More Thoughts about Race
Two thoughtful articles have come across my computer about race and education. The first is from the blog , The Becoming Radical written by P.L. Thomas, a professor at Furman University. Professor Thomas' blog subtitle is "A Place for a Pedagogy of Kindness and the article that caught my eye is entitled "Are We (Finally) Ready to Face Teacher Education’s Race Problem?" I find this issue has coming up frequently because of the continuing push from TFA. Despite all of TFA's claims, they have a largely white teaching corps and, in places like, New Orleans, have pushed out many teachers of color. The teacher quality and teacher education debates have been absent a fundamental acknowledgement of race in the same way that school quality and education reform have mostly ignored race. While the mainstream press and education reform agenda remain distracted by the whitewashed “achievement gap”—a metric not only identified by but created by standardized...