Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom

Introduction to the 2005 Edition

Lisa Delpit

A lot has happened since I first sat down to write the original introduction to Other People’s Children, both in my life and in the life of the country. I have gone from being the anxious yet hopeful mother of a five-year-old just entering the public school system to the exhausted and discouraged mother of a sixteen-year-old who has struggled through nine schools from first to eleventh grade in our attempt to find a school that makes sense.

Since the publication of Other People’s Children, the country’s educational system has become caught in the vise of the No Child Left Behind Act, which mandates more standardized testing of children than the country has ever seen, with more and more urban school districts adopting teacher-proof curricula to address low test scores, along with school consultants whose sole purpose is to police teachers’ adherence to scripted lessons, mandated classroom management strategies, and strict instructional timelines that ignore the natural rhythms of teaching and learning.

But perhaps one of the changes that carries the most weight for all of us is the realization that we are not the country we once believed ourselves to be. The great putrid underbelly of racism and classism in our nation has been exposed through the tragedy of New Orleans. The horror of nature’s attack on a major U.S. city has been overshadowed by the distorted attitudes toward those who are darker and poorer. Tens of thousands of American citizens were abandoned, suffering a dearth of food, water, sanitation, and basic medical attention, and, in too many instances, left to die from neglect.

All of these changes affect my thinking as I pen this introduction to Other People’s Children over a decade after its first publication. Overall, I write now with a sense that, like the unicorn who frolicked in the rain instead of getting on the ark, we have missed a very important boat. We have given up the rich meaningful education of our children in favor of narrow, decontextualized, meaningless procedures that leave unopened hearts, unformed character, and unchallenged minds.

I recently invited a group of educators to ponder a fictional scene:

The year is 2092. The hundred-year-old man lies on his death bed, contemplating his long life. His children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren surround him. He has lived a good life - there have been good times and bad times; he has accomplished much that he is proud of and had many experiences that he’d prefer to forget. One of his favorite grandsons looks into his eyes and asks, Grandpa, is there anything you regret in your life? The old man closes his eyes. Just when his family thinks he has drifted off to sleep, he opens them again and says with an expression of deep, wistful longing, Son, I just really wish with all my heart that I could have scored higher on the state-mandated achievement tests.

The absurdity of this scene is clear. And yet we in education have allowed politicians to push us to act as if the most important goal of our work is to raise test scores. Never mind the development of the human beings in our charge - the integrity, the artistic expressiveness, the ingenuity, the persistence, or the kindness of those who will inherit the earth - the conversation in education has been reduced to a conversation about one number.

It has been, in part, this type of education that has driven my family in the frustrating search for a school that would consider my daughter’s entire being and not merely her ability or inability to produce a test score. Although my child suffered from the reductionism of test-mania, children in low-income communities suffer even more greatly.

When we strip away a focus on developing the humanity of our children, we are left with programmed, mechanistic strategies designed to achieve the programmed, mechanistic goal of raising test scores. Nowhere is the result more glaring than in urban classrooms serving low-income children of color, where low test scores meet programmed, scripted teaching. The reductionism spawned has created settings in which teachers and students are treated as nonthinking objects to be manipulated and managed.

Of course, as I submitted in Other People’s Children, it is still imperative that we actually teach children the academic skills they need to be successful participants in society, but I now realize, with ever-increasing clarity, that we must do that and much more. I will be forever grateful for locating a school for my child that has embraced the idea of much more and institutionalized it, not only in its two boarding schools in New England but in public charter schools serving predominantly African American children in New Haven, Connecticut; Washington, D.C.; Oakland, California; and, soon, Harlem, New York. That school is the Hyde School, which takes as its mission the education of the hearts, minds, and souls of its students. Rather than enforce some narrow, lop-sided version of education, founder Joe Gauld says the Hyde School’s message to students is:

- that they have an important purpose on this earth and the unique potential to fulfill it.

- that their true worth is measured not by their social status, intellect, or talents, but by the strength of their character.

