The Dreamkeepers. Gloria Ladson-Billings
both at home and at school reinforced that idea. We were a people who overcame incredible odds. I knew that we were discriminated against but I witnessed too much competence—and excellence—to believe that African Americans didn't have distinctly valuable attributes.
Hollins has looked carefully at programs and strategies that have demonstrated a level of effectiveness with African American students.32 Her examination suggests that these programs fall into three broad categories—those designed to remediate or accelerate without attending to the students’ social or cultural needs; those designed to resocialize African American students to mainstream behaviors, values, and attitudes at the same time that they teach basic skills; and those designed to facilitate student learning by capitalizing on the students' own social and cultural backgrounds.
Falling within the first category are programs like the Chicago Mastery Learning Reading Program, where the focus is on remediation or acceleration in the basic skills.33 Hollins suggests that such programs, while they pay close attention to pacing, monitoring of instruction, and precise sequencing of objectives, virtually ignore the social or cultural needs of students.
The widely publicized New Haven, Connecticut, program entitled “A Social Skills Curriculum for Inner-City Children” is an example of a program that fits into Hollins's second category.34 This program represents an explicit attempt “to resocialize youngsters viewed as outside the mainstream and to inculcate in them mainstream perceptions and behaviors.”35 The philosophy behind such programs resembles that of the compensatory educational models of the 1960s and 1970s in that the children's academic problems are seen to be rooted in the “pathology” of their homes, communities, and cultures. Thus if the children can be removed or isolated from their culture of “deprivation,” then the school can transform them into people worthy of inclusion in the society.
Programs in the third category attempt to capitalize on students' individual, group, and cultural differences. Rather than ignoring or minimizing cultural differences, these programs see the differences as strengths to base academic achievement on. Cummins suggests that students are less likely to fail in school settings where they feel positive about both their own culture and the majority culture and “are not alienated from their own cultural values.”36 The work of Au and Jordan in Hawaii is an example of teachers' use of the students' own culture to improve their reading performance.37 Hollins argues that Chicago's Westside Preparatory School is an example of a program that uses African American culture to improve the students' academic performance.38
Even putting these programs with underlying agendas to resocialize African American students aside, there is some evidence to suggest more generally that when African American students attempt to achieve in school they do so at a psychic cost.39 Somehow many have come to equate exemplary performance in school with a loss of their African American identity; that is, doing well in school is seen as “acting white.” Thus if they do not want to “act white,” the only option, many believe, is to refuse to do well in school.40 Thus they purposely learn how not to learn. In contrast, the opportunity to be excellent academically, socially, and culturally underlies the thinking in many African American immersion schools.41 When schools support their culture as an integral part of the school experience, students can understand that academic excellence is not the sole province of white middle-class students. Such systems also negate the axiomatic thinking that if doing well in school equals “acting white,” then doing poorly equals “acting black.”
I was sent to an integrated junior high school that was not in my neighborhood. I describe it as “integrated” rather than “desegregated” because no court mandates placed black children there. I was there because my mother was concerned about the quality of our neighborhood school.
There were a handful of African American students in my seventh-grade class, but I knew none of them. They lived in a more affluent neighborhood than I did. Their parents had stable blue collar or white collar jobs. They had gone to better-equipped elementary schools than I had. The white students were even more privileged. Their fathers had impressive jobs as doctors, lawyers—one was a photojournalist. Most of their mothers were homemakers. In contrast, my mother and father both worked full-time. My father often even worked two jobs, yet we still lived more modestly than most of my classmates did.
In seventh grade I learned what it means to be competitive. In elementary school my teachers did not seem to make a big deal out of my academic achievements. They encouraged me but did not hold me up as an example that might intimidate slower students. Although I suspect I was a recipient of a kind of sponsored mobility—perhaps because my mother always sent me to school neat and clean and with my hair combed—I don't think this preferential treatment was obvious to other students. But in my new surroundings the competition was very obvious. Many of my white classmates made a point of showing off their academic skills. Further, their parents actively lent a hand in important class assignments and projects. For example, one boy had horrible penmanship. You could barely read what he scrawled in class, but he always brought in neatly typed homework. I asked him once if he did the typing and he told me that his mother typed everything for him. She also did the typing for his cousin, who was also in our class and had beautiful penmanship. The teachers often commented on the high quality of these typed papers.
I had come from a school where children learned and produced together. This competitiveness, further encouraged by the parents, was new to me. I could attempt to keep up with this unfair competition and “act white” or I could continue to work my hardest and hope that I could still achieve.
A Study of Effective Teaching for African Americans
This book examines effective teaching for African American students and how such teaching has helped students not only achieve academic success but also achieve that success while maintaining a positive identity as African Americans. It is about the kind of teaching that promotes this excellence despite little administrative or collegial support. It is about the kind of teaching that the African American community has identified as having its children's best interests at heart. It is about the kind of teaching that helps students choose academic success.
This book is based on my study of successful teachers of African American students, which was funded by a 1988 postdoctoral grant from the National Academy of Education's Spencer Foundation. I conducted this research during the 1988–89 and 1989–90 school years, with an additional in-depth study of two classrooms in the 1990–91 school year. The opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the position, policy, or endorsement of the National Academy of Education or of the Spencer Foundation.
I make a distinction between excellent teaching and excellent teachers purposely. Although each of the teachers who participated in my study are superb individually, this book looks at a teaching ideology and common behaviors, not at individual teaching styles. By choosing this path, I lose some of the distinctive and rich personal qualities of these marvelous individuals. However, I sacrifice this richness in favor of a focus on “the art and craft of teaching.”42 This focus is important because it minimizes the tendency to reduce the research findings to individual idiosyncrasies and to suggest a “cult-of-personality” explanation for effective teaching. Looking