Panel Gives Three Takes on Race And Education

How does racial disparity make itself felt in in the New Haven public school system today? And what is the best way to address that disparity so that all New Haven students are sufficiently prepared, supported, and empowered to become productive, self-sustaining citizens by the time they graduate high school?

Three local educational and policy experts offered three different takes on these questions during an hour-and-a-half panel discussion held on Tuesday night at the New Haven offices of Educators For Excellence at 153 East St.

Before an audience of several dozen educators, parents, and community activists, Karen Dubois-Walton, Genevieve Walker, and Billy Johnson argued for the relative importance of poverty, job preparedness, and curriculum reform in understanding the current state of racial inequality in New Haven schools. All the while, they challenged the local school system to recognize its failings and to prioritize providing sufficient, equitable education to the city’s black and brown populations. Inner City News Editor and WNHH radio host Babz Rawls-Ivy moderated the conversation.

“A Country That Creates Poverty”

DuBois-Walton, the executive director of Elm City Communities (also known as the Housing Authority of New Haven), made the strongest pitch for the outsized influence that poverty has in maintaining racial disparity in the city’s schools. Racialized poverty is not a matter of historical happenstance in this country, she argued. Rather, it is a collective decision that American society makes on a daily basis to support the affluent and punish the poor.

“We can’t move away from the fact that home ownership is the greatest wealth creator in this country,” she said, building off of Rawls-Ivy’s question about Connecticut’s overreliance on property taxes to fund public education. ​“And by systematically depriving that opportunity to entire segments of the population, we advantaged some and disadvantaged others. Wealth gets passed from one generation to the other, and if you start behind, that gap just grows with each generation.”

Drawing a connection between this country’s history of redlining, white flight, and federally sanctioned racial segregation, DuBois-Walton singled out the Mortgage Interest Deduction (MID) as the single largest housing subsidy offered by the government today, and therefore one of the bigger contributors to racial, economic, and educational inequality. By supporting homeowners based on the size of their mortgage, MID ensures that public funding and property tax dollars that could go toward affordable housing or public education are instead directed toward those least in need of government support.

“The question we have to ask ourselves is: Do we want to continue to be a country that creates poverty as opposed to ending poverty?” she asked the room. ​“Because our federal policies right now very much advantage the wealthy and the affluent.”

Change Within The Classroom

As the educators and educational administrators on the panel, Genevieve Walker and Billy Johnson shifted the conversation from economic justice to concerns about what happens in school classrooms, arguing that racial disparity manifests itself as much in the ​“doing” of education as in its funding.

Walker, the director of programs at Connecticut Center for Arts and Technology (ConnCAT) and a former 5th grade teacher at New Haven’s John Martinez School and Hamden’s Church Street School, lamented the low confidence and lower educational ability exhibited by many of the high school applicants to ConnCAT’s tuition-free medical and culinary programs. She described how students coming from the New Haven public school system are imbued with low expectations for themselves and their peers, and subsequently emerge underprepared to pursue subsequent educational or professional ambitions.

“The culture [in many of the city’s public schools] is one of defeat, from teachers, administrators, and students,” she said. With such low collective expectations, ConnCAT has to work twice as hard to retrain students after they graduate from high school so that they can gain meaningful employment and, if they choose, post-secondary education.

Johnson, a director of instruction at New Haven Public Schools who supervises 10 different magnet schools, neighborhood schools, adult education, and alternative programs throughout the city, recognized that the current school system suffers from low expectations and economic disadvantages. But to him, the root cause of the racial disparity that defines public education in this city and throughout the country comes from the material being taught in the classrooms themselves.

“Everyone likes to talk about expectations,” he said, ​“but no one likes to talk about race. There’s clearly a different expectation for students of color. Poverty is the excuse that so many of my colleagues lean on, but just because you’re impoverished does not mean you can’t learn. When we say changing how we ​‘do’ education, we’re actually talking about empowering students and giving them the skills and understanding of where they exist in the world.”

Johnson spoke about how too much of the current curriculum focuses on what happened to people of color in this country, as opposed to any active role that they played in the creation and development of national and world history. He referenced how his three-year-old daughter who sported a little afro came home one day and asked her mom to redo her hair, because she had learned at school that she simply could not wear her hair naturally.

“The majority of our students don’t understand where they exist in history,” he told the room. ​“So they don’t understand where they exist in present times.”

For Johnson, any efforts to ameliorate economic disadvantage, low expectations, a broken jobs pipeline, and racial disparity in education had to start with the curriculum itself. ​“The content has to change in the way we do education,” he said.