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A Letter to Improve Multicultural Education at Millennium Middle School

Maggie S. Gearns

Michigan State Univeristy

TE 825: Diverse Learners and Subject Matter

Lauren Elizabeth Reine Johnson

August 13, 2020

I took an amazing course on diversity and its role in education this summer as part of my

master’s coursework at Michigan State University. Before taking this course, I thought of

diversity as showing respect for various cultures and incorporating different cultures into our

classroom. When I heard the term ‘diversity’, racial diversity immediately came to mind.

Throughout the course I have learned that there are many aspects to consider when thinking of

diversity. Race, gender, sexual orientation, ability level, and language are all important aspects

of diverse classrooms. I have learned the importance of helping all students to feel represented

and valued in the classroom, regardless of their background. This often requires analyzing

curriculum to identify and change aspects that marginalize groups of students. The

standardization of curriculum has led to many issues in which groups of students, particularly

black students are undervalued, underrepresented and underserved. There are many authentic

and meaningful ways to teach diversity and help all students to feel valued and understood. In

addition, we must also recognize historical injustices and work to build a just curriculum and

school that works for all of our students.

First, it is important to recognize the historical inequities and oppression of groups of

people that have led to a school system that does not work for marginalized groups of students.

We have a tendency to teach children that all people are equal and that anyone who works hard

and follows the rules will be successful. While this is well-intentioned and true for many of our

kids, it does not acknowledge the struggles and inequities faced by marginalized groups. At

Millennium, marginalized students include black students, student who live in poverty and

students with disabilities.

tendency to teach history in a way that is “sanitized and suggests everyone is fairly content”

(Sleeter & Carmona, 2017, p. 84). We do this by portraying injustices as problems that occurred

in the past and have since been fixed. For example, we teach students that slavery was abolished

in 1863 with the signing of the emancipation proclamation. However, even after slavery was

abolished, many black people continued to live and work on plantations as sharecroppers for a

debt they could never afford to repay and were, in essence, still enslaved. Many black people

were arrested for petty crimes and forced to work on plantations as form of prison labor (Love,

2019). We teach the civil rights movement as if it ended in 1960’s with the integration of

schools and the signing of the Civil Rights Act. When the Supreme Court passed Brown v.

Board of Education in 1954, black students were forced to attend white schools, and black

teachers were fired, causing black communities to lose the schools that supported them and gave

them power. Love (2019) states “Before the landmark decision of Brown in 1954, Black schools

were proud institutions that provided Black communities with cohesion and leadership. Though

Black schools' facilities and books were inferior to their White counterparts, the education they

provided was not...Black schools were places where order prevailed, where teachers commanded

respect, and where parents supported teachers.” (p.28). We teach that Brown v. Board of

Education provided justice and equality to black children by allowing them to attend the same

schools as their white peers. We fail to acknowledge that black communities lost their own

schools in the process and still were not accepted in many places. This sanitized and simplistic

curriculum is not historically accurate creates misconceptions for students that the problems that

existed in the past are no longer problems today. In addition, it causes us to accept the idea that
“everyone who works hard will be successful” and allows us to escape responsibility for working

towards justice for marginalized groups.

Love (2019) describes what she calls the “educational survival complex”, the idea that

dark children in our schools put up with a great deal of suffering that leaves them exhausted and

only able to survive, not thrive. She gives countless examples of how black students in the

United States are treated with rage. A high school girl in South Carolina was violently thrown

from her desk by a school resource officer after she refused to give her cell phone to a teacher.

A black student in Virginia was arrested for not following the correct procedure to purchase his

65-cent carton of milk, which he was entitled to have for free as part of school lunch program

(Love, 2019). While we have not had an incident to this magnitude at MMS, I think it is

important to recognize what happens when schools do not understand and see the good in all

students, but particularly black students who are often dismissed or treated as inferior in the

world of education.

The standardization of curriculum has only worsened the problems with providing a

multicultural education. Sleeter & Carmona (2017) describe how the purpose of schooling has

historically been to create human capital. In other words, we produce workers who keep the

United States competitive in a global economy. To meet this goal, schools increasingly focus on

teaching and testing a prescribed set of standards, leaving little room for activities that engage

students in multicultural learning or high-level critical thinking. At MMS, our students spend

many hours each year taking the NWEA and M-Step and teachers feel pressure to ensure

students are prepared for these tests. Unfortunately, this takes the focus away from our kids as

people and puts the focus on test scores and a prescribed set of knowledge. Furthermore, the

content included in the standards is selected by people in power and can perpetuate inequity.
According to Sleeter & Carmona (2017), “knowledge and the knowledge selection process

relates directly to power, privilege, and system of oppression” (p. 17). We should shift our

focus from a prescribed set of knowledge to helping children explore and interpret diverse sets of

knowledge that encourage justice and social change.

