labor would germinate a distant wasteland. Harsh as it sounds, the idle poor, dregs of society, were to be sent thither simply to throw down manure and die in a vacuous muck. (Isenberg, 2017, pp. 2–3)

From these inauspicious beginnings grew the myth of American exceptionalism, the idea that Americans are, inherently, unique, different, and better; the lack of attention to class fuels this myth (Isenberg, 2017; Desmond, 2016; Vance, 2018). In the myth of American exceptionalism, migration from England was the great equalizer, and all who stepped on shore were—or became—homogenous. Classism, and an intentional blindness to it, is baked into the very structure of America. “Americans do not like to talk about class. It is not supposed to be important in our history. It is not who we are” (Isenberg, 2017, p. 7). American exceptionalism, along with its accompanying narrative of individualism, where anyone who works hard can get ahead on their own merits, has caused so much anger and disappointment among the white working class and led to blame apportioned toward immigrants, people of color, and anyone else who is “other.” When schools consider the revision of curriculum to include a more honest, more nuanced reckoning with America’s past, social class is an essential part of the conversation. Rather than learning only the standard narrative about the Pilgrims, and, later, the Founding Fathers, students can examine who came, or was exiled, to America, how they reorganized a class system that largely aligned with the system they left behind in England, and how racism ensured that white men were accorded more privilege and power than Indigenous or enslaved peoples.

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Schools don’t do their students any favors when social class is left out of the broader conversation, especially when there is a long history that perpetuates class discrimination in America. Certainly, it is challenging to talk about class with young people; it is also fair to say that they are aware of socioeconomic stratification. Not talking about this as a metric of diversity makes it untouchable, and, therefore, unchangeable. Social class colors the existence of low-income students in many ways, from hunger to academic struggles to feeling ostracized by their peers. Schools, both affected by and affecting cycles of poverty, have a large and vital role to play in creating positive social change. Class, like race and religion, is a systemic issue that creates inequity within society, despite what the standard narratives teach. Gender is another systemic issue, but one that is talked about more freely, debated more readily. Despite an acknowledgment of gender disparities in America, and around the globe, these inequalities persist and become evident in classrooms, schools, and communities.

CHAPTER 5

“We Exist”: Gender and Education

Abstract  This chapter considers how to discuss gender and acknowledge the differences in gender identities and experiences meaningfully across age ranges. Focus groups and observations conducted at both the middle and high school levels shed light on how young people think about gender, identity, and belonging. After examining the different experiences that binary boys and girls face in school, this chapter gives space to the words, feelings, and experiences of students who are nonbinary, transgender, and gender fluid. Ultimately, this work exposes the differences in how young people experience school. Keywords  Gender • Identity • Transgender students • Nonbinary students In East School District (ESD), a stark gender disparity is on display. In classrooms in East Middle School (EMS) and East High School (EHS), teachers called on male students three times more often than female students, regardless of grade, content area, or academic level of the class. It was not because the girls didn’t have their hands up, ready to answer questions—it’s because the teachers called on the boys more often anyway. The boys were more likely to call out when they weren’t called on quickly or make a displeased noise (like a loud sigh) if they weren’t called on. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Rich, Politics, Education, and Social Problems, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76085-4_5

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Teachers, then, got used to the boys in their classes carrying the conversation, unconsciously perpetuating gender inequity (Liu, 2006). What I observed in the middle and high school doesn’t represent a new experience for the girls. Research shows that starting in elementary school, teachers engage less frequently with the girls in their classes, asking them fewer questions, and, at the same time, provide boys with more feedback (Sadker & Zittleman, 2009). The same study, with over one thousand observation hours in all grade levels, found that there is an uneven allotment of teacher time, energy, and attention, with boys receiving far more than girls. It is not only in teacher time and attention that girls come up lacking. Research also shows that curricular materials are more likely to be written by, and show the lived experiences of, men (Weiler, 2009). A study of language arts textbooks used in Los Angeles School District reinforces this finding, showing that, on average, less than 30 percent of the authors included in the books were female (Alber, 2017). Male characters outnumber female characters two-to-one in curricular materials (Sadker & Zittleman, 2009). As I sat in classrooms in EMS and EHS and wandered through the halls, I noted that the posters on walls and bulletin boards and the books on the shelves were male dominated. Teachers seem to have been given the message that they should have diverse images for students to look at, so classroom walls were covered with traditional images (e.g., male scientists) with one image including women and another including people of color. These disparities, as well as the observations made earlier about boys being called on more often, have not gone unnoticed by the girls in EHS. Grace:

I don’t know, it just feels like in the classroom the boys are the more active ones and the ones who are more out there and participating. Sophie: Oh yeah, that’s true. Except if there’s a group project or something and I’m put in a group with a boy, usually I end up doing all of the work, and he ends up taking all of the credit! Grace: I think in that instance, if you’re not given the groups and you make the groups, it’s also like just who you’re more comfortable with, girls just happen to be, I know personally, girls are just more comfortable working with other girls.

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Rachel: Yeah, there’s just always been this gender split. Like at one point something happened and we all realized it was awful to have to work with the boys. Except the teachers, who call on them all the time, even when we have stuff to say. Sara: Yeah, I agree. I never get called on because I’m a ‘good girl’ and don’t call out. The boys don’t even know what they’re talking about, but they just talk. And take credit for ideas that aren’t theirs. I think they should change how they act, but I also think we’re so used to it because it’s just been that way, so to us it’s normal. Lizzy: Oh! I mean, it’s not just the boys talking all the time. Why wouldn’t they? Everything we look at or read is by men. Or about men. [Rolling eyes.] It’s like someone said to include some women and some minorities, so there are posters of, like, the women from Hidden Figures (the movie, not even the real women!) because they are both? How obvious can you be?

The girls I spoke with affirmed what the research says and what I observed about gender disparities in the school and classrooms. I was curious, though, as to what the boys would say about their perceptions and experiences of gender in school. The boys reported an almost completely different experience than the girls did and from what I observed. They felt that they were held to higher standards than girls, received harsher consequences for misbehavior, and were disfavored by almost all of the teachers. Billy:

Dan:

Jay:

You know, being a dude at EHS really sucks sometimes. We do the same things as the girls, but we’re the ones getting in trouble. Like, if a girl is on her phone it’s fine, the teachers ignore it. If we’re on our phones, we get our phones taken away, or lunch detention. Yeah, the girls definitely have it easier. It’s like all they have to do is sit in the class and be quiet and they get all this, like, praise, for “doing the right thing.” And then if we don’t talk, no one does. I see that more in the classes that are for conversation, like English or History. Not as much in math or whatever. I think we’re treated pretty much the same in math…. Well, I don’t know if that’s right. I think the girls just don’t even talk in math, but that’s because it’s harder for them…

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Dan:

Phil:

Dang!! You can’t say math is harder for girls! That’s like, being sexist. But I do think the girls, like, take a nap during math. But the other day my friend, Ryan, he, like, put his head down in a class for a minute and the teacher yelled at him and told him not to be lazy. What about gym, yo? How about how we have to do all this stuff that girls don’t? On that one test, we have to get over 50 push-ups to get a passing grade, but the girls only have to do 25? I mean, if we’re supposed to be equal, how come we have to do twice as many push-ups as the girls?

This conversation continued for a while, with the boys presenting an almost completely contrary view of school than the girls. And, for every piece of evidence that says girls experience gender bias in schools, there is just as much that says that boys face even more discrimination. Where outcomes are concerned, boys are lagging. As of 2013, women in the United States earn 62 percent of associate’s degrees, 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 60 percent of master’s degrees, and 52 percent of doctorates (Sommers, 2013). Boys account for 71 percent of all school suspensions, with the numbers increased for Black and Hispanic boys (U.S.  Department of Education and Schott Foundation Report). They comprise 67 percent of all special education students, with higher numbers, again, for Black and Hispanic boys (Schott Foundation Report). Boys are five times more likely than girls to be classified as hyperactive and are 30 percent more likely to fail out or drop out of school (National Center for Education Statistics). Finally, girls outperform boys in grades and homework at all levels (NCES). It is a somewhat controversial idea to suggest that boys are the ones being disadvantaged by the public school system; when I’ve shared this with teachers, they write off the data as skewed in some way, explaining that the boys are the loud, engaged students. The boys I spoke with, though, were unsurprised by the data. I shared it with them, and asked them what they thought of it. Here’s what they said: Jay: Billy:

No offense, but that’s all pretty obvious. I didn’t know about the stuff that boys graduate college less than girls do, but the stuff about guys getting in more trouble and stuff? That’s true. I take Ritalin, but only on the days I come to school. I still get in trouble but I take it so I get in less trouble. I think if I were a girl, no teacher would have told my parents that I need it.

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Phil:

Dan:

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Bro! I do, too! My mom said that if I went to school, like, when she was a kid I would walk around more and no one would have said I need to take that pill. I mean, it’s no big thing, but I shouldn’t have to take something to make the teachers feel better. They should know how to teach guys. How many times have you gotten lunch detention or been asked to leave the room or just gotten in trouble because you knew the answer and said it? It happens to me all the time. Aren’t we learning to be adults? Raising your hand is overrated. We should just talk if we need to.

