What If We Leave All the Children Behind? The Challenge of Teaching in the 21st Century
Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings


Our kids are living in poverty, and they’re being victimized by schools that fail to prepare them to enter an economy that requires increasingly high levels of literacy….In the name of ‘leaving no child behind’ we may indeed leave almost all of the children behind.”


Dr. Ladson-Billings described the social and economic challenges that many students and families face, including living in poverty and in single-parent families and students being behind in school and not graduating from high school. She said that educators are facing a nearly impossible task because they are expected to take the poor students, living in the poorest communities, consigned to the poorest school, and have them perform at the exact same levels as the students from the wealthiest homes and communities. In reality, the students living in poverty need the resources of schools much more than the wealthier students in order to achieve economic and social advancement.

The current focus on standards and high-stakes testing does not take these differences among students into account, and it does create problems such as the following:
• It causes standardization in learning that robs students of a rich and robust curriculum that would present the world in all its complexity and truth rather than in an oversimplified package.
•Students have to take courses that do little more than prepare them for the test rather than having quality curricula that encourage them to constantly strive.
• The tests have been made to serve as proxies for student learning. However, they are not a full measure of good teaching or accountability, especially because they only measure a few points in time in limited ways.
• Inflated test scores achieved through concentrated test preparation give the impression that teaching and learning in minority schools is improving when it actually may be severely compromised by the attempt to raise test scores.
• Teachers are increasingly having to read scripts, follow directions, administer tests, and punish students, and not contribute original ideas about designing and implementing curricula.

There are, however, some teachers that are continuing to teach in a culturally relevant way and focus on academic achievement, cultural competence, and social political consciousness.

Dr. Ladson-Billings concluded by raising the questions of “what is at stake” and “why is it important for teachers to teach in a culturally relevant way.” She answered these questions by saying that our democracy is at stake because to have a real democracy we need to educate people so that they can become citizens who are able to participate intelligently in the decisions that govern our nation.