The Teacher Race

The Washington Post, by this stage of the game, is good for not much more than a lens into Late Stage Collapse Clown World.  As America is probably within a decade of some kind of crack up, the Post is worried about ... the race of teachers in America.  Not only that, it feels that there are too many White Teachers.

The quote that got my attention is the one that perpetuates the same myth that has bounced around schools of education for the past 40 years, the myth that if the race of the teacher matches that of the student, it's "better".  Here is Prof. Seth Gershenson explaining things: “Representation absolutely matters and it matters for … almost every educational outcome you can think of,” said Seth Gershenson, a public policy professor at American University.  I checked Prof. Gershenson's CV.  He has taught a total of 0 days at a public high school of any kind, let alone a public high school in the Bad Neighborhood.

I learned that this myth is patently false within the first month of teaching in the South Bronx in 1997.  One of our Teacher Assistants lamented that there were not only too few Latino teachers, but that we didn't read Piri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets.  Her belief was that students needed teachers and authors who look and sound like them.

None of that is true.  The race of the teacher is completely irrelevant.  Students want quality instruction, from someone with passion for the craft.  Students, like everyone else, don't want their time wasted.  The 'expert' quoted above is not only wrong, he's destructively wrong.

Only in race obsessed Corporate Media and Academia would a quote like this one pass the editor's desk: "A classmate, Sebastien Jean, 17, who is black and Hispanic, remembers that his elementary school teachers were all white, so he started acting what felt like white, absorbing what he called the “Caucasianness of it."

“I sort of lost my flavor,” he said.

That created tension with his mother. “I would go home and start talking about the weather and gas prices and my mom would be like, ‘Where did you get that from?’ ”

When they look back at Clown World, they'll see mindless anecdotes like the one above, and wonder how it all went so badly so quickly.  Everyone knows that talking about the weather and gas prices is destructively White.  The 'caucasianness' of it ... so terrible.  Of course the obvious irony is that the Cloud People keep trying to bus more Black and Hispanic students into White neighborhoods.  The Post seems unaware of the obvious contradiction.  This is an example of The Narrative being maintained, even where there is obvious inconsistency.

Another piece of evidence archaeologists of the future will use is the picture above.  The white liberal teacher with the glasses is the problem.  She thinks she can help, but her paternalistic philosophy only harms students.  She and Prof. G. continually promote these myths, with the help of the Washington Post. Despite the obvious failures of their idiotic race based philosophy and the system's collapse, they eternally beat the same drum.

As usual, the only people who lose in this toxic cauldron are the students.

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"Sensible children do not wish to be incomplete adults."  -- John Taylor Gatto