Classroom Racial Divide
Where Teacher Training Often Misses the Mark

By John Wolfson

Richard Miller has never forgotten what he learned the first time he taught his students the history of slavery. He can't forget. The same thing always happens.

Miller's lesson began 11 years ago, when he got his first teaching job, in New York City, after working for several years in the theater and then in journalism. A tall, trim white man from rural Pennsylvania, he had just received his teaching certification from Hunter College and was hired at Central Park East, an alternative public school in East Harlem. He arrived, he recalls, full of optimism, confident of his ability to teach social studies, and eager to work at a school where about 99 percent of the 500 students are black or Latino.

When the time came to teach the history of slavery to his eighth graders, Miller figured he was well prepared. He used teaching skills he learned at Hunter and dug deeply into the subject. His students read about lynching and beatings and families that were ripped apart. Miller drew upon his passion for history and racial issues and delivered what he believed was a thorough, thoughtful and nuanced lesson.

Nothing in his training, he said, prepared him for what came next.

Though many of his students responded well, some of his black pupils were so affected by the stories of what happened to their ancestors that they simply shut down, becoming depressed and unresponsive for weeks, even when studying other subjects.

"They couldn't take it," Miller, 47, recalled recently, whispering so he wouldn't disturb his students as they worked on a test. "It was just too painful for them."

It was the first time Miller had ever considered that studying slavery might distress some African-American students. The danger never arose during his training. "There certainly was no specific course in dealing with kids from different cultural backgrounds," he said.

Today, he teaches the in-depth slavery unit once every two years at Central Park East, and some students always shut down. But with experience, Miller has learned to watch his classroom carefully for pupils who may show signs of discomfort. He meets privately with those students and encourages them to talk about their feelings. The sessions allow the students to admit fears and insecurities they might hide from the rest of the class.

The slavery lesson illustrates just one way in which the racial divide at urban schools like Central Park East, where nearly all the students are of color and 75 percent of the teachers are white, can influence - and sometimes distort - classroom learning. Several educators warn that if teachers, especially those drawn from the white, middle class, falter in facing the classroom racial divide they can impair how students listen, learn and relate to one another. Moreover, critics say, failure to address race can subtly affect whether teachers believe in the potential of their minority students.

Thus, as President Bush calls for sweeping education reforms that "leave no child behind," many teachers and critics say at least one part of the remedy has been largely neglected - better training of white, middle-class teachers to recognize and overcome race and class challenges inherent in serving mostly low-income black and Latino students.

White teachers dominant urban education. In New York City, 64 percent of the teachers are white while 75 percent of the students are non-white. And New York is not alone, according to the Applied Research Center in Oakland. During the 1993-1994 school year, at least half the teachers in Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston were white while roughly 90 percent of the students were non-white, the center reports.

Miller said teachers and students in any classroom usually have different views of the world, often just because of generational outlooks. "But I think that's exacerbated when you're dealing with race, and class further complicates it," he said.

Poor training for the classroom race divide is unfair to both the teachers and the students, said the Rev. Calvin Butts, president of State University of New York College at Old Westbury and head of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. Butts said middle-class teachers often become frustrated and then give up because they feel they can't reach their students. The students, he said, have little faith in teachers they sense are unprepared, and often don't put forth their best effort. Old Westbury has begun to change its teacher preparation course to include training for teaching in urban schools, he said. College officials could not be reached for comment on the changes.

A. Lin Goodwin, an associate professor at Columbia University's Teachers College, said race in the classroom is a subject that is rarely talked about in society. "People are afraid of it," she said. "When do we talk about it? When there is a crisis." Teachers College, renowned for preparing teachers to work in urban schools, offers a diversity course for all students in its teacher preparation course, but that course sometimes draws criticism from the students.

Geoff Hunt, a 30-year-old white student at Teachers College, recalled the time he was student teaching in an urban school. As he scribbled on the chalkboard and spoke to the class, one student yelled out, "Damn, Geoff, why you gotta talk so proper all the time?" Hunt, from suburban Boston, replied, "Well, it's because I'm the whitest person you'll ever meet." He smiled at the memory. "They know it's true," Hunt said recently. "What should I do, pretend there isn't this racial difference, this cultural difference? They see it. Some teachers say they don't see race in their classroom. Well, believe me, everyone else in that classroom sees it."

Miller said a teacher who fails to see the race divide risks losing his students. "The kids say, 'This is a teacher I'm not going to learn from. He doesn't listen to me, why should I listen to him?'"

Terrell White, an African-American youngster with his hair in corn rows and an earring adorning each ear, receives "distinguished" marks, the equivalent of A's, in Miller's class. Still, Terrell insists that black students learn better from black teachers. "They'll relate to you better. They just understand," he said. "It's a black thing." While Terrell acknowledged that he has earned better marks this year than he did in a black teacher's class last year, he attributed the difference to his own motivation.