Listening to the boys talk put my own observations in a different light and made me question my own gender bias. As the mother of two school-aged boys, this was an illuminating experience on a personal level. I did see teachers calling on boys more often, the boys sighing or slapping their hand on the desk when they didn’t get to speak in class. What I was missing from the observations, though, were the boys’ own perceptions of what was happening. With such different perspectives of what is actually happening in schools, I wanted to talk to a group of boys and girls to see what they said when they were not in single-gender groups. I brought some of the same students back and explained that they had very different ideas of what was happening in school and who was having an easier time. Very quickly, it was out in the open that each group thought that school was biased against them and the other group was treated better. I asked what they thought the solution might be, and the answer surprised me. Lizzy: Billy: Grace:

Honestly, I know we’re not going to do this, but I think we should have the choice of if we want to go to some classes, at least, with just girls. Or, you know, just boys. I don’t know. Like, what if school was just way better for you guys because the teachers like you better, and, like, totally sucked for us? Yes! I love it. The boys wouldn’t shout over us all the time, but also, no offense, they wouldn’t be such jerks in gym. Oh my god, can you imagine gym without the boys making rude comments?

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Sophie: Dan: Sophie:

Even if we still had to do the same things as the boys, like not read stuff written by women or whatever, at least we’d be able to talk. And we could do the work and take our own credit for it. I’m in for that, bro. As long as we get the teachers that get it. You know, the ones that don’t yell if you rock your chair back, or tap your fingers on the desk. Ugh! I mean, I think there was some law about ‘separate but equal’ right? I mean, I think that was for Black kids a long time ago? But we could totally have separate but equal classes! In the good way!

The suggestion for single-sex classes had not come up in any of the previous focus groups or informal conversations. There has been much debate over the benefits and drawbacks to single-sex education, with even more about whether or not it is appropriate for, and legal in, public schools (Hubbard & Datnow, 2005, 2013; Ferrara, 2005; Zubrzycki, 2012; Meyer, 2008; Mulvey, 2010). A 2014 meta-analysis of 184 studies on single-gender education found “modest advantages” in math performance, but not science performance, for boys and girls in single-sex settings (Pahlke et al., 2014). The same study found “trivial differences” in performance in math and science between the students in co-educational settings and those in single-gender settings in controlled studies. There have also been legal challenges to single-sex education. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a major opponent of single-­ gender schools and classes and warns school districts against going down that route. This is because they are likely to face challenges in court around civil rights and education laws, including Title IX. The ACLU has pushed back against ideas that boys and girls learn differently and need different educational methods, which is a common reason districts give for creating such schools or classes (Superville, 2017). All of these factors, not to mention potential blowback from district families, make it unlikely that ESD will consider single-gender classes anytime soon. Additionally, there is a consideration not well explored in any existing research on the subject, which is about students who identify as gender fluid or nonbinary or who are transgender. ESD administration has worked hard to make the middle and high school inclusive of all gender identities, with policies about personal pronouns and preferred names that are intended to make all students comfortable and safe.

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I spent a number of lunch periods at EHS sitting in the cafeteria, observing the ways in which students cliqued together and where they sat. In the back corner of the cafeteria sat the members of Prism, the group that used to be called the Gay–Straight Alliance. This was a group that was made of up of members of the LGBTQ+ community and their straight allies. There were always somewhere between 12 and 20 young people crowded around two tables. Some students had colorful hair, dyed in shades of pink or green or purple; others wore tee shirts or hoodies with rainbows across the back; others had Pride stickers on their laptops. In their group, taken all together, these young people seemed to be full of joy, laughing and joking loudly as they ate their cafeteria French fries and gulped down sodas or cups of coffee. I realized my error after I spoke with the single-gender groups and the boy–girl group; I had been discussing gender and the way it affects individual school experiences, but I had been thinking about gender the way I might have when I was in high school. It was on my radar to consider sexuality, about how gay, lesbian, and bisexual students were treated by their classmates, but I had overlooked nonbinary, gender fluid, gender nonconforming, and transgender students. (For ease of language, I use the terms nonbinary and transgender moving forward.) I quickly invited any member of Prism who was interested to participate in a focus group. Several students who identify as gay and lesbian joined us, as did one young woman who was an ally; seven nonbinary or transgender students joined us as well. These students (most who use they/ them pronouns) spoke emotionally about what school was like for them. Most poignantly, one young person lamented the fact that nonbinary and transgender students are completely silenced and ignored in elementary school because some parents and teachers feel these identities are not “safe” for young children to learn about. Cory explained why this is wrong, saying, we exist, we existed as little kids, so we are child-safe. And I know there’s issues with parents and stuff, in that people are like, ‘Oh, no. You can’t be teaching my kid this, it’ll influence them,’ or, ‘This isn’t child appropriate.’ We exist. We existed when we were little. There will be little queer kids in these classes.

The group of students explained that they struggle with both teachers and students understanding their gender identities and treating them with

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respect and kindness. It is most disappointing for them when teachers don’t understand or respect their pronouns or preferred name. Chris explained that they always email my teachers a few days before school starts, and say, ‘Hi, I’m in your class. This is my name, this is what class I’m in, and I’m gender-fluid and use they/them pronouns. I’m happy to answer any questions you have.’ And then most of my teachers use she/her pronouns for me, and then it’s not even a mix of she/her and he/him, it’s just she/her. And then, if it continues, or if it’s especially during one class period, I’ll go up to the teacher afterwards and be like, ‘Hey, this is just something that I wanted you to be aware of, is something that’s important to me, and something that I’d really like if you were able to try and use. But if you have issues with it grammatically or if you have issues with it morally, or whatever, I’m happy to talk about those.’ And nothing really changes, there’s the occasional teacher who is really good about trying to use the right pronouns, and they still slip up, which is fine. But the fact that the assumption is that my teachers will use she/her pronouns for me, even when I’ve emailed them before school, talked to them about it in person ... the ones I can speak to; some won’t even entertain it. It is really rare to find a teacher who consistently uses they/them pronouns for me.

Others in the group echoed this experience. Joe shared that his teachers refer to him as “Joe,” which is his preferred name rather than his birth name, but still use she/her pronouns when referring to him. He said, they will immediately, they’ll use Joe for me, and then they’ll immediately say ‘she’, like they don’t have any second guess. You can tell it’s what they meant to say, and it’s what they want to say, continuously. I’m okay with that sometimes, but with my teachers, I told them that I go by he/him pronouns, and my name is Joe. So why would you call someone a girl if their name is Joe? I don’t know, but they would. Because that’s just what they see, I guess.

The students went on to explain that they can’t tell if teachers do this on purpose or consistently forget, but—either way—they feel like they aren’t being seen or heard when their pronouns are not being used. They want teacher support with this, believing it might make interactions with other students easier.

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Another issue that the students need teacher help with is navigating field trips. On trips out of the building, nonbinary and ransgender students face health challenges because of how uncomfortable they are with gendered bathrooms. Aaron: On school trips, it just ... if there’s any other trans people on the

Mel:

trip, they’ll be like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have such a headache, I’m so dehydrated.’ And I’ll go, ‘I know. I know that life,’ because the thing is, on field trips you can’t drink any water, because then you’ll have to go to the bathroom, and if you have to go to the bathroom on a school trip, you’ll have to use the gendered bathroom. And if you have to use the gendered bathroom on a school trip, then you’ll be with your peers, and then they’ll know that you’re in the bathroom and that’s frightening. Yeah. Yeah, my avoidance of having to use the single, all gender bathroom, because it’s always busy, and then I don’t feel safe in the gendered bathroom. It does actually affect our health. I’m constantly dehydrated, so I don’t ...

In these instances, the students acknowledge that it is possible, even likely, that their teachers are unaware of how challenging this is for them. They also admit, though, that they do not feel comfortable talking to most of their teachers about this. They place blame, then, on both the adults they want to take care of them and on themselves for not speaking up. If the students are unsure about the motivations of their teachers, they are more comfortable assigning motivations to their classmates. They explained that there are some people who ignore them, others who don’t believe that nonbinary or transgender identities are real, and others who are outright hostile. On the more benign side, according to the group, are those who struggle to understand what nonbinary gender identity is. Kerry:

I was working on an English project with somebody and I was writing about nonbinary genders, and I knew that the other person was pretty conservative. At one point, I asked her and she’s like, "Yeah, I’m not sure this is a thing." She was being respectful about it, but it was also like ... she was being ­respectful about it though, so I didn’t mind, and I enjoyed getting to peer-edit with her, because it was really interesting. But it was still like, ‘Okay. Well, this person doesn’t believe I exist.’

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Sabrina: There’s also different levels of that, where someone’s respectful or they’re trying to learn, or it’s just not what they’re taught. And there’s the people that have been educated about it, but then still go about it in a disrespectful way, they’re like, ‘I don’t care that you’ve said this. I refuse to ...’ It’s not like, ‘I have to come to terms with this,’ it’s a, ‘I just don’t care.’ And coming to terms with it, it’s fine. You start somewhere and you have to grow. I’m not going to be mad at someone for that, but there’s people that have been educated that you can talk to, that are still being really disrespectful about it.

