America's Schools and the Diminishing Promise of American Diversity: Reflection #8 on Perspective-Taking

So already, over the weekend, I read Paul Tough's excellent article, "How Kids Really Succeed," in the June 2016 Atlantic Monthly. The article begins by making sure that we readers understand that more than half of America's public school children are poor: "In 2013, for the first time, the majority of public-school children--51% to be precise--fell below the federal government's low-income cutoff, meaning they were eligible for a free or subsidized school lunch."*

Tough's article goes on to offer some real solutions to the problem of helping economically disadvantaged students develop the attitudes, beliefs, and work habits that will serve them well as learning in school demands more perseverance and risk-taking. His generous history of well-intentioned but flawed educational initiatives; his descriptions of the the two kinds of successful teachers, only one of which is generally acknowledged and celebrated; and his discussion of how understandings of the human brain can and should contribute to the design of educational reforms--in addition to his descriptions of those reforms themselves--are worth every educator's reading and discussing.

But it's diversity and perspectives that have most been on my mind in this American political season when talking across difference respectfully and openly has become rare--and suspect. Compromise is disdained in a climate that insists on categorizing people as winners or losers. What are students learning about difference, how it is to be regarded and negotiated, as they attend school and follow election politics on television and social media? And if they are learning in classroom groups that don't represent--or little represent--the types of differences that are shaping the social and political discourse (or discord) they are observing, will they do any better than their elders when it's their turn to participate in the "conversation" and vote?

My belief as a citizen is that Americans who will cast their ballots for different presidential candidates and who generally disagree about what the country and the world need, should still able to talk to one another, should actually to talk one another, and should feel compelled to understand as fully as possible the problems that affect all of us. My belief as an educator, enhanced by years of working with Project Zero ideas--most notably, Teaching for Understanding, Making Learning Visible, and several projects associated with the Interdisciplinarity and Global Studies initiative--is that perspectives matter, whether we're using the word "perspectives" to mean viewpoints of vantage points. Different perspectives aren't merely inevitable; they're useful. If our students can recognize, respect, explore, even to feel some of the emotion associated with others' perspectives, they will develop nuanced, high-quality understandings that can actually be applied in a world composed of flesh-and-blood other people, not just the idea of "other people."
 
Whether diverse perspectives are found in the curricular content itself, among the students in the classroom, and/or among actual people beyond the classroom, they require acknowledgment and attention. And when they represent not just divergences in students' academic reasoning, but heartfelt differences of opinion and sense-making shaped by students' individual cultures, beliefs, identities, and experiences, talking across those differences is much more difficult--and all the more crucial. The challenge for educators is to ensure that all students feel adequately safe and welcome to speak and be, that all are listened to with comparable openness and respect, and that all experience themselves as authentically part of the group, especially when disagreements and differences raise the question of whether the group will be able to stretch enough to accommodate all the differences that are arising.

My last ever CRLS students being themselves

I believe that teenagers are the perfect people to be learning the skills and mindsets associated with capitalizing on diversity. Developmentally ready to understand complex phenomena and issues that affect people's lives, and not yet committed to particular roles, positions, and courses of action, they are apt to respond to other ways of seeing and thinking less defensively and more openly than adults generally do. Ideally, students in diverse groups that explore and value members' different perspectives develop tools and techniques for negotiating difference in other settings; come to value difference's capacity to energize and inform critical and creative thinking; and increasingly appreciate and trust in the experiences of getting to know, and getting to be known by, different others, especially if they had little expectation of such experiences. Students in such groups delight not only in their personal feelings of being appreciated members of a diverse group of people, but in their classmates' similar feelings of acceptance and belonging. Furthermore, they feel prepared to engage in civic life in the present and the future, and inclined to do so.

But how does this happen if the student group isn't very diverse at all? It's quite possible that there are very homogeneous student groups in small communities that are far from other small homogeneous communities--and in those cases exploring diversity might require forging connections via the internet with people whose priorities, histories, levels of achievement, and life experiences may be quite unlike "our own."

But my bigger concern is the diversity that doesn't happen when the "people whose priorities, histories, levels of achievement, and life experiences may be quite unlike 'our own'" are a room away, a street away, a neighborhood away, or a town away--in other words, really close by, but deliberately separated off for particular reasons or according to certain criteria. So the lack of diversity in a student group that exists in a relatively diverse context might reflect any of the following: 

• a school policy that groups or tracks students according to achievement or "academic readiness"--and in so doing deliberately or inadvertently segregates students economically, at least to some degree; 
• a real estate market that dictates which schools poorer and wealthier students will attend--and thus keeps them separate;
• the choice of many parents to opt out of public education entirely--and to send their children to schools that are for people "like us" in one or more ways.

