Published Online: September 15, 2015
Published in Print: September 16, 2015, as 'Hoping for a Yes' in a Troubled District
COMMENTARY
Empowering Students in the Wake of Michael Brown's Death
Students Speak Up: What Bias Means to Them
By Inda Schaenen
I have my dream job: small class sizes; bright, lively, curious students; lots of
affection; professional autonomy; and all the supplies we need. People, peace,
love, and stuff. In the first days of school, my 60 7th and 8th grade students memorized the first
stanza of Emily Dickinson's poem "Hope Is the Thing With Feathers" and worked in teams to
build a free­standing structure out of string, tape, dry spaghetti, and a marshmallow.
I teach in Normandy, Mo., about a mile from Ferguson. Provisionally accredited for years,
Normandy was unaccredited in early 2013, which triggered the application of Missouri's school
transfer law. In the fall of 2013, 25 percent of our 4,000 students left for schools in higher­
scoring districts, with Normandy obliged to pay tuition and busing costs to at least one of those
districts. Less than a year later, Normandy High School graduate Michael Brown was shot in
Ferguson.
Last year in this publication, I wrote about teaching in a community where educational
dysfunction intersects with racially charged public outrage. In the late summer of 2014, I had no
idea how much worse things would get. A teacher down the hall quit midweek after a student
hurled a textbook at the back of her head. Pressured to deliver higher attendance rates and test
scores, we teachers had no time to ameliorate our school climate and adjust to the precipitous
exodus of colleagues, who found our working conditions intolerable. Outsiders were sent in to
observe our data­team meetings, where we discussed student performance on isolated standards
like identifying main idea or inferencing when we should have been rethinking foundational
assumptions about literacy learning in the district.
Meanwhile, I taught students I loved. We read, wrote, listened, reflected, and talked. As best I
could, I incorporated content from other classrooms and made time for uninterrupted, sustained
silent reading. Pedagogically speaking, however, I was bushwhacking. My students did not even
recognize that I was actually teaching them language arts.
At the end of the year, students ill­prepared for 9th grade were promoted to high school despite
teachers' clearly communicated assessments of where these students stood academically. At the
8th grade promotion ceremony, a candid member of the Missouri state board of education
apologized to the students for the failures of the state. This was encouraging. But if failure is
necessary for learning, so is a valid assessment of context and history.
The Normandy school district hit rock bottom because of bad things
happening for a while at every level of the system. We can't blame local
boards and administrators without also blaming misguided education
policy. And we can't blame bad policy without blaming inequitably and
imprudently distributed resources. We can't blame teachers without
blaming unenlightened, mandated curriculum; student transience; the
unmet social­emotional needs of students; and the lack of student
accountability.
“Wherever public
schools go wrong,
we ought to be
talking about
failures that span
institutions.”
Essentially, we can't blame public education practices without weighing the realities that have
affected and continue to affect the residents of Normandy: segregative residential redlining,
subprime lending, the loss of manufacturing jobs, the middle­class flight to the suburbs, poverty,
substandard access to health care, housing insecurity and mobility, racially biased policing, a
racially biased juvenile­justice system, and racially biased municipal court practices, among other
factors.
Wherever public schools go wrong, we ought to be talking about failures that span institutions.
But viewing public education sociologically, comprehensively, and structurally frightens most
people. And blaming does no good, especially when it's heard as excuse making. And looking at
the problem holistically certainly doesn't appeal to people who profit from addressing parts here
and there—the sellers of education's version of Band­Aids and tourniquets.
There's not a single root cause for the troubles that
undermine districts like Normandy that are
predominantly African­American, low­income, high­
poverty, with a high percentage of students who
struggle academically. There is rather a root­ball
cause, tangled tight inside interconnected systems that
subordinate and harm a specific group of people.
People like the children I teach.
Complete Series: Beyond Bias
And so by June 2015, I had no idea whether to get out
This yearlong series will examine efforts to
or stay in. I came home from the last day of school
recognize and overcome discrimination in
and went to sleep for two weeks. I woke up knowing
schools. View the complete series.
how I wanted to teach, what I wanted to teach, where
I wanted to teach, and why I wanted to teach. Rested
and reinvigorated, I would return to Normandy, propose an innovative program, and hope for a
yes.
Today, I'm running the Normandy Project Lab, a project­based, experiential, interdisciplinary
learning space for 7th and 8th graders. The Normandy district provided some of my supplies, but
I've had to raise the money—$11,000 to date—to pay for classroom materials, field trips,
technology, subscriptions, and other resources.
The program rests on three guiding principles:
• Our classroom is a place of interdependence and trust.
• As the teacher, I recognize, value, and build lessons upon my students' collective strengths,
competencies, and talents.
• With input from students and in collaboration with my colleagues, I design curriculum that will
benefit students and their families. A year ago, as white authorities were claiming to serve and
protect the citizenry, my students were out on the street witnessing tanks, guns, and flares
trained on their community—the night air filled with flying bottles, tear gas, and rubber bullets.
Nobody should be surprised that some of these children by day hurled pencils, paper, and even
books at white strangers in positions of authority, claiming they were there to teach them.
Now that students consider me to be trustworthy, I'm free to curate an environment for deep
learning. I can read aloud from a novel while they color complex mandalas. I can set up six
chessboards and watch their tactical skills develop as we listen to cool jazz. In addition to
writing editorials, essays, news articles, and book and movie reviews, my students will be
creating poetry, fiction, and performance art that expresses to a larger community the emotional
texture of their daily lives. Lives that matter.
Looking beyond this first month of school, my goal is
to take the Project Lab's guiding principles and develop
a place­based, student­centered curriculum that
empowers and responds to my students and their
community in real time. Through a problem­based
approach to standards­based instruction, how might the
Project Lab respond to structural social biases that
affect school funding; criminal­justice policy; social­
emotional and physical well­being; housing and food
security; and even income?
Visit Opinion.
These are huge questions, and believe me, I'm keeping track. My students will be, too. We have
four main projects that will serve as platforms for learning this school year: the student
newspaper; a literary magazine; an interscholastic, student­led peace initiative; and
performance­art events. The Project Lab will integrate practices and knowledge across the
curriculum: English/language arts, art, social studies, computation, algebraic and statistical
concepts, and even biology, genetics, and environmental science. My students and I are co­
creating an experiential, interdisciplinary learning field. Not that the label matters; I'm focused
on what we do, why we do it, how we do it, and what students learn along the way. I, too, have
a lot to learn.
Right now, what I can say for sure is that the first weeks of school have been seriously fun.
Inda Schaenen is a 7th and 8th grade language arts teacher at Normandy Middle School in
Missouri. She is the author of Speaking of Fourth Grade: What Listening to Kids Tells Us About
School in America (The New Press, 2014).
Vol. 35, Issue 04, Pages 30,32