This sort of interaction is common, according to the group. Just as common, though, are being called homophobic slurs, like “fag” or “tranny.” They weren’t able to quantify how often they hear these things, or who says them, because “we hear them all the time, just walking down the hall or getting lunch off the line.” In a conversation I had with a different group of kids over lunch one day, they asked me what I thought of the “gay kids in the back of the caf.” While I didn’t answer their question, I did ask them if they wanted to say more about what they were thinking. This is what they said: Abby: There’s a, especially with the freshman I’ve noticed, there’s just a lot of them that, I guess they look different. And a lot of them refer to themselves as ‘they/them,’ so then I always don’t know. I feel like I’m afraid I’m gonna be offensive if I assume ‘she’ or ‘he.’ And I think that the school just kind of assumes that we all know how to act and that we’re just gonna accept that we have to not be offensive and know how to act when it’s kind of all new. John: It’s so… f ’ed up… when the school tries to push the preferred pronoun crap on us. I think the people that identify themselves as, you know, the opposite gender, call themselves ‘they/them,’ instead of telling other people to identify them correctly, they should be telling them how they should really be acting and how they should really be identified. They need to be talked to because something is clearly wrong. So, they need to fix that instead of pushing on other people to make sure they’re right.

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Dean: They need ... like people who refer to them as the opposite gender or them or they. They need to stop getting so offensive over it. If someone misleads you, maybe correct them and let them know. And if they don’t accept it, just be okay with it, but at the same time, I guess it could annoy you a little bit, but just let it go because if they see you in the hallway again, they’re not gonna remember that you’re a they or them or he or her. They’re not gonna know they’re just gonna assume based on what you look like and that’s not their fault. You can’t push someone to be progressive if they don’t know or they don’t know how it’s gonna affect you. They just need to be able to control ... I guess like, relax a little bit. Chill out. ESD needs to chill out. Mary: Well, with the gender neutral stuff or however you want me to phrase it, I feel as though that’s one of the more sensitive topics in the school. It’s like a new idea if you will, so when you ... I’m not saying me personally, but do you think I’m a boy or a girl? I mean, that’s how you identify someone in the halls. You’re not ... Jason: It’s biology. I think everybody should go by science and you know, he’s obviously a male and you’re gonna call him a male because he’s a man regardless if he wants to call himself a girl. He’s wrong. Sorry. That’s just what happens. People need to understand that, too. Just because you don’t want to be a boy anymore doesn’t mean that you’re automatically a girl and people have to call you ‘she.’ You’re still a boy regardless of what you want to be. Science. It’s biology. He’s a man. He’s a man. You’re a girl. You’re a woman. Abby: To be honest, I think this whole gender thing is crazy. Unnatural.

Listening to students who identify as nonbinary or transgender, as well as students who are so clearly hostile to their existence, helped me understand just how hard it is to navigate high school as gender nonconforming. I was struck by how different the concerns were between the cisgender boys and girls and the nonbinary students. The cisgender students were concerned with their success, with how often they share their ideas and questions in class, and with how much credit they get for their

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work. The nonbinary students were concerned with their physical and mental health and safety. The students, all in the same grades, in the same school, all relatively privileged by multiple measures, live vastly different daily experiences. * * * Politics, Education, and Social Problems has now explored race, religion, class, and gender in schools. It cannot be overemphasized how important it is to think about these identities as intersectional. It is impossible to talk about gender equality without also talking about race, class, religion, sexual orientation, and any number of other intersectional identities. Not every male, female, nonbinary, or transgender person has experienced gender bias in the same way. Their experiences depend on a constellation of other factors, including the color of their skin, the social class in which they live, and their religious beliefs. Teaching about gender inclusivity has the potential to act as a lightning rod, much like the topics covered in earlier chapters. There are communities, cultures, and families that have gendered ideas about the roles of men and women in society, as well as about gender nonconforming individuals. It is not the role of schools to indoctrinate students with liberal ideas about gender roles and identities, but it should be the role of schools to engage in conversations about gender. Teachers are crossing a boundary if they move to degrade or ignore competing ideas, values, and social beliefs held by families. This makes conversation about gender delicate, but, as Cory said, “we exist, we existed when we were little. There will be little queer kids in these classes.” Gender cannot be ignored. Gender is another knotty topic that ought to be discussed out in the open. Parents begin treating their sons and daughters differently from the moment they are born, comforting crying girls more than crying boys and praising toddlers for either playing with building blocks or dolls depending on their gender. It is hard to unlearn or reconsider the gendered norms we all have grown up with, and schools play a significant role in leveling the playing field. The issues examined thus far are intersectional, as evidenced in the examples of complicated conversation in the next two chapters. They share experiences I had with pre-service teachers in classes that I taught at Public University. The undergraduate students will one day be teachers

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themselves, which makes it all the more important for them to learn how to participate in and facilitate complicated conversations. Therefore, the conversations explored in the next chapters serve two purposes: they illustrate how young people respond to complicated conversations and they also help reconceptualize parts of teacher education programs in order to increase the occurrence of complicated conversations in public school classrooms.

CHAPTER 6

Classroom Conversations about Sexual Assault

Abstract  This chapter looks at sexual assault, sexual harassment, and bodily autonomy and how classroom conversations can be employed to actively combat the marginalization of young women. It discusses examples of sexual assault and harassment that dominated headlines, including President Trump and Justice Kavanaugh, and considers how these highly political cases make teaching about consent in schools both more critical and more complicated. While teaching about consent should not be a partisan issue, it has become one, with debates about the autonomy of female bodies becoming increasingly prominent in the conversation. There are several promising ways that schools might address this, including early and regular conversations and reimagining health and physical education classes. Keywords  Sexual assault • Sexual harassment • Current events

One goal I have for future teachers in every education class is to help them understand that schools are connected to families, communities, and national and global conversations. One way I accomplish this is by requiring students to select a current event to share; they are then asked to facilitate a conversation about what they shared. Students are instructed to focus the conversation on the facts, various opinions about and responses © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Rich, Politics, Education, and Social Problems, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76085-4_6

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to the facts, and how their piece of news might affect K-12 students around the country. These current events sessions serve another purpose: they generate complicated conversations. This is one way of teaching young adults how to have respectful, factual discussions about hot-button issues. This also serves as a model for pre-service teachers as they think about how they can do this work in their own future classrooms. In the fall of 2018, sexual assault was in the news. Now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the United States Supreme Court, and there was a credible accusation of sexual assault leveled against him. Justice Kavanaugh’s nomination and the allegations made by psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford became a litmus test of sorts, with people certain that either Kavanaugh or Blasey Ford was telling the truth and the other was a liar; there was very little middle ground to be found. This was just the sort of current event I encouraged students to talk about; in this instance, I wanted to foment a complicated conversation about sexual assault, the role of the media, politics, and gender. At the start of the semester, I raised the issue with my class, explaining the current events project to them and letting them know that we’d concentrate on the issue of the #MeToo movement, a movement against sexual assault and harassment focused on publicizing crimes committed by powerful men, for the foreseeable future. This did what I hoped it would; students immediately had thoughts that they wanted to share. Before anyone brought a current event to share with the group, I made sure they all had heard about the Kavanaugh controversy and asked them what their thoughts were. One outspoken young man, Lucas, started the conversation. Lucas:

Mia:

Emma: Will:

Really? You want me to be honest? I don’t think we should talk about this here. People… I’m going to offend some people if we do because I’m really pissed that this woman is getting to tell a bunch of lies about Kavanaugh. Ummm, yeah. That’s offensive. Maybe he’s right and we shouldn’t talk about it, because I really like this class the way it is right now. Lucas, every single girl in here is going to hate you. Are you cool with that? Just, one more thing? I agree with Lucas. I don’t talk about this much, but I think if she was assaulted, she would have told a long time ago. I just think this a bad idea. Plus, we’d never talk about this in a real class, like if we were teaching. Wouldn’t we get, like, fired?

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I shared that these were all reasonable concerns; it was reasonable to worry that they would offend their classmates, that their tempers might flare, and that these conversations would never happen in public schools. I didn’t do anything to reassure them or try to convince them that they were wrong; I moved right into setting up norms for difficult conversations. I asked the group what our norms should be, and they came up with: 1. Be respectful. No cursing at each other, no name calling, no personal attacks. (No matter how mad you get!) 2. Be informed. Read from different perspectives (CNN and Fox News), and see what is the same and different in different sources. Social media is not a source. 3. Be able to change your mind. It’s okay if you want to switch your opinion. Don’t be too stubborn to do it! You don’t have to be right! At that point, several students were asked to bring stories related to the Kavanaugh controversy the following class session, and class was dismissed. Over the next few weeks, students brought articles from a variety of sources and were ready with cued-up news clips. They worked hard to follow the norms that they set for themselves and learned to have complicated conversations, to discuss and deliberate. A theme that came up repeatedly was that of false reporting. A number of young men in the class shared that they “were sure” that if Blasey Ford got in the way of Kavanaugh’s confirmation, then “every guy in the world could be accused when a girl gets pissed at them.” To bring structure to the conversation, I shared the following statistics: • There is a 2.1 percent rate of false sexual assault accusations. • Six out of every ten women will not just be assaulted but will be assaulted and not report. (Fitzgerald et al., 1995; Rennison, 2002) Students were then asked to write silently for a few minutes about what these statistics show, what story they tell, then use their writing to participate in, first, small group discussions and then a whole class discussion. As I walked around during the small group conversations, I heard students sharing very personal stories. Several young women shared that they had been sexually assaulted and never told anyone except their closest friends. Others talked about how hard it is to be a woman, always worrying about how they look, if they are safe, and if they are wearing clothes