Though the general tendency of the media is to talk about public education as American education, it's about time we started looking at "America's schools" as an umbrella term for the collectivity of systems, schools, and networks that educate all American school-age children. Because I read Paul Tough's 51% statistic right after I'd had contact with friends who work in private schools, were themselves educated in private schools, and/or had sent their own children to private schools, I wondered what percentage of all American school-age children this 51% of the public school population represented. 

In addition, because I'd recently read Emily Badger's "For kids, neighborhood (and its schools) make all the difference, study says," reprinted from The Washington Post in The Boston Globe, I was already thinking about the huge role economics plays in the sorting of American students across the board. In discussing Ann Owens' findings about the roles wealth and neighborhood play in children's educations, Badger writes,

        "The nationwide phenomenon of rising income segregation is in effect the aggregate outcome of parents who can afford to jockey for position for their kids. And as income inequality has widened over this same time, the rich have more and more money to spend on the real estate arms race to get into wealthy neighborhoods, where everyone else is wealthy, too. (And the same can be said of the local classrooms.) 
        " . . .
        "Owens additionally argues that as wealthy parents are spending their added resources on housing, they’re choosing that housing with schools, particularly, in mind. In her data, there’s wider income segregation among families with children in ‘‘fragmented’’ metropolitan areas that have more school districts for parents to choose from, allowing greater sorting between low-quality and coveted districts."**

With Badger's article in mind, I speculated that the students whose educations were of greatest concern to Paul Tough were probably attending schools with classmates who were economically similar to them--and perhaps racially, ethnically, and linguistically similar to them, too.

Again, the question isn't whether kids can learn academic skills and content in any of these settings--Paul Tough is emphatic that the economically disadvantaged students he describes can learn (I agree!), and he provides examples of two approaches--not yet widely adopted--that work (66). The question is what impact a lack of diversity in these schools and groups will have on students' social, civic, and academic development and their future behaviors, attitudes, and paths as adult American and global citizens.

What does it say about us when "the adults" claim that there's value in knowing and understanding "different" people, but then design schools and classrooms that minimize or downright prevent interactions among "different" students? Why does it say about us that even though we assert the value of being able to work with others, we seldom create educational settings and opportunities that facilitate "different" students' talking to one another, getting to know one another, actually working together--and, in doing so, coming to appreciate what one another brings to the joint learning endeavor?*** Is it difference itself that we fear, or are we afraid that our skills are insufficient to make difference productive? Or is what's really holding us back our not-so-hidden belief that difference is overrated, that contact with certain "different" people could harm us or hold us back, that America is and always will be a place where longstanding hierarchies will keep us separate and unequal, so why bother to learn to live and work together anyway?

I wonder how students make sense of the explicit and tacit messages they get about "difference" from their schools' and their parents' decisions--or their parents' non-existent opportunities to make decisions--about where and with whom they should learn. When students go to school only with people of their own faith, for example, how do they interpret their being "schooled apart" from students reared in other religious traditions? When is deliberate separateness a comment about who "we" are, and when is it a comment about who "they" are? And what about students who attend schools that are "better" because they offer "better" programs for "better" students? How do those students view their own status as "better," and how does it shape their attitudes toward those students who are "different" and "worse" for either financial or academic reasons--and who, as a result, are denied this "better" educational opportunity?

Neil Gabler, in an Atlantic article published in May 2016, described his reasons for choosing private school for his daughters:

I never wanted to keep up with the Joneses. But, like many Americans, I wanted my children to keep up with the Joneses’ children, because I knew how easily my girls could be marginalized in a society where nearly all the rewards go to a small, well-educated elite. (All right, I wanted them to be winners.) **

Gabler practically goes broke paying for this girls' schooling, then moves his family to the suburbs so his daughters can attend a well-regarded public high school; but I always wonder how children being raised to be winners in an educational sweepstakes their parents see as having both winners and losers (a) define "losers" and (b) regard "losers." 

And what about those students who know that no one thinks they're smart and "better"--for example, the students I taught at English High School about fifteen years ago who told me, "This is the worst high school, Miss Soble, and everyone knows it. No one wants to come here," and "This place sucks, Miss Soble, and everyone thinks we're losers because we go here"? There was no economic diversity at English High: everyone was poor, and almost everyone was dark-skinned.

