• Excellent teachers pull on the strengths of students.
• Sometimes we ask the wrong questions, as researchers. Where are the excellent teachers and why are they missing from the research?
• Good teachers do not predict, they produce.
  

• Part of the problem is those who are doing the research and asking the questions are failures and not responsible for turning around the educational process.
  
• Children are falling into the hands of those that never wanted to be teachers in the first place.
  
• Schools are being run by people who have no clue or idea of what is going on. They are listening to the researchers asking the wrong questions.
  
• Education is controlled by people who have not had the intent and never demonstrated the process of excellence. After this process is fixed, then we can attend to special education. We know that special education was a small number before 1954 and increased tremendously after.
  

Dr. Beth Harry
Professor of the Department of Teaching and Learning
University of Miami

There's Nothing Wrong with Her, She Just Wants Her Mama!

Dr. Harry described the methods and results of an ethnographic study of the over-representation of minorities in special education in the Miami County Department of Schools.

The following methodology was used:

• Interviews with school personnel, parents, teachers, school administrators, janitors.
  
• Observations in classroom (K-3); selected two classes to sit in for three months.
  • Teaching style in classroom
  • Child study team meetings
• Studied early instruction, referral process, environment, and school factors contributing to student referrals.

Drawing from the results of her study, Dr. Harry made the following suggestions:

• Examine the environment from which the child is coming. It is not enough to do a social history. Observe child in home environment and school environment.
• Teachers must connect with students to find out their religious and cultural background.
• In the prereferral process, specify what needs to be done; specify who is doing what.
  
• Look out for negative beliefs, misconceptions, and preconceived misconceptions.
  
• Identify the school's responsibility in the evaluation.

Learning While Black: Creating Educational Excellence for African American Children

Dr. Hale criticized schools for failing African American children—especially boys—and for instilling failure in them. She called for greater instructional accountability and for redefining school for African American students.

Dr. Hale made the following observations about failure in our schools:

• Children in one set of schools are being educated to be governors. Children in the other schools are being trained to be governed.
  
• Failure is an active part of education for African Americans.
  
• African American males receive the most suspensions and lowest standardized tests. One-third of African American males in urban areas are addicted to drugs. Unemployment in urban areas is 50 percent and it is highly unlikely to know another African American male in a high position. An African American male is most likely to be killed by another black male and will have a shorter life than an African American female.
  
• Schools penalize children because of what they don't know.
  
• In order to understand what our children are not getting, we have to look at what rich white American parents are doing with their children.

She made comparisons between the education and penal systems, focusing on the plight of back males:

• African American children are being educated in a system that delivers girls to public assistance and boys to incarceration. Incarceration is an outcome of public education.
  
• Prisons are replete with African American males.
  
• America is excited about building more prisons. It costs $35,000 per year to incarcerate an African American. It costs $65,000 to incarcerate in maximum security. It costs $4,000 each year to put a child in Head Start. It costs less to put the money in the front end of life than to put the money at the back of life.

Suggestions for change included the following:

• Instructional accountability
  
  • African American children spend almost the entire year preparing for state tests.
    
  • The issue for the twenty-first century is not teacher training but teacher supervision.
    
  • How do we know that teachers are teaching what they know?
    
• The school has to be redefined as the family. Nobody drops out of the family.

Dr. Ronald Rochon
Interim Associate Dean of the College of Health, Physical Education, and Teacher Education and Director of the School of Education
University of Wisconsin, La Crosse

Attitude Adjustment: African American Student Perceptions of Identity and Curriculum

In his presentation, Dr. Rochon emphasized the relationship between cultural identity and academic success for African American students. Miseducation and racism play a key role in the learning experience of black children.

He made the following points about identity and culture:

• Persons of African descent have been socialized to believe their heritage is unimportant.
• Black people are not inquiring into their identity and culture.
• We have to engage in the discussion about what our children are learning-many of our children are focused on getting paid (quick money) and entertainers, but not about their history.
• Slave culture from the nineteenth century until the present has seen many different terms for African-Americans, and we have gone through many different terms to identify ourselves.
• I believe in the struggle of our ancestors. When you see African-American kids that are not doing well, they did not fail, we failed them. I want all children to succeed but usually we leave out black children.

Popular culture plays an important role in this dynamic:

• I went to the movies with an African American friend to see the movie Any Given Sunday and heard the lyrics to a song with the word nigger. I saw whites reciting the lyrics to the song. What does this mean? What are our children learning?
• The World Wide Web is full of images that reveal negative depictions of African-Americans and women.
• There was a movie called Meet The Parents—the movie had no people of color until you see a poster of Lil' Kim (black female recording artist) on a poster with her legs open, which makes you ask the question, How does the world see black women? Have your students write journals about how they see black women and you will be very surprised with what you see.

We do not talk about the miseducation of ourselves in general. It goes into the history of the racism in this country, such as the Halloween party at Auburn University with young white men dressed up in black face. James Byrd was not lynched in Texas by accident. What would W. E. B. Dubois want from us regarding educating black kids?

back to top

Dr. Robert Jagers
Associate Director of the Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at-Risk
Howard University

Contextual Enhancements to Promote Children's Developmental Competencies

A joint commission between Howard and Johns Hopkins examined whole school reform on the elementary and secondary levels. The focus of the study was on classroom assessment and professional development.

Dr. Jagers drew these conclusions from the study:

• We need to utilize the principle of multiple outcomes.
  • Educating the whole child
  • Links between academic achievement and social emotional success
• It is important to craft a shared vision about what must be done with these children and implementation that will change the outcomes for these children.
  • Talent-development in the elementary school setting
  • School-community partnership
  • Academic support activities that involve in class tutoring

He discussed the need to enhance specific developmental competencies:

• Hypothetical model of children's developmental competencies
  • Racialized cultural identity, socio-moral reasoning and emotions, social self-efficacy, social skills, peer relations, teacher-student relations, academic outcomes
• Intervention components
  • Classroom management workshop, caring community of learners, goals and assumptions, communication skills, class meetings, community norms and procedures (class rules/routines), responses—positive recognition and consequences
• Social emotional competence curriculum modules
  • Attitude and values, communication, problem-solving and decision-making, relationships
• Extended hour mentoring program
  • Academic skill enhancement, cultural and recreational activities, after school and weekend activities, community component, tutoring, rites of passage

Dr. James Patton
Professor of Leadership and Special Education
College of William & Mary

Disproportionality as a Symptom: Understanding the Dialectic

Dr. Patton defined disproportionality as a pivotal concept in understanding inequities in the education system--a problem that extends beyond special education.

• Disproportionality is not a special education problem alone. Its problems and symptoms cannot be removed from the general education, gifted education, and higher education discourses.
• Disproportionality is a problem because it creates stigma, provides limiting inappropriate services, reinforces school segregation, and correlates with negative outcomes like premature school leaving, school expulsions, and school suspensions at all levels.
• Civil rights concerns and ethical issues around equity and justice are involved (i.e., segregation after Brown v. Board of education poses new challenges)
• Problems lie primarily in special education categories that tend to rely on subjective judgments.
• The problem affects African American students (grades 3-12) nationally and also affects Latino and American Indians in geographic pockets.
• Disproportionality is a problem because it drives other bad outcomes.
  • For example, African Americans represent 16 percent of the school age population and they constitute 26 percent of those arrested, 30 percent of the cases in juvenile court, 40 percent of youth in juvenile detention, 45 percent of cases involving some form of detention, and 46 percent of the cases waived to criminal court.
• Children from culturally diverse backgrounds needing special education support often receive low-quality services and watered-down curricula.
• Disproportionality is a symptom of additional problems in teacher education training and professional practice such as the use of negative stereotypes, misperceptions, negative assumptions and attitudes, and inappropriate assessments, evaluations, eligibility, and placements.
• Disproportionality can be viewed as a symptom of the fact that certain ethnic groups have not had opportunities to learn, to identify with education and educational attainment, and ABT (ain't been taught).
• The absence of the voices from culturally and linguistically diverse parents, families, and communities represent symptoms exposed by disproportionality.

Dr. Geneva Gay
Professor of Curriculum and Instruction Faculty Associate of the Center for Multicultural Education
University of Washington, Seattle

Culturally Responsive Teaching

In her discussion of educational reform, Dr. Gay called for pedagogical equity, plurality, and authentic new research agendas. In the past, reformers have tried to make black kids into white middle-class kids, when what is necessary is an understanding of the total picture of culture.

Dr. Gay posed the following questions:

• What is "good education"? This concept comes from a particular cultural frame of reference.
• Curriculum: Where is the cultural content in the IEP for African American students?
• What do culturally responsive IEPs do as far as student performance? Performance is greater than academic achievement.
• We need to consider symbolism—What we teach children by types of images, icons, and symbols that we place in the context of learning. If we take the space in which ESE of African American students are to be taught and fill it with symbols of their culture, what kind of impacts would that have on student behavior, attitudes, etc...?

She also described an agenda for action:

• Pedagogy: This is a complex area—a way to think about this is by matching teaching styles with learning styles. Explore alternative pedagogies for African Americans: dance, drama, poetry.
• Building a new research agenda: Qualitative research based on observation and interviews, with an awareness of appropriate ways to interview African American students, teachers, and families.