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that are sexy enough but not too sexy. One young man shared that he had been accused of sexual assault but didn’t do it and would “always believe the guy.” Several students cried as they spoke with their groups. This was challenging, as I wasn’t prepared for the personal nature and emotions of the conversation. I brought the group back together, and pulled back the lens, speaking to them as future teachers. I asked the class why they thought they were able to have such open conversations with one another, straying from an analysis of the facts into sharing deeply personal information. They expressed that it was the nature of the class, the community that had been formed, and the way they were learning that there isn’t always, or often, only one right way to think about things. I didn’t want to let the class session pass without meeting the goal of discussing the data presented, which the students were able to do well. Many of the students, both men and women, explained that they didn’t realize how common unreported sexual assault is. They also expressed that it helped them to hear stories from their classmates’ lives, that these stories made the issues more personal. On September 27, 2018, the Senate Judiciary Committee held one day of public hearings, calling only Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh to testify. I was teaching during the hearings and decided to watch with my class. I encouraged students to speak to one another or share comments or questions with the class as we watched. It was eye-opening for the young men and young women to listen to one another and to listen to both Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh. (Class ended during Blasey Ford’s testimony, but I found a classroom where students could gather to watch the rest together. Of the 31 students in the group, 28 stayed for all or part of the hearings.) Those who were Kavanaugh supporters listened carefully to Blasey Ford and their classmates who vehemently defended her, and vice versa. In the end, several students said they were no longer sure that their initial opinion was correct, and no one was afraid to share reasoned, sometimes controversial, ideas with the class. Since the complicated conversations about the Kavanaugh confirmation were successful, and students became highly engaged, we continued to explore the news around the #MeToo movement. At the time, it was difficult to turn on the news without hearing about another powerful man who was being accused of sexual assault or harassment. This news cycle was particularly long—it began with then-candidate Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood tape, moving on to cover Harvey Weinstein, and other scions of industry and entertainment (Ohlheiser, 2017). Arguments

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were made that #MeToo is less about gender than it is about power; one of the female accusers has been accused of statutory rape herself, and a feminist university professor stands accused of sexual harassment of a student (Severson, 2018; Greenberg, 2018). Regardless of how it’s sliced, though, women’s bodies, consent, and power were in the national conversation. I expanded the complicated conversations we had in class to focus on what happens in schools, the messages female students (and teachers) often receive about their bodies, and what might be done to shift the rhetoric. Data shared with students included the fact that 77 percent of teachers are women. In elementary schools, this goes up to 90 percent, and in high schools, down to under 66 percent (Loewus, 2017). With such a large female population, one might expect to see less policing of the bodies and clothing of female teachers, as well as a reconsideration of dress codes that so often police the clothing choices of young women and girls. However, 77 percent of school superintendents are male (Schmitz, 2017), and women, overall, are less likely to achieve tenure than men in colleges of education. We talked about the fact that student teachers, and teachers in general, receive messages about their bodies and their work from myriad sources, including what they watch, the music they listen to, and those around them, both in positions of power and those in the classrooms next door. The focus groups conducted at East High School confirm that girls receive these gendered messages from school and society beginning at very early ages. Girls are called on less often than boys in classrooms, receive overt and implicit messages that having opinions makes them “bossy” or “shrill,” and their clothing choices are more likely to get them sent home from school for dress code violations. Girls have, in fact, been sent home from school for showing their knees underneath the hems of their skirts in order to not distract their male teachers. In sum, girls are told to keep both their ideas and their bodies under wraps. Female teachers, then, have a lifetime of messages to overcome. Making this more complicated is the report that approximately one-half of middle and high school girls report to having experienced some form of sexual harassment during the 2010–2011 school year, with only nine percent of these students reporting these incidents to an adult at school (aauw.org, 2013). It is a fair assumption that while this is a fairly recent statistic it is not a new phenomenon.

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Students in my class were asked to grapple with these issues surrounding gender. We began by discussing and debating sex education in schools. One student raised the issue of what should be covered in sex education classes, and the group was divided between whether students should be taught about abstinence, safe sex, or consensual sex. That led to a conversation about what consent is and how this can be taught to children. The group determined that, in essence, consent is an active and ongoing process between two people. It is not a negotiation; it is about asking and receiving an affirmative. The “yes” can be retracted by either party at any point. Consent can be taught as totally separate from sex, and we do this all time. We teach young children to ask permission before taking a toy, to give a toy back when the owner wants it—in other words, to receive consent. This led one of the young women in the class, Olivia, to ask about how teachers can empower female students more generally. Olivia:

Matt: Bella: Olivia: Bella:

Melly:

Can we ‘discuss and deliberate’ about if schools should make girls feel more confident or, like, powerful? Because, I’m talking about girls specifically, and not boys. No offense. I think the girls need it more. Every girl I know has imposter syndrome, or thinks she’s fat, or has all of these issues with how she is. My sisters are that way. It’s not a thing that schools can control though. I think you guys are just made that way or something. Yeah… you know what would help girls feel safe in school? I don’t know, Livy, was that what you were talking about? Maybe it’s different. Can I talk about this? It’s a little different but all the same. I give you confidence to go ahead. [Grinning and rolling her eyes.] Okay. I mean, when I was in school, like high school and stuff, the boys would always do things like pinch our waists, or whistle when we’d walk down the hall, or pull us down on their laps in the lunchroom. And no teacher or aide or whatever every told them to stop, even if they were right there. And sometimes it was gross. Can I say the opposite? It’s so embarrassing. This is still like Vegas, right? I can say this and you won’t tell everyone? I was always jealous of the girls who that happened to.

The girls had a moment of recognition, seeing that no matter how they were treated by the boys it was hurtful. They moved to talk about the

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culture of girls being objectified in schools and how this could change. After a long process, much of which the boys objected to at first, they decided that teachers need to intervene when they see something, boys need to see girls as equal, and schools need to treat girls as smart by “letting us talk more!” Another complicated conversation we had was about school dress codes. Several students brought current events related to the enforcing of dress codes and the ways in which these were more restrictive for young women. Most students argued that a reconsideration of dress codes is vitally important. Schools are, quite literally, policing what young women wear, sending them home when they wear clothes that women wear in “the real world”: leggings, sleeveless tops, and shorts, for example (Krischer, 2018; Barrett, 2018). When female students are asked to miss class time in order to change, the message is clear—male students (and male teachers) are unable to see past their clothing, focus, and learn. Certainly, as one young woman said, “men have seen leggings outside of school and can handle them in classrooms.” Students engaged in conversations about body image and how restrictive dress codes are harmful for women and their self-image, but these dress codes also teach boys that it’s the responsibility of girls to help boys learn and to keep themselves safe. Amy:

Rachel:

Noah:

Amy:

So, in my school we had to follow the fingertip rule – you know, where skirts have to be as long as the tip of your longest finger? And I’m so tall that, like, I never wore skirts or shorts, because the rule was the same for them, too. That’s such BS, you know. The thing is that it matters more for the boys, no offense, than it does for us. Because it tells them that girls should cover up their bodies because our bodies are a distraction and then the boys can’t learn. Come on. I have a cousin who is the same age as us and we went to school together and sometimes she got in trouble for what she was wearing. I think it’s ’cause she’s, like, the guys think she’s hot or whatever. So, because guys think she’s hot she is the one who has to change her clothes? It’s like saying girls get raped because of something they did. Girls get raped because guys rape them. We don’t have all the… no. We don’t have any of the blame for any of this stuff.

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In this instance, when we were talking about a very clear school issue, students came back to sexual assault. By the end of the semester, the class had come up with some firmly held ideas about what needs to change in schools to prevent sexual assault and harassment and to help boys and girls see each other as equal. They determined that schools need to give young people the tools to speak up and stand up when they see sexual harassment and assault taking place or experience these traumas themselves. It is not the world we live in today, but it is our work to help our students envision and form a better world for the future. Fundamentally, they decided, boys and girls need to see each other and believe each other to be equal. Then assault and harassment will be harder to explain away. Assault and harassment won’t, in fact, go away, they admitted. But, in essence, sexual assault is about power. Often, but not always, it is about a man exerting his power over a woman. It is about dominance and control, about taking something that is wanted. Among equals, this becomes more difficult. The students articulated, repeatedly, that the responsibility lies with those who assault and harass—mostly (but not always) men. Sometimes an excuse is offered up about hormones or how male brains form later in life. These men need to learn to take perspective, have empathy and respect for others, have some self-discipline, and take ethical responsibility. These are all measures of social emotional health and can all be taught in school and out. Teaching children, even the youngest children, how to have conversations is also a critical step, as the class saw things. These conversations needn’t be about anything specific but about everything—the weather, their weekends, and their triumphs and tragedies. Then kids will see one another as friends, partners, equals. They will learn to respect and empathize with one another. Older students must learn the facts, and the differences, between assault and accusations—the statistical differences, which are sobering, certainly, but also the ways in which both of these affect the lives of all those involved. This extended example of an ongoing classroom discussion about sexual assault is one way to think about how to engage students in complicated conversations, as well as how to teach young people to lead these conversations. None of the discussions we had were easy. It is also

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important to note that this series of conversations was less fraught to have with college students; there are not the same limits about what is age appropriate or how and when sex can be discussed. In reflecting on these conversations as a class, though, the students came to believe that all of these issues should be discussed in high school. They spoke about complicated conversations as a way to change the culture; they agreed that hard talk about serious, knotty, systemic issues does make a difference.