The daily experience of many EHS students was probably much like what Ta-Nehisi Coates talked about at the National Education Association Foundation Convening last October, captured in the tweets to the right and left. At Cambridge Rindge and Latin School--the only district high school in Cambridge, the school at which I spent most of my professional career, a school that has a truly diverse student body in terms of economics, race, ethnic background, and language--I suspect far fewer students feel similarly physically endangered on a daily basis. That said, current grouping practices at CRLS segregate students and make authentic classroom interchange across economic and racial difference difficult to achieve, despite the fact that real diversity exists. My first thirteen years at CRLS were as part of the Pilot School, the democratic alternative school within CRLS that specified "diversity" as one of its core principles and values; during my last five years at CRLS, I taught Advanced Placement classes that were predominantly white, despite the fact that CRLS is not predominantly white.

I think what I really want to know--and this is as much a public school issue as a private school issue, given the many public schools that essentially provide separate programs and school experiences for "better" and "worse" students--is what are the effects on students' future politics, activism, career choices, and life choices when their parents and their schools communicate, directly or indirectly, that winning matters and losers do not, and that some students really shouldn't be learning with others.

I know that not everyone shares my ideas about the inherent value of diversity, about the value of communities' and societies' actively exploring their own diversity and getting to know people and peoples whose collective and individual experiences are very different from their own. So if you're one of those people who would rather "stick to your own kind" and want your children to do the same, if you prefer that your children explore diversity intellectually but not interact with different others, then I hope you'll consider Ethan Zuckerman's thoughts about diverse learning groups.

In the chapter of Digital Cosmopolitans entitled "The Connected Shall Inherit," Zuckerman asserts that "In some [problem-solving] circumstances, diversity trumps ability" (257).**** He talks about an experiment performed by University of Michigan scholar Scott Page and his colleague Lu Hong, who created a computer model that could simulate the competition of two teams, one composed of "random" problem-solvers and one composed of identified "highly skilled" problem-solvers, to solve a problem too complicated to be solved by one person. Zuckerman explained their results as comparable to the "'best and the brightest' problem" (259):

    President John F. Kennedy was noted for surrounding himself with smart, young foreign policy advisers . . .. These individuals were unquestionably bright, but they came from similar backgrounds--the best preparatory schools and elite universities, the same university and foreign policy jobs. Personality differences aside, they tended to solve problems in similar ways. Furthermore, they liked the solutions their fellow advisers proposed, because those solutions were comfortable, familiar, and likely to preserve harmony within the group. As a result, they didn't look for other perspectives or solutions, and reinforced each other's limited thinking, a process the psychologist Irving Janus termed 'groupthink.'
     "A shared set of assumptions about China, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam proved disastrously wrong" (259).

For those who see no social and civic benefit to interacting across differences, the value of diversity might lie in the fact that winning professionally and economically in a world in which complex, global problems create career--and therefore economic--opportunities may be tied to embracing diverse perspectives and communicating across difference.

At the same NEA Foundation Convening at which Ta-Nehisi Coates discussed his experience as a student, Finland's Pasi Sahlberg shared his assessment of the five practices and approaches that doom education reform movements. Among them were privatization and competition, which I maintain also doom the promise of American diversity because they cut students off from a number of perspectives and judge certain perspectives as inherently less worthy of time and attention. 

We need to create schools and classrooms in which students come to appreciate their fellow students' "different" perspectives as capable of enriching their understandings of themselves, their communities, and the world. We need to create schools and classrooms in which students experience the value of learning, creating, and solving problems with those who think differently and know other things. Finally, we need to create schools and classrooms that foster not only appreciation of other people, but actual connections to and relationships with them.  And we can do it: we've done it before, albeit in a climate less committed to standardization and test-taking and more committed to "justice for all" and "give me your tired, your poor." If we don't do it, we will increasingly inhabit a world of gated communities and dangerous separations. 

The diminishing belief in the importance of American diversity threatens the dream of American democracy. Diverse schools and classrooms that foreground diversity and use it to ground and enhance students' social, civic, and academic experiences can go a long way toward helping to secure that endangered dream that is just too good and too important to lose.

* Tough, P. (2016, June). How kids really succeed. The Atlantic, 317(5), 56-66.  
** Badger, E. (2016, May 11). For children, neighborhood can be the key, study suggests. The Boston Globe, p. A2.

*** Gabler, N. (2016, May). The secret shame of middle-class Americans. The Atlantic. Retrieved May 31, 2016, from http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secret-shame/476415/ 
**** [The connected shall inherit]. (2013). In E. Zuckerman (Author), Digital cosmopolitans: Why we think the internet connects us, why it doesn't, and how to rewire it. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.