Success in school shouldn't be determined by your zipcode. We must do better. | Guestview
My first year as a teacher at an inner-city middle school in Houston, Texas, I learned about privilege. The year was 2010, and most of the nation was reeling from the impact of the Great Recession. One task on my pre-school checklist was to assist a welcoming team, volunteers from the school who went to the neighboring apartments and houses to knock on doors and remind families that school was starting, that breakfast and lunch would be provided by the district, that clothing was available if it was needed. A translator tagged along, repeating, in Spanish, most of what my knocking partner said to whomever happened to be home.
Sometimes the door was answered by a single parent holding an infant.
Sometimes the door was answered by a junior high student, left with the task of watching her four younger siblings while the parent worked three jobs.
Sometimes an extension cord and a garden hose slithered serpentine-like from the doorway to a neighboring apartment, evidence of electricity and water that had long been shut off, and that the family was doing what they had to.
Sometimes there was no door on which to knock, evidence that they family found a vacant apartment in which to settle, for the time being, to get out of the rain.
The experience provided perspective. I was raised in a middle-class family in Pensacola, had done well in school, and was fortunate enough to happen across a flyer advertising Teach for America, a program that places recent college graduates in teaching positions with underserved public schools across the nation. I had not experienced failure in any meaningful way in my entire life. I had a vision for what this kind of work looked like. Maybe I was looking for my “Finding Forrester moment,” as short-sighted as that may be. But this was not that moment.
The students that first year were brilliant. They were curious, skeptical of the world and its workings. They had theories on why things worked out the way they did, or didn’t. But many were pressed by the constraints of poverty, which loomed over them like a specter day after day.
One morning during school breakfast, I had a talk with a student from my homeroom group about her grades. She had missed several math and reading homework assignments and her teachers complained that she was falling asleep in class. Crouched on one knee beside her desk, I noticed the handfuls of pilfered plastic-wrapped breakfast items stuffed into her backpack. The tears in her eyes underscored the weight of the problem: She was hungry. She and her younger siblings so often had to do without. The food they got here was all the food they would get.
Within the economy of emotions in her mind, there was no room for grammar rules or long division.
In education, we know that poverty does damage to a child’s physical, social, and emotional well-being. We also know that changes in the brain inflicted by poverty can lead to suboptimal behavior and performance in school, all of this according to Eric Jensen’s book Teaching with Poverty in Mind. One of the most damaging shortcomings as educators and as a community is a failure to render these understandings into actionable changes in mindset.
Put simply, if a child is starving, or abused, or suffering from anxiety and depression, or is the care-taker of young siblings, how can that child learn from a teacher who does not teach with those obstacles in mind?
As a community, it is imperative that we change our mindset. We must operate with meaningful daily expressions of care. We must provide structure for them in the classroom to make up for the lack of structure in their lives outside the classroom. We must involve students and parents in setting goals. We must teach the whole child.
Strides are being taken here in Northwest Florida to change the lives of students who have grown accustomed to failure − those students whose zip codes have, for too long, dictated their levels of success.
I am proud to continue doing this kind of work as an educator. I call on my fellow educators and the community to continue the fight for our most at-risk students.
Jonathan Peacock teaches English at Tate High School in Escambia County, as well as Creative Writing workshops at the University of West Florida.
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Success in school shouldn't be determined by zipcode. We must do better.