CHAPTER 7

Classroom Conversations About Gun Violence

Abstract  This chapter examines gun violence in America and the ways in which it manifests in public schools. It considers gun violence in urban areas, death by suicide, and school shootings and other instances of mass gun violence. Finally, this chapter discusses what it means to teach in a society that has rampant gun ownership, loose firearm regulation, and a fetish with gun ownership. Suggestions for education are offered throughout based on the author’s experiences, qualitative research, and extended conversations with student teachers and children about guns. Keywords  Gun violence • School shootings

Every semester, sometimes more than once a semester, I have to talk to my classes about a mass shooting in America. These tragedies occur in various locations: movie theaters, concert halls, shopping malls, office buildings, schools, and places of worship. I pause whatever was on our syllabus in order to talk about these things because of the nature of the classes I teach; I teach about education, social problems, genocide, and mass violence. I also pause to talk about gun violence because it is an example of the sort of complicated conversation I want to teach young people to have. After talking about the particulars of the most recent shooting and allowing space for students to express their grief and/or fear, I move the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Rich, Politics, Education, and Social Problems, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76085-4_7

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conversation to consider guns in America. I begin by asking students to take a few minutes to write down their opinions about gun ownership in America and any facts they have to support their thinking. It is a habit of mine while teaching to ask students to think privately first, then to share with a small group, and, finally, to talk as a whole class. The “gun” conversation always brings up very diverse perspectives about the Second Amendment and why America repeatedly suffers through mass shootings. Once all of the initial ideas are on the table, I set out some statistics. In America, 42 percent of people live in households with guns, and two-­ thirds of gun owners own multiple guns (Enten, 2018). More Republicans than Democrats own guns, as do more white people than African American people. American citizens own approximately 393 million firearms. In 2016, there were 38,000 gun-related deaths in the United States, with two-thirds of these beingsuicides. In states where there are more guns, there are more suicides (Lopez, 2018). Although half of the people shot and killed by police are white, Black Americans are shot at a disproportionate rate; they account for less than 13 percent of the US population but are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans (Washington Post, 2020). Gun violence is a problem in countries with guns, but it is a uniquely American problem: America has six times as many gun homicides as Canada, and sixteen times as many as Germany. There have been 1600 mass shootings since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, with almost one mass shooting every day in America (Lopez, 2018). These are challenging statistics, and students tend to interpret them to line up with their initial ideas about the Second Amendment. So, students who believe that Americans have the absolute right to own as many guns as they’d like see these statistics as reinforcing the idea that good guys with guns are necessary. Students who believe that only police and military personnel need guns see the statistics as indicative of an out-of-control gun culture. Conor: Angela:

I mean, I have guns. I know how to use guns. No one can open carry in [this state], but I have a license. And you can be sure that if I saw some shit going down, I’d use my gun. Right. Okay. That’s fine, but doesn’t think about the fact that… or maybe it proves it?... I don’t know. You have guns, fine. But

why are all of these shootings in America? It’s not the same in other countries. So, what’s the real problem?

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What about just for safety in our homes? If some dude breaks in, I can take him down. Protect what’s mine. You’re still not even talking about the whole story. More guns is more suicide, not even just shooting other people, killing yourself. And why do people, like, collect guns? Why does anyone need more than one gun? Or assault weapons? We’re, like, not in a war in our neighborhoods.

In this instance, Angela’s comments led us to a conversation about guns and suicide. I generally discuss the relationship between the two as a part of a broader conversation about “ordinary gun violence,” the sort of all-­ too-­common violence that doesn’t make the national news anymore— including suicide. What the statistics show is that suicide is impulsive: 24 percent of individuals who commit suicide take less than five minutes between making the decision and taking the attempt on their lives; 70 percent take less than one hour. In 2001, the Centers for Disease Control found that 85 percent of suicide attempts involving guns resulted in deaths. A further study conducted in 2003 found that 96 percent of cases where people were admitted to the hospital for attempting suicide with a firearm died, compared to only 6.7 percent who attempted suicide by cutting and 6.5 percent by poison. Guns in homes are associated with increased risk of suicide of up to 2–10 percent, depending on the age of the people who live there and how the gun is stored; adolescent suicide is four times as high in homes where guns are kept unlocked and loaded (Drexler, 2015). Those who die by suicide with a gun are often, but not always, bullied. The statistics are sobering: 10 percent of children report being severely bullied during the last school year, and 75 percent of children report being bullied at all during the past ten months. School personnel rarely notice or intervene in bullying situations, but when they do, it helps. Kids are bullied for all sorts of reasons, including ethnicity and religion, sexual and gender identity, disability, and social status. They are bullied by both popular kids and kids trying to make their way into “cool crowd.” Cyberbullying makes it hard, if not impossible, to get away from bullying. The conversation about guns and suicides is a delicate one and crosses into many other areas—mental health, toxic school cultures, and family dynamics. Students considered all of these factors when considering guns and suicide, keeping an emphasis on what schools can and should do.

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They felt that staying alert to bullying, and intervening when bullying does take place, is one area where schools can play a critical role in mitigating some risk of student suicide. Parents and teachers are on the front lines when it comes to stopping bullying, but, fundamentally, they so often don’t know what they are looking for or how to intervene without making it worse. “Zero tolerance policies” don’t allow conversations or remediation to take place and rarely do they stop cyberbullying. Instead, this group of students suggested, schools ought to start early to promote inclusion and put policies and supports in place that begin to teach students how to talk and listen to one another. Class meetings, an emphasis on conversation, and restorative justice, they agreed, are all good places to begin. Some other school solutions that the class suggested as “sort of easy but also meaningful” include partnering older and younger students to build empathy, increasing an emphasis on the arts, and reading books with diverse characters and storylines. They also emphasized how important it is for teachers to make sure to know the signs of both the bullies and bullied students. * * * Every semester, when we are collectively confronted with mass shootings, I share a series of personal experiences and impressions with my classes. Some say that the experiences and ideas of teachers do not belong in the classroom. bell hooks argues against this, saying Many professors remain unwilling to be involved with any pedagogical practices that emphasize mutual participation between teacher and students because more time and effort are required to do this work. Yet some version of engaged pedagogy is really the only type of teaching that truly generates excitement in the classroom, that enables students and professors to feel the joy of learning. (1994, p. 204)

As I hope has become clear, I deeply believe in the mutual participation hooks describes here. As adults, we have the opportunity to model a powerful idea for young people: we have beliefs, opinions, and values that are strongly held, and—at the same time—we can listen to, respect, care about, and like people who hold differing beliefs, opinions, and values. To this end, I share the following with classes as a way to generate meaningful conversations.

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When I first began teaching, I taught second grade. In my second year as a teacher, Pokémon cards were popular, and students often brought them to school to trade at recess. One day, a young boy in my class was playing with his cards during class time. After two warnings, I told him that I was going to hold his Pokémon cards until the end of the day, when I would return them. His response? “I don’t care. I have a gun, and I’ll shoot you.” He calmly pulled a gun out of his desk and pointed it at me. I have imagined what might happen in this situation in President Trump’s “arm the teachers” era. I can spin out two scenarios. In the first, I would have a gun, I would be “the one of every five teachers” armed. I would get my previously concealed weapon and aim at a child. I would be so scared that I would, perhaps, shoot him. Alternately, another adult in my school would be armed. I would send up an alert, and a grown-up with a gun would enter my classroom within moments. He or she would see a young Latino child pointing a gun at a white, female teacher, with a room full of terrified, cowering children. The student holding the gun would, perhaps, be shot. Let’s say, in either of these scenarios, this young boy escapes with his life. In both, I would have lost the trust of my students. I can hear them, in my mind, mumbling, “we better not do that, she’ll shoot us!” What happened, instead, is something that could only have happened two decades ago. It was a post-Columbine era, certainly, but it was a world before school shootings felt, tragically, commonplace. I walked up to the student, one I liked, who often wore an impish grin along with his pressed school uniform, whose hair was always gelled carefully, who had a sweet and charming sense of humor, and put one hand on his face to distract him, and said, “oh, you don’t want to do that, sweetie.” With my other hand, I reached out and took the gun by the barrel and pulled it away from him. I called the office. Help came. I found out three things later: the gun belonged to his dad, it was not loaded, and he learned his behavior by watching his dad threaten his mom. * * * In 2012, the year of the Sandy Hook shooting, my oldest son was in kindergarten. We live in New Jersey, and we were not affected personally. But it was the first time I had experienced the cultural trauma of a school shooting as a parent, the first time I wanted to go to school and bring my child home and not send him back. The shooting was all over the news,

