LF: You write that Why We Teach Now is based on a “discourse of possibility.” Can you explain what you mean by that and how you think it compares/contrasts with how you see more typical education policy discussions taking place?
Sonia Nieto:
For the past couple of decades, we’ve been mired in a discourse of hopelessness. This is due to several factors, not the least of which has been the so-called “education reform movement” that has focused on rigid accountability, privatization, and the corporate takeover of public education, in effect stripping students and teachers of dignity and respect, and stripping the “public” out of public education. These policies and practices have resulted in the blaming of poor and marginalized communities as well as teachers for all the problems in public education. Rather than excite or motivate educators about their role in changing the situation, the climate of blame and retaliation has led to a massive exodus of teachers from the profession, the further alienation of the students who need the most support, and even large-scale cheating in an attempt to game the testing system. Hope has been hard to come by.
We should have seen these things coming. We can’t continue to blame teachers and the most vulnerable students for policies and practices over which they have little control. A good example is what is called “the achievement gap,” the difference in achievement between White students and students of color. I reject this term, preferring instead “opportunity gap” because many students of color and students living in poverty attend poorly resourced schools and simply haven’t had the kinds of opportunities and advantages that middle-class and wealthy students have had. To confirm this situation, all we need to do is visit schools in middle-class or wealthy neighborhoods and compare them with schools in poor neighborhoods. In most cases, there are enormous differences in the resources and opportunities they offer their respective students. And yet we continue to treat all students as if they’ve started out on a level playing field.
It’s for these reasons that I refer to the teachers featured in “Why We Teach Now” as engaged in “a discourse of possibility.” Whether they teach in cities or suburbs, large schools or small, early childhood or high school, they are filled with hope. But it is not a naïve hope, but instead a hope tempered by the reality of the situation in which they work and live. They’re realists with a sense of purpose and commitment. They know that the system is often rigged against the most vulnerable and yet they have hope in their students and themselves to resist and change the situation. Maria Rosario, a Chicago elementary school teacher, described it in this way in her essay: “Because schooling has always existed to indoctrinate young people into a system where the vote might be better controlled or their minds might be better molded to serve as members of the working class, I am able to be there to help my students dream of other possibilities for themselves” (p. 200).
Read the full interview between Sonia Nieto and Larry Ferlazzo here.