What does it mean to be poor and black in education
What does it mean to be poor in United States’ public education system?
The history and development of education in the United States always catered to the elite, the upper class. The poor were illiterate, uneducable, and delegated to a working class or servitude. They began to learn trades but rarely experienced the arts, humanities, and languages, which continued to subjugate their social status beneath the elite. Poor children attended poor schools. These schools had fewer resources, less books, more overcrowded classrooms, and remedial education.
Today, many of these schools do not offer advanced or college prep courses. Teachers teaching in these schools have less experience, are uncertified, and high turnover. Many of these schools become dumping grounds for the worst teachers in school districts, creating dropout factories. Children attending these schools are less prepared, score lower on standardized tests, and less likely to attend higher education institutions. For those children lucky enough to graduate, they eagerly accept opportunities to attend higher education, only leaving these institutions with higher debt.
Collectively, these experiences are traumatic. They create highly stressed environments that inhibit the physical and psychological wellbeing of black and brown children.
To be black, brown, and poor in the United States public education system requires great resilience. Black and brown children either adapts into an educational environment filled with stress-induced from trauma or falter to the wayside and become prison inmates.
The children required to adapt, travel great distance in order to attend better schools. They sit in isolation in advanced classes, more often, remaining silent as they do their required work and assignments. They ask internal questions, “Do I belong here? Am I smart enough? What do they think of me?” They are required to develop coping responses that undermine their cultural orientation in order to accept the dominant orientation. They must downplay their blackness, indigenousness, brownness, in order to reduce their perceived threat to the school system’s social order. They experience “acting white” as they assimilate and develop survival strategies to achieve acceptance and navigate the school experience. They must use a certain kind of language and engage a certain kind of behavior in order to reduce their alienation. Each encounter, each experience, message whether it is overt or covert affects wellbeing.