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and I was so careful not to let him see anything. He was five, and I was terrified he would be scared to go into school. Just a week later he had his first lockdown drill. He hid for 30 minutes in the bathroom built in his kindergarten class; his teacher told them they were hiding from a tiger. He came home upset because he “smelled like pee.” For the remainder of the year he had lockdown drills biweekly, though he remained convinced he was hiding from animals rather than people. Lockdown drills are now a part of school. Both of my children understand they are hiding from “school shooters.” My younger son, now in fourth grade, is scared of these drills, and I am both grateful that he understands their importance and angry that we live in a world where he needs to be prepared to survive a school shooting by hiding in a corner. My older son, now well over six feet tall and the tallest in each of his classes, has the job of tying classroom doors shut during lockdown drills. He has asked me what happens if he’s absent “when there is a real shooting? Will my friends die if I’m not there to lock the door?” I have told them both that the adults in the building are there to keep them safe, though I am stuck when they ask how the teachers will keep them safe if someone with a gun comes to their classrooms. I deeply believe both that teachers should not be armed and that I am leaving my children unprotected should a gunman come to his door. It is every parents’ worst nightmare. When I talk to my college students about these things, they ask how they will handle this in their own classrooms, how they explain school shootings to young children. They always ask me to predict the future, to promise them that they will never experience a school shooting first hand. I cannot do this. I do tell them that I have had to talk to elementary school classes, as well as my own young children, about school shootings. I give them guidelines for discussing shootings with children and remind them that, odds are, they will be faced with talking about these things but will not experience them. Guidelines that I share include the age, proximity, and personal involvement of students. We talk about empowering young students to take action, give back, become helpers. These sound like platitudes but are, in my experience, as good as it gets. Knowing what to say won’t make it easier, but it’s something to hold on to. My students take notes, as if what I am telling them will one day become a life raft for them.

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The students I work with know that conversations about guns are not the only courageous conversations they will need to have. They will also need to talk to their classes about politics, race, gender identity, family dynamics, and religion. They need to find ways to encourage open conversation, to facilitate discussion and teach their own future students how to respectfully and honestly disagree with one another. I help my students learn how to do this by having them go through it themselves, time and time again. I clearly have a perspective. I am not neutral. I never ask my students to take on my perspective, just to articulate their own. When it comes to guns in schools, students are divided. They are quick to engage in heated debates about arming teachers, the value of metal detectors in schools, and the best way to keep schools safe. I encourage them to express their views, back them up with facts, and challenge one another. My students are hopeful and brave and funny and smart and caring. They are eager to learn how to be the best teachers that they can be and are set upon keeping the students in their care safe. These young men and women have so much ahead of them. They will have students coming to them hungry, homeless, and abused. They will have students whose parents are divorcing, who have siblings being born into their families, who cope with blessings and disasters, illnesses and bullying. These young teachers will also, of course, have to help 25 students each year learn to read, to add, to understand how flowers grow, and what it means to be a part of a community. Some children in their classes will have mental health needs, some physical needs, some will need extra attention for no diagnosable reason. Each child is part of a family, and that family might need extra support, as well. These young future teachers have an enormous amount on their plates. When I work with them, I encourage them to debate, to learn, to engage whatever strategies work so that each child in their care knows that he or she is valued and that he or she is safe. I will never, ever advocate that they arm themselves. The tools my students and I develop together are not everything and they will not solve this problem, but they are a start. I encourage them to use their gut, to teach with empathy and heart. I remind them that it is more important to be kind than to be right, and a little bit of extra time goes a long way. There is so much that they will need as teachers to keep a school safe. They will need time in their classrooms to focus on students, to listen to them, and to help them listen carefully and thoughtfully to one

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another. They will need books to engage student imaginations, to teach them about the better worlds that they can create. They will need paper, pencils, and crayons so students can raise their voices and create art. They will need music, theater, and history in the very same quantities in which we offer science, math, and technology. As teachers, they will need the tools to talk about the fear “their children” feel when they learn of another school shooting, and they will need support in talking to them. I argue, and not all of my students ever agree with me, that the solution is not good guys with guns going up against bad guys with guns. Instead, we need to instill our kids and our societies with the skills to communicate and see beyond themselves. The complicated conversations I have with my classes about guns are always a challenge. I push students to be courageous, to carefully consider unpopular opinions, and to express their own ideas and fears about gun violence. Without exception, students rise to the challenge. This is how we reach a tipping point, how the next generation of teachers learn to challenge the status quo, think outside of the box, and teach their own future students to do the same.

CHAPTER 8

How Do We Get There?

Abstract  This chapter offers a roadmap for change. The problem, now defined as a struggle to help young people develop into citizens ready to participate in a democratic system, has been explored, and this chapter offers practical steps for families, school systems, and teachers to take. It suggests practical ways to introduce complicated conversations into all classrooms. It further argues that educational systems must change in order to put more emphasis on civics education and teaching young people the skills needed to have complicated conversations. Keywords  Educational change • School change • Civics education

Civil rights icon and Georgia Congressman John Lewis wrote an op-ed in the New York Times shortly before his death. His words were directed at young people. He wrote, in part, When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build … a nation and world society at peace with itself. (…) You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Rich, Politics, Education, and Social Problems, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76085-4_8

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time. People on every continent have stood in your shoes, through decades and centuries before you. The truth does not change, and that is why the answers worked out long ago can help you find solutions to the challenges of our time. Continue to build union between movements stretching across the globe because we must put away our willingness to profit from the exploitation of others. (Lewis, 2020)

Lewis articulates, succinctly, elegantly, and powerfully, what Politics, Education, and Social Problems is about. It is about reimagining education in order to empower young people with the skills and tools of debate and dialogue. More broadly, it is about reimagining education in order to create a more just, more equitable, more peaceful society. Before defining what reimagined teaching practices would look like, it is worth stepping back to consider what schools look like now. Eastern School District (ESD) is an example of a district that has the resources to create the schools that they want. What they have created are schools that have withstood the test of time: desks in rows facing the teacher, who stands at the front of the room dispensing knowledge or asking questions that generally have only one right answer. When students are encouraged to work in small groups, desks can be turned to form “pods” of four or six. “Good” classroom management is always on display, so students speak softly or they are reminded to use “inside voices.” An example of one ongoing group assignment is book clubs, found in many English classes in East Middle School (EMS) and East High School (EHS). In order for teachers to hold students accountable, each member of the book club is given a role of either discussion leader, note taker, connection maker, summarizer, or passage picker. Students in ESD have access to what they need to get good grades, pass Advanced Placement (AP) exams, become well rounded, and get accepted by the colleges of their choosing. They are given computers, schools have constant access to the internet, the school libraries have become media centers with some books and enormous amounts of technology, and sports and clubs give students the chance to engage in and excel at whatever interests them most. Many parents of ESD students are “helicopter parents,” advocating for their children to retake tests, move into higher level classes, be given larger roles in school plays, or start on varsity sports teams. The schools in ESD are, by many measures, excellent schools. Students who graduate from EHS grow up to become leaders in their chosen fields, proud of the schools that helped them get there. It is easy to understand

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how parents who choose to live in ESD do so because of the school system and the future the schools help create for their children. Despite all of this, marginalized students experience discrimination on a regular basis in ESD (as shown in Chaps. 2, 3, 4, and 5). If the purpose of education is to help young people grow up to participate in their democratic society and to create positive social change, as I suggest it is, then teaching practices in schools need to be changed. The voices of all young people need to be amplified in classrooms, and there needs to be a culture shift so that test scores are less important and civic engagement becomes a prized goal. Rather than a focus on holding students accountable for their work within a top-down structure, teachers should empower students to create structures that work for them. Not only does this replicate what young people will do in the “real world,” it forces students to engage in the political process of developing spaces that work for them and their classmates. Hard conversations like the ones highlighted in this book need to be integrated into every class, so that the real-world skills of listening, speaking, compromising, debating, imagining, and creating are built into the school day. This is hard work, and will encounter resistance, but is essential to the future of good education and our civil society. This is not to suggest that academic standards should be lowered, or ignored. Instead, standards ought to be raised so that test scores and grades matter, but as a reflection of learning. The hard work of using knowledge to fuel change is, to my mind, the most critical outcome of education. Perhaps this is a decidedly liberal view of what schools and society ought to be. In the past years, though, America has given in to darker impulses of nationalism, xenophobia, misogyny, and racism. It is not too late, not now as we move into the third decade of the twenty-first century, nor in the future, to change course and search, once more, for our better angels. There are concrete steps that schools and teachers can take to help create the classrooms that have been envisioned here. These are universal suggestions, applicable to each topic covered in the previous chapters, as well as others that have not been examined here. First, teachers need to build learning communities in their classrooms. Students learn best when they feel connected, cared for, and that their perspectives are valued (Samuel, 2017). This is particularly true when teaching subjects like race, religion, class, and gender, where building classroom community increases comfort and willingness to engage in

