Segregation by Experience

Agency, Racism, and Learning in the Early Grades

Jennifer Keys Adair, Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226765754
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Early childhood can be a time of rich discovery, a period when educators have an opportunity to harness their students' fascination to create unique learning opportunities. Some teachers engage with their students' ideas in ways that make learning collaborative--but not all students have access to these kinds of learning environments.In Segregation by Experience, the authors filmed and studied a a first-grade classroom led by a Black immigrant teacher who encouraged her diverse group of students to exercise their agency. When the researchers showed the film to other schools, everyone struggled. Educators admired the teacher but didn't think her practices would work with their own Black and brown students. Parents of color—many of them immigrants—liked many of the practices, but worried that they would compromise their children. And the young children who viewed the film thought that the kids in the film were terrible, loud, and badly behaved; they told the