Another of Miller's students, Alexis, who is of mixed white and Hispanic heritage and who asked that her last name not be used, said race differences are less important than class differences. "If a black teacher grew up in Westchester, in a house, they won't understand us like a white teacher would, one who grew up in the projects," she said. "I do feel I learn more in (Miller's) class than I do in all the other classes I ever had."

Other students agreed and said the key lies in Miller's strict approach and in his willingness to learn about their lives. For instance, they said, he plays basketball with them and tells them how professional basketball teams got their nicknames. Several students said white teachers, and middle-class teachers of any race, could connect with their pupils better if they walked the surrounding neighborhoods occasionally and if they learned what interests their students.

The importance of understanding how race affects classroom performance is not limited to teacher-student relationships, Miller said. Recently, three girls in his class came to him because they were upset that an African-American male classmate continually made fun of their Puerto Rican heritage. "That then becomes a factor in your classroom," Miller said. "Those girls are not paying attention to learning; they're thinking about him."

Central Park East is in trouble. Many veteran teachers have left in recent years, and many more will leave after this year, Miller said. Most of the school's teachers are young and inexperienced, he said, and are uncomfortable talking about race with their students. The younger teachers are hesitant to discipline their students or to set rigorous academic standards, he said, often out of a sense of sympathy for what they believe have been difficult or disadvantaged lives.

Miller teaches in Room 431. Famous faces - black, brown and white - peer down from posters at the students, who sit at the 20 desks arranged in a square in the middle of the room.

Though classes were in session up and down the fourth floor hallway, tiled in gray with pink doorways, students wandered in and out of classrooms, seemingly without direction. Several times while his class was taking its test, Miller had to shoo away students who wandered from the hallway into his classroom. He didn't bother to write down their names. No students were sent to the principal's office for leaving class. For Miller, it was enough that his students could take their test in relative peace.

Jennifer Golub is Miller's teaching assistant. She attends Teachers College and, like many of her classmates, she chose the college in part because of its reputation for preparing teachers to work in urban environments. Students work five days a week as assistant teachers in inner-city schools. They take their college classes at night. All students in the college's teacher preparation program are required to take a diversity course, which meets once per week. The idea, said Golub, a 27-year-old Houston native, is to get the future teachers ready for the cultural differences they will encounter in urban classrooms and provide strategies for avoiding classroom problems.

But Golub said the diversity program is poorly run. While it does highlight potential areas of racial conflict or sensitivity, she said, it offers few practical solutions. The college students are encouraged to talk about their own feelings on race and culture, she said, but rarely delve into their students' racial experiences. "It ends up being a big therapy session," she said. "I think we should be talking about the kids."

Several of her fellow students agreed. They gave the college credit for discussing diversity but said, overall, it fails to prepare them for the obvious fact that they have lived very different lives from most of their students.

"I felt I was learning to teach in a perfect world, and we don't live in a perfect world," said Anna Emerald, a 32-year-old Hispanic woman from Los Angeles who recently graduated from Teachers College. "I would bring up issues of poverty and race, and we didn't deal with it in the classroom. They never really dealt with it."

But Goodwin, the Teachers College associate professor, said the diversity program is meant to begin, not end, the process of understanding race and class differences in the classroom. "It's about learning other people's cultures," she said. Understanding other cultures is important, she said, but does not, in itself, ensure that middle-class whites are prepared to teach low-income students of color. To further that preparation, Goodwin said, race and class awareness are integrated into most Teachers College courses, and students learn from their time student teaching.

Still, the future teachers said the college fails to provide even the most basic training for addressing the race divide, training such as role-playing classroom scenes about racial issues or bringing in members of the communities in which they teach to talk about race.

"It's too, 'Let's all love each other,'" said Michelle Capoures, a 25-year-old Asian-American woman from Michigan. "That's fine, but that doesn't work in the real world. If they had a little less, 'Let's all get along' and a little more practical experience, it would be better." Capoures said role-playing various situations would give her a reservoir of experience to tap in the classroom, a set of solutions to "shift this problem of cultural misunderstanding into something positive."

Jessica Vandersalm, a 29-year-old white woman, said an urban cultural affairs course that focused on art, history, politics and music would be a good way to prepare for teaching in the inner city. "At first, a white teacher has to work a lot harder to gain the trust of a black student," she said. "But if you're a smart and empathetic person, you can do great."

Goodwin said students may not fully appreciate the value of what they've learned until they have a classroom of their own. "Right now, they're tired, they have a lot thrown at them at once," she said. "My experience has been that once they are working as teachers, they look back at what they learned at Teachers College and say, 'Now that makes sense to me.'"