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learning about critical topics (Delano-Oriaran & Parks, 2015; Lichty & Palamaro-Munsell, 2017; Smele et al., 2017). Students (and teachers) can feel that they are taking significant risk when sharing their preconceptions about, or personal experiences with, these hard topics, and a well-formed learning community can help these risks feel more comfortable. For example, when considering how to teach about race and racism, Leonardo and Porter forewarn that some “whites turn racism into an intellectualist problem, rather than a lived one” (2010, p.  149). The intellectualization of race and racism by some (white) students, while others have experienced racism on a regular basis, can put students on uneven ground as they discuss race. The same concept applies to religion, gender, and class discrimination. Next, teaching about these hard topics varies from one context to another, and teachers need to be mindful of shaping conversations to suit the needs of their students and situation. For example, at a school like EHS, white students have limited interactions with Black students, while Black students have deeply felt the impacts of racism on their own lives. In this instance, students likely lack the language to speak about race and racism (Delano-Oriaran & Parks, 2015; Santas, 2000; Simpson, 2006; Rothschild, 2003) and will struggle to understand the way individual identity and community values play into these conversations. Even in schools where students have been exposed to diversity, the vast majority of white people carry beliefs and understandings rooted in misinformation, bias, or internalized beliefs in white supremacy (Sue, 2010). All of these factors make it more important for teachers to meet students where they are, regardless of the topic being considered, to access each student’s knowledge base, and to teach students how to engage in complicated conversations. Third, education about complicated topics is grounded in encouraging students to become reflexive, defined as the ability to consider one’s own feelings, reactions, and motives and how they impact behaviors (Bozalek et al., 2010; Smele et al., 2017; Zembylas, 2012). In the context of education about social class, reflexivity means cultivating the ability to evaluate critically your own socioeconomic position in society, to become increasingly aware of personal biases, and to be willing to consider the ways personal biases about social class inform our interactions with others. One way to help students do this is to have them make use of journals to consider their earliest experiences with social class, their thoughts and questions, and ways they see class and classism in their everyday experiences.

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Fourth, teachers must take a stance of genuine curiosity when young people share ideas that are objectionable or factually incorrect in order to foster conversation. Students who have not thought deeply about any of these issues, or who have not been exposed to multiple perspectives, may share ideas, opinions, and arguments that are troubling. For example, a student may suggest that homophobia does not exist in America any longer or that all Muslims are terrorists. One strategy that teachers can employ is strategic empathy (Zembylas, 2012). This requires resisting the urge to correct misinformation, instead adopting an inquiry stance into the motivations of students in order to promote reflexivity and critical thinking (Delano-Oriaran & Parks, 2015; Lichty & Palamaro-Munsell, 2017; Winans, 2005; Zembylas, 2012). This might look like asking questions about a particular statement, despite how challenging this may be. Some examples of ways that a teacher might respond to a problematic statement are: tell me more about that; it sounds like you have strong views on this— have you had some personal experience that might help us understand where you are coming from?; or I’m glad you brought this up, because we hear that idea a lot in popular culture, and it’s important to understand and unpack—what are your concerns about this idea? Finally, to open minds, these topics require far more dedicated time and a different sort of process. The issues discussed in this book are multilayered, complex social problems that lead to discrimination and, often, violence. They cannot be solved through one conversation in one class at one moment in time. One solution to this is what I am calling “seminar groups.” These are small groups of students from across grade levels, grouped thoughtfully so each group is diverse. Diversity, in this sense, is not a single metric but many; it is race, religion, class, gender, sexuality, family structure, personality, and learning style, among others. Seminar groups gather once a month during the school day in order to discuss and debate current events, systemic social problems, and other political issues (defined, again, as issues that need to be resolved democratically in order to create a space where all people can live together harmoniously), and to imagine solutions. Seminar groups would, for example, take a deep dive into the topic of race and racism from multiple perspectives. They would gather to learn the history, certainly, of race in America but also to read literature written by African Americans during the civil rights movement, listen to African American music from slavery through current day, and explore African American art. Beyond the (inter)disciplinary perspectives that students

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would gain, seminar groups would, crucially, explore how race and racism appear in their own lives and community. They would look at racism as a deeply political issue, one that gets in the way of a community in which people live together harmoniously, and they would consider solutions to this systemic and perpetual problem. Another goal of seminar groups is to induce cross-cutting talk (discussed in Chap. 1), to have young people learn from and with those who have different life experiences and ideas. Seminar groups encourage cross-­ cutting talk by bringing together students from multiple grade levels and helping them become comfortable sharing their own unique backgrounds. Wealthy students can listen to those who are low-income, cisgender students can listen to those who are transgender, and Christian students can listen to those who are Jewish. Each one of these historically marginalized groups can listen to those who are privileged, as well. The group as a whole, with the mess of experiences and values they live, can come together to create a space that is safe and productive for all of them at once. While seminar groups are a start, complicated conversations must be incorporated into classes across disciplines on a regular basis in order to make a difference. This is a challenge; there are structural impediments in schools to creating the culture that Politics, Education, and Social Problems advocates for. The first, and most challenging, change that needs to occur for the successful integration of complicated conversations across classrooms is school culture itself. Hard talk demands innovation and asks school leaders, teachers, and the broader school community to adopt different ways of thinking. While some changes within schools might take place through top-down mandates, integrating hard talk is not one of them; this change asks for trust, conviction, and creativity. In addition to support given from superintendents, principals, or school boards, the sort of change suggested throughout this book demands a movement. Teachers (or others) dissatisfied with the status quo and who hold a deep belief that schools can change society must drive this vision forward, acting as advocates with colleagues, school leaders, and community members. Those who wish to lead this charge can follow several steps. First, frame the issue clearly and with urgency in order to incite action. In this instance, the integration of hard talk in classrooms demands a revision of school or district goals and an answer to the broad question of what public schools are meant to do. Next, change-makers must demonstrate that their idea is a good one. Rather than explain the change they would like to create,

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teachers can, for example, integrate complicated conversations in their classrooms and ask stakeholders to observe their teaching or ask students to share their experiences. Then, a broader group needs to be formed in order to prove efficacy and build goodwill. If five teachers in a school district lead the charge for complicated conversations, each needs to bring two or three interested colleagues into the fold. In this way, the change will become rooted and grow. Finally, administrators, teachers, parents, and students must be brought into the conversation. Schools are generally judged by student success, and stakeholders need to understand that the traditional definition of success won’t change; it will, however, be expanded upon. Change-makers must show that the innovation of hard talk is successful through their own actions and classroom practices. Adapting school vision and goals can come after change is proven to be successful. Creating this sort of shift in school culture will address a very real issue that teachers have with integrating complicated conversations into the classroom: fear. Teachers in ESD expressed concerns that parents would complain or they wouldn’t know how to handle tough situations, like the one Kate experienced (examined in Chap. 3). These are reasonable concerns and can be combated through a revision of teacher training. Teacher training needs to change to embrace the rigor, nuance, and complexity of introducing complicated conversations into classrooms. Currently, teachers learn their craft, first, in college preparatory programs, like the one I’ve discussed at Public University. Once they are practicing teachers, they receive ongoing training, which generally consists of several days throughout the academic year of school or district workshops. Teachers also, perhaps most often, spend their summers, school vacations, and other leisure time reading, talking to colleagues, and considering their work. To fully address the challenge of integrating complicated conversations into schools, then, colleges of education need to change. It is my hope that the examples of complicated conversations shared in Chaps. 6 and 7 serve as an opening to consider what this might look like across settings. Currently, colleges of education (rightly) focus on lesson and unit planning, meeting Common Core Standards, and effective classroom management. While these foci are important, I contend that these are not the most important concepts. Engaging pre-service teachers in considering the role of schools and the purpose of public education in America, helping them think about the relationship between families, schools, and communities, and teaching them to create materials that meet standards as well as

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student needs are all vital roles of teacher preparation programs. Modeling for pre-service teachers how to participate in and facilitate complicated conversations is necessary and should be built into every education class they take. In-service teacher training also needs revision. Earlier in this chapter, I discussed creating learning communities among students. Now I want to advocate for creating a school-wide learning community of adults. Teachers and administrators must engage in the courageous conversations that will be expected of young people to better understand the benefits and the challenges. While much of how ongoing, district-provided teacher training is mandated by union contracts that regulate the number of days and hours that are spent dedicated to continuing education, schools can reimagine when those hours take place and what they are used for. Rather than several single-day workshops during the school year, schools might use fewer hours more frequently through the school year. This would allow teachers to practice complicated conversations, as well as share their successes and trouble-shoot their challenges. Teachers can also use in-service workshop time to reevaluate curricula and materials used in their classrooms. They can conduct equity audits of their school together, looking at what is familiar to them with a critical eye. Groups of teachers can tally the number of books on shelves that are written by women, people of color, and other historically marginalized groups and can consider what texts might be added to the standard curriculum. Current curriculum is calcified, with only agreed-upon narratives being highlighted. Complicated conversations can help young people challenge standard narratives and better understand their world in all of its nuance and contradiction. Teachers can ensure this sort of critical thinking happens on a regular basis. Hard talk is essential to not only a good education but a more just civil society. Creating this change in classrooms, schools, and school districts is brave work that requires dedication, creativity, and vision. It is not easy work, but it is critically important. In creating a movement for social and structural change in schools, in teaching young people to engage in hard discussions, to deliberate, and to create spaces that are harmonious for all people, we can—together—create the world that we imagine.