To include multicultural education in our standardized curriculum, we tend to take an

“additive approach” in which we sprinkle in information from different cultures into our current

curriculum. This is problematic and can actually perpetuate stereotypes and misconceptions.

For example, in teaching about Native Americans, we need to be careful to recognize Native

Americans as real people who are part of our community today, as opposed to presenting them

only in a historical context (Sleeter & Carmona, 2017). One of the issues I have with our

“diversity day” lesson is that it gives and inaccurate portrayal of food scarcity. The 6th grade

science diversity day lesson requires students to look at pictures of families around the world

with the food that family has for one week. One picture presents a family from Uganda with

very little food for their six family members, while the family from the United States has a

plethora of food. The hidden message is that food scarcity happens in other places, but not in

the United States. This is unfair to our students who live in poverty, and also teaches our

wealthy students that this problem doesn’t exist in our own community. We could make this

lesson more relevant to our own students by teaching about food scarcity in Southeast Michigan.

Another way to support diversity at MMS is to provide professional development to staff

on the use of language. Teachers should be aware that there can be issues with terms that are

commonly used to describe marginalized people. For example, Glover (2016) describes how the

term “people of color” lumps all people from a non-white background into one group and

suggests that all non-white groups are essentially the same. Ferguson (2014) argues that by
using the term ‘minorities’ we are “consigning these people to a lesser status and a smaller role-

in short to powerlessness”.

In addition to understanding the terms we use, we need to celebrate and accept the

various home languages that our students come to school with. Some teachers feel that only

Mainstream American English should be used in schools. While I agree that Mainstream

American English is important to opening opportunities for students, our students home

languages should be welcomed and respected as well. Teachers can establish expectations for

when Mainstream American English is required, such as in formal presentations or writing

assignments, but should allow students to speak in their home language at other times. This

shows respect and value for all students and their entire identities.

Teacher expectations is another area that we can improve to work towards justice. All

students need to be held to high expectations. According to Sleeter & Carmona (2017),

researchers consistently find that many teacher’s expectations vary based on their students race

and class backgrounds. Expectations tend to be lower for English Language Learners and

special education students. (Sleeter & Carmona, 2017). For students to have a fair chance at a

quality education, teachers need to believe that they can overcome challenges and provide the

same opportunities for high level curriculum. Higher level courses are more engaging and

stimulating and both high-achieving and low achieving students are more likely to fail lower

level courses (Sleeter & Carmona, 2017). We need to do better to maintain high expectations for

all students.

Finally, we need to push for restorative justice as the main form of discipline to be used

for all students. Restorative justice helps students to think about their actions and how their

choices impact others in the school community. This ensures that all students receive fair and
consistent discipline. While we commonly use restorative practices to handle problems at MMS,

this program was one of the first offered up to be cut with last year’s budget shortage. If we are

serious about respecting our students as human beings and working towards justice, we need to

value and protect these programs.

As you can see, there are many ways that we can support our students and incorporate

multicultural education and social justice reforms at MMS. We often talk in staff meetings about

educating the whole child, but we can’t educate the whole child unless we understand who that

child is. We can do a better job of stepping back from our prescribed standards and ensuring that

our students have multiple opportunities to see themselves within the curriculum. We can

educate ourselves to better understand and change the historical inaccuracies presented in the

curriculum. We can work to use language that respects all students. Please consider these

important ideas as you plan for the upcoming school year.

Sincerely,

Maggie Gearns
 References

Ferguson, H. E. (2017, January 12). Let's Stop Describing Ourselves as 'Minorities'.

https://www.theroot.com/let-s-stop-describing-ourselves-as-minorities-1790876529.

Glover, C. (2017, September 1). 4 Reasons 'People of Color' Isn't Always the Best Choice of Words.

Everyday Feminism. https://everydayfeminism.com/2016/08/poc-not-best-choice-of-words/.

Love, B. L. (2019). We want to do more than survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of

Educational Freedom. Beacon Press: Boston, MA

Sleeter, C. & Carmona, J. (2017). Un-Standardizing Curriculum: Multicultural Teaching in the

Standards-Based Classroom. 2nd Edition. Teachers College Press: New York, NY