- that we admire their attitude and effort, and care less about their actual achievements, because these will come with time if they develop character traits like those emblazoned on the Hyde School shield: Courage, Integrity, Concern, Curiosity, and Leadership. ¹

The Hyde Schools do not take these ideas lightly. Every student, every teacher, and every parent pursues a rigorous curriculum of character development, and students consistently hold each other to their best efforts - intellectually, physically, spiritually, emotionally, and socially.² Hyde’s assumption that character development leads to achievement is borne out by the overall record of its graduates. Not only do more than 95 percent of the boarding school’s graduates go on to four-year colleges, but 100 percent of the 2005 seniors at the public school, Hyde D.C., were accepted into four-year colleges.

I am more concerned now with the development of the character of our children than I was when I originally wrote Other People’s Children. This is in part because, as my own child advanced through the grades, I have become more involved with older students. Engaging almost any middle- or highschooler, regardless of ethnicity or social class, in a real conversation about schools will inevitably leave one with a sense of the vacuousness of much schooling. Seldom are students encouraged to tackle the deep moral issues they must tussle with in this complex time, nor are they led to think about themselves as agents responsible for a larger world. I cannot help but believe that the past decade’s phenomenon of middle-class white students turning into assassins is connected to the emptiness of what many of our students call schooling. There continue to be dedicated, thoughtful, committed teachers in our schools, but the narrow focus of No Child Left Behind has driven them to despair as their administrators mandate more and more meaningless, mechanistic goals.

Were we focused on our children as inheritors of the future, perhaps we could be more deliberate in teaching them the traits they need to become protectors of the earth and all of its inhabitants. Perhaps then we would have seen a different outcome in New Orleans.

In the original introduction to Other People’s Children, I spoke of the deadly fog created when the cold mist of bias and ignorance met the warm reality of children of color. I spoke of how that fog fed the monstrous stereotypes held by so many about young black males. If there existed a metaphoric fog in 1995, then the hurricane known as Katrina is both an apt metaphor and a portrayal of the literal truth of the level of deadly bias that exists in 2005.

Like many Americans, I sat in my comfortable home, horrified but unable to turn away as the Katrina tragedy unfolded. Even while on-location news reporters pleaded with the powers that be to rescue the thousands of poor black people left in deplorable conditions, I watched one eight-second clip of a few black residents taking non-survival items replayed over and over again, day and night, with the unstated implication that those left behind were not worthy of rescue. A picture described two white victims as finding bread and soda at a local grocery store, while a picture of black survivors, also carrying bread, was labeled as looting.

Newscaster after newscaster described black people so out of control that police were needed to restrain them rather than to rescue them. Young men with guns were said to be terrorizing police and shooting at the helicopters sent to rescue them.

It has only been since the real stories of the survivors have surfaced in a few venues that the mainstream reports can be shown to be the distorted, racially biased interpretations that they were. Yes, eyewitnesses reported, there were those who shot at helicopters, but they were firing in frustration as helicopters passed over them, bound for the mostly white suburbs of Kenner and Metarie (home of KKK notable David Duke) to rescue people there rather than saving those in the severely flooded areas of New Orleans. They said the shots were fired because black people were being ignored again.

Denise Moore, trapped in the Morial Convention Center, says that there were young men with guns, but they were the only help the people there could count on. These young men got food and water for the old people and the babies because no one had eaten in days. Police and National Guardsmen dropped people off but no one was picked up, and no provisions were supplied. When the buses finally came, Ms. Moore declared, it was the young men with guns who organized the crowd: old people in front, women and children next, and men last. When she got to safety, Ms. Moore says she couldn’t believe how these young men were portrayed on television. She kept repeating to her interviewer, Make sure you tell everybody that they left us there to die. . . . Those young men with guns were protecting us. If it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t have had the little food and water they had found. ³

A young black man able to start a New Orleans Parish school bus picked up forty to fifty starving and dehydrated people and drove eight hours to the Houston Astrodome. The young man was called a thief. The bus was called a renegade bus, and the hurricane survivors on the bus were denied access to the Astrodome because they did not come directly from the New Orleans Superdome on a designated bus and they had arrived sooner than the chartered buses. They were eventually taken in and given water and food, but some report that the seventeen-year-old driver was arrested after returning to New Orleans to rescue others.