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America is imperfect; in the Constitution, the framers suggest that they are writing to help their countrymen (and women) form a “more perfect” union. America and the American dream have never been perfect. As young people learn to grapple with all that is imperfect about America, and American history, they can envision a yet-more-perfect society. With one complicated conversation at a time, schools can support the next generations to finally imagine and create a more perfect union.

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Additional Resources Books Adichie, C. N. (2015). We should all be feminists. Anchor Books. Alexander, M. (2012). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press. Anderson, C. (2019). One person, no vote: How voter suppression is destroying our democracy. Bloomsbury Publishing. Coates, T. (2015). Between the world and me. One World. Desmond, M. (2016). Evicted: Poverty and profit in the American City. Broadway Books. Harding, K. (2015). Asking for it: The alarming rise of rape culture and what we can do about it. Da Capo Lifelong Books. Isenberg, N. (2017). White trash: The 400-year untold history of class in America. Penguin Books. Kendi, I. (2017). Stamped from the beginning: The definitive history of racist ideas in America. Bold Type Books. Kendi, I. (2019). How to be an antiracist. One World. Luiselli, V. (2017). Tell me how it ends: An essay in forty questions. Coffee House Press. Rothstein, R. (2018). The color of law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America. Liveright Press. White, E. (2019). The stonewall reader. Penguin. Zinn, H. (2015). A people’s history of the United States. Harper Perennial.

Websites Facing History and Ourselves: https://www.facinghistory.org/ Teaching Tolerance: https://www.tolerance.org/ Zinn Education Project: https://www.zinnedproject.org/

Index

A African Americans Black history, x Black Lives Matter, ix and gun violence, 74 slavery, 14, 15, 85 and students, 4, 14, 16–19, 84 Alternative facts, see Facts, alternative facts American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 54 American exceptionalism, 47 Anti-racist views, see Racism, anti-­ racist views Antisemitism, see Jewish students/ teachers, antisemitism Asian students, 4 Assignments (coursework), vi, vii, 82

B Bias, see Confirmation bias; Debate, and bias Black history, see African Americans, Black history Black Lives Matter, see African Americans, Black Lives Matter Black students, see African Americans, and students Blasey Ford, Christine, 64–66 Bullying, 8, 17, 18, 21, 75, 76, 79 C California, 14 Canada, 74 Career readiness, 6 Center for the Study of Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights, v, vii

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INDEX

Charlottesville, Virginia, 15 Christianity, 24, 29, 32, 35 and holidays, 23–38 Christmas, see Christianity, and holidays Civil War (U.S.), 14 Class, see Social class Classrooms, v, vii, viii, x, 2, 5–7, 9, 14, 24, 25, 27, 29–32, 35, 37, 48–51, 61, 63–71, 73–80, 82, 83, 86–88 as space, 26 Clinton, Hillary, v, vi Code switching, see Language, and code switching Common Core Standards, 87 Confederate monuments, 15 Confirmation bias, 37 See also Debate, and bias Constitution (U.S), 25, 89 and Second Amendment, 74 Conway, Kellyanne, 27 Covid-19 pandemic, ix Cultural boundaries, vi D Debate and bias, x, xi, 8, 16, 52, 53, 60, 84 and cross-cutting talk, 6 facilitating, vi and seminar groups, 85 vitriolic tone of, 15 Declaration of Independence, 15 Democracy, 1, 2, 6, 25, 81 DeVos, Betsy, 27 Disability, 8, 75 Discussion vs. deliberation, 7, 12, 36, 37 Diversity, 2, 4–6, 12, 48, 84, 85

E Empathy, 70, 76, 79 Equity audit, 4, 88 Europeans colonized, x F Facts, vii, viii, x, 5, 14, 18, 30, 35–37, 40, 55, 56, 63, 64, 66, 67, 70, 74, 79 alternative facts, 27 Faculty, v, vi, viii, 4 Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA), 27–29 First-generation students, 3 Floyd, George, ix Fraternities/sororities, 4 Freedom of speech, 26 G Gender identity and bias, 52, 53, 60 cisgender students, 59, 86 and classroom participation, 83 and discrimination, 52 and homophobic slurs, 58 and intersectionality, 60 and male viewpoints, 49, 50, 59, 60, 67, 69, 70 and transgender/nonbinary, 54, 55, 57, 59, 60, 86 See also LGBTQ+ communities; Single-gender education Georgia, 14 Germany, 74 Glaude, Eddie, Jr., 15 Gun violence and gun ownership, 74 school shootings, 77, 78, 80 and suicide, 74–76

 INDEX 

H Hate crimes, 26 Healthcare, ix, 13 Hindu students, 32 Hispanic/LatinX students, x, 4 History (subject), 29, 51, 80, 81 Holocaust, the, v, vii, 29, 36 Hooks, bell, 6, 7, 9, 76 I Immigration, 8 Incarceration, 11 Inclusion, 5, 76 Individualism, 47 Indoctrination, vi, 25 Intrinsic equality, 2, 5 Islam, 24, 26 and Islamophobia, ix, 26, 30 Israel, 36, 37 J Jefferson, Thomas, 15 Jewish students/teachers, 37 antisemitism, vii, ix, 26, 36 Judaism, 24, 26 Juneteenth, x K Kavanaugh, Brett, 64–66 King, Martin Luther, Jr, 12, 14 Kwanzaa, 21 L Language, 3, 12, 19, 26, 29, 50, 55 and code switching, 19 Lewis, John, 1, 81, 82 LGBTQ+ communities, 55 and transgender rights, 57 See also Gender identity

103

Low-income students, 44, 45 See also Poverty M Male students, see Gender identity, Male viewpoints Math (subject), 2, 41, 51, 54, 80 Muslim students, 24, 30 N National Center for Education Statistics’ Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS), 41, 52 Nationalism, vii, 83 and xenophobia, 83 Native Americans, x New Jersey, x, 14, 77 News media, 65 New York City, x, 3 P Palestine, 36, 37 Parks, Rosa, 12, 84, 85 Participant observation, 3, 5 Patriotism, 34 Pence, Mike, 26, 27 Personal style/fashion, 47 Pledge of allegiance, 26, 27 Pokémon cards, 77 Police and policing, ix, 67, 69, 74 Politically correct speech, 12 Politics conservatism; conservative voices, vii; far right, xi; polarization, viii, ix; and presidential election 2016, 3, 21; and rhetoric, 67 Popularity, 39, 40, 43 Poverty, x, 41, 42, 48 See also Low-income students

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INDEX

Prism, 55 Privilege (general), ix, 4, 11–22, 26, 27, 47 See also White privilege Protest/dissent, xi, 13 Public education (general), 25, 26, 34 and civics, 2 and democracy, 1, 2 and religion, x, 8, 22–38, 60 and tax base, 41 See also Single-gender education Public-private partnerships, 4 R Race, 11–22 and assimilation, 20 and language, 84 and racial unrest, ix and skin color, 11, 12 and stereotypes, 16, 17, 35, 43 See also African Americans Racism anti-racist views, ix, 16 color-blindness, 13 and Jim Crow, 11, 15 and jokes, 5, 16–18 and post-racial beliefs, 13 and redlining, 11 and segregation, 15 systemic/institutional racism, ix, x, 8, 13, 47, 48 and white flight, 15 Religion, 23–38 atheism/secularism, 25, 37 and pluralism, 26 and prayer, 26, 33 and religious freedom, 25, 26 See also Christianity; Islam; Judaism

Republican Party, vi Campus Republicans, vi S Sacks, Peter, 40 Sandy Hook Elementary School, 74 School administrators, 13 Science (subject), 2, 27, 41, 54, 80 Senate Judiciary Committee (U.S.), 66 Separation of church and state, see Public education (general), religion Sex education, 54, 68 Sexual assault/harassment, 1, 9, 73–80, 85 and #MeToo movement, 64, 66 statistics on, 65 Single-gender education, 54 Slavery, see African Americans, slavery Social class, vi, vii, x, 3, 4, 7–9, 12, 13, 16, 17, 21, 24, 29–37, 40, 42, 47–49, 51–53, 56, 59, 60, 63–71, 74, 76–78, 83–85, 88 classism, 47, 84 and popularity, 39, 40, 43 and upward mobility, 40 white working class, 47 Social-emotional learning, 6 Social justice, 3, 5, 7, 8, 12, 31 Social media, 65 Sociology, ix Southern Poverty Law Center, 14 Sports/athletics, 21, 28, 39, 45, 46, 82 Student council, 8 Student housing, 4

 INDEX 

Students’ parents, x, 4, 44, 55, 79, 82, 87 Suicide, see Gun violence, suicide Supreme Court (U.S.), 26, 64 T Terrorism, 35 Textbooks, 14, 50 Title IX, 54 Trump, Donald, v, vi, viii, 26, 27 and Make American Great Again (MAGA), vi, viii Tubman, Harriet, 12 V Violence, see Gun violence; Sexual assault/harassment

105

W Wealth inequality, ix, 43 Weinstein, Harvey, 66 White privilege, ix, 11–22, 26 White students, vi, 4, 14, 17, 18, 84 See also White privilege White supremacy, 14, 84 Women and body image, 69 See also Gender identity; Sexual assault/Harassment Y Yoga, 4, 33 Z Zero-tolerance policies, 8