By Julia Rocco, English teacher
My mom forwarded me this Washington Post article about the racial achievement gap in Shaker Heights, Ohio, the town where I grew up and where my parents lived for over thirty years. The article centers around a "tense exchange" between an African American student and her AP English teacher, which has led to a debate about the school system's struggles to achieve greater racial equity. The article addresses the larger context of the debate -- the Cleveland suburb's perceived identity as an "American dream town" that values diversity -- and includes author Laura Meckler's personal experiences as a white child growing up there. It is the product of over two years of interviews with "nearly 100 people — parents, students, teachers, administrators and community leaders, both black and white, and with [her] own high school teachers and classmates." I found a lot I could relate to on a personal level in this article. I attended Shaker schools through sixth grade, and my sister and many of my childhood friends graduated from Shaker Heights High School. My early perceptions of race were shaped by frank discussions led by the high school students who visited my elementary school from the Student Group on Race Relations, but also by the stark lack of racial diversity in the honors-track classes I began attending in fifth grade. As a teacher, I found myself making comparisons to our own struggle to navigate issues of race in Brookline. The two towns have a lot in common: both are wealthy, inner-ring suburbs that see themselves as special for their liberal values. Both school districts emphasize excellence and equity, and yet both struggle to close persistent racial achievement gaps. On the other hand, the racial demographics of Shaker are very different from Brookline -- the student population is nearly half white and just over half black -- which I think makes the problems in Shaker stand out more starkly. The title of the article -- "This trail-blazing suburb has tried for 60 years to tackle race. What if trying isn't enough?" -- makes it sound like it might have a tone of hopelessness, but that is not the message I got from it at all. What I took away was that good intentions and lofty ideals are not enough. Grappling with race in our schools is messy and difficult, and there is a lot that teachers and schools cannot control, but we have to keep doing the work.
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