While all of the patients in the mostly white Tulane Hospital were expediently evacuated, days passed before the mostly black and poor patients of Charity Hospital were slowly evacuated, and then only after desperate phone calls from overwhelmed, exhausted, and dehydrated nurses played over the airwaves.

Poor people and people of color are clearly in trouble in this country. And this means that we as a country are in trouble. Our trouble cannot be resolved by the creation and administration of standardized tests. Our trouble cannot be resolved by teacher-proof curricula. The troubles of our country - indeed, the troubles of our world - can be addressed only if we help ourselves and our children touch the deep humanity of our collective spirit and regain the deep respect for the earth that spawned us. Perhaps we can learn from traditional African education, where the role of teachers is to appeal to the intellect, the humanity, and the spirituality of their students. ⁴

The year 2005 brings me both hope and despair. I despair when I see good teachers either leaving the profession or closing down their creativity in the face of school policies that kill real learning rather than promote it. And I am discouraged by the treatment of people of color and poor people in this country, which Katrina epitomized.

On the other hand, I am filled with hope when I see schools like Hyde and others around the country that treat children with the belief that we are working with precious resources when we seek to educate young people, when I receive hundreds of letters from teachers of all colors who are frustrated but deeply committed to doing the best for children, when I see young people who devote time and energy to making the world a better place. It makes my heart smile when I meet college and high school students who have joined the Young People’s Project, in which young college students devote great chunks of their free time to becoming Community Math Literacy Workers so they can teach younger children to be successful in mathematics. Or when I find out about young people who are volunteering time to help New Orleans residents repair their houses.

When I consider what I would like to see in the education of our children, I continue to want all of our children to achieve academic success. But I also know that there must be more. I am always moved by a letter that Haim Ginott included in Teacher and Child, given by a principal to all of his teachers on the first day of the new school year:

Dear Teacher:

I am the survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness:

Gas chambers built by learned engineers.

Children poisoned by educated physicians.

Infants killed by trained nurses.

Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates.

So I am suspicious of education. My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing and arithmetic are important only if they were to make our children more humane.⁵

Introduction

SCENE I

Carolyn is a young Irish-American kindergarten teacher who has been teaching for five years. The school at which she has taught has been a predominantly white, middle-class school in a quiet neighborhood in New England. However, because of recent redistricting, the school population now includes children from a housing project not far away. These children are almost exclusively poor and black. Thus, Carolyn and the other teachers in the school are newly faced with a population of children with whom they are completely unfamiliar.

I am working on a research project with Carolyn. She has asked me to observe a little boy named Anthony, a five-year-old black child from the projects, whom she has defined as a child with behavioral, learning, and language problems. She wants to use the results of my observations to get him help.

In my observations of Anthony in the classroom, I have noticed that he gets almost no positive feedback during the course of a day, and instead receives a tremendous number of negative comments. I have taken Anthony out into the hallway several times to talk and play privately so as to get a better assessment of his actual abilities. The following dialogue is taken from a transcript of my conference with Carolyn about my observations. I am attempting to point out some of Anthony’s positive points to Carolyn:

L: Anthony told me that he liked school and that his favorite thing in his class was group time.

C: That’s amazing, since he can’t sit still in it. He just says anything sometimes. In the morning he’s OK; after nap he’s impossible.

L: He’s really talking more, it seems!

C: He’s probably never allowed to talk at home. He needs communicative experience. I was thinking of referring him to a speech therapist. He probably never even got to use scissors at home.

L: He told me about his cousin he plays with after school. It seems he really does have things to talk about.

C: It’s unfortunate, but I don’t think he even knows what family means. Some of these kids don’t know who their cousins are and who their brothers and sisters are.

SCENE II

Charles is a three-year-old African-American boy who likes a little white girl in my daughter’s nursery school class. Like most three-year-olds, his affection is expressed as much with hugs as with hits. One morning I notice that Charles has been hovering around Kelly, his special friend. He grabs her from behind and tries to give her a bear hug. When she protests, the teacher tells him to stop. A short time later he returns to her table to try to kiss her on the cheek. She protests again and the teacher puts him in time-out. I comment to the teacher with a smile that Charles certainly seems to have a little crush on Kelly. She frowns and replies that his behavior is way out of line. She continues with disgust in her voice, Sometimes what he does just looks like lust.

SCENE III

One evening I receive a telephone call from Terrence’s mother, who is near tears. A single parent, she has struggled to put her academically talented fourteen-year-old African-American son in a predominantly white private school. As an involved parent, she has spoken to each of his teachers several times during the first few months of school, all of whom assured her that Terrence was doing just fine. When the first quarter’s report cards were issued, she observed with dismay a report filled with Cs and Ds. She immediately went to talk to his teachers. When asked how they could have said he was doing fine when his grades were so low, each of them gave her some version of the same answer: Why are you so upset? For him, Cs are great. You shouldn’t try to push him so much.

As I lived through each of these scenarios, a familiar sense of dread closed in around me: my throat constricted, my eyes burned, I found it hard to breathe. I have faced this fog too many times in my career in education. It is a deadly fog formed when the cold mist of bias and ignorance meets the warm vital reality of children of color in many of our schools. It is the result of coming face-to-face with the teachers, the psychologists, the school administrators who look at other people’s children and see damaged and dangerous caricatures of the vulnerable and impressionable beings before them.

But we cannot blame the schools alone. We live in a society that nurtures and maintains stereotypes: we are all bombarded daily, for instance, with the portrayal of the young black male as monster. When we see a group of young black men, we lock our car doors, cross to the other side of the street, or clutch our handbags. We are constantly told of the one out of four black men who is involved with the prison system - but what about the three out of four who are not? During a major storm this past winter, a group of young black men in my neighborhood spent the day freeing cars that were stuck in the ice. When do we see their lives portrayed on the six o’clock news?

So, as a result of living in this society, their teachers make big assumptions about Anthony, Charles, and Terrence. They judge their actions, words, intellects, families, and communities as inadequate at best, as collections of pathologies at worst. These stories can be justifiably interpreted as examples of racism. However valid that interpretation may be, it is insufficient, for it gives us no clue as to how to resolve the problem. Indeed, these views are not limited to white adults. In my experience in predominantly black school districts, the middle-class African-American teachers who do not identify with the poor African-American students they teach may hold similarly damaging stereotypes. These adults probably are not bad people. They do not wish to damage children; indeed, they likely see themselves as wanting to help. Yet they are totally unable to perceive those different from themselves except through their own culturally clouded vision. In my experience, they are not alone.

We all carry worlds in our heads, and those worlds are decidedly different. We educators set out to teach, but how can we reach the worlds of others when we don’t even know they exist? Indeed, many of us don’t even realize that our own worlds exist only in our heads and in the cultural institutions we have built to support them. It is as if we are in the middle of a great computer-generated virtual reality game, but the realities displayed in various participants’ minds are entirely different terrains. When one player moves right and up a hill, the other player perceives him as moving left and into a river.

What are we really doing to better educate poor children and children of color? Sporadically we hear of minorities scoring higher in basic skills, but on the same newspaper page we’re informed of their dismal showing in higher-order thinking skills. We hear of the occasional school exemplifying urban excellence, but we are inundated with stories of inner-city mass failure, student violence, and soaring drop-out rates. We are heartened by new attempts at school improvement - better teacher education, higher standards, revised curricula - even while teachers of color are disappearing from the workforce and fiscal cutbacks increase class sizes, decimate critical instructional programs, and make it impossible to repair the buildings that are literally falling down around our children’s heads.

What should we be doing? The answers, I believe, lie not in a proliferation of new reform programs but in some basic understandings of who we are and how we are connected to and disconnected from one another. I have come to some of those understandings through my own attempts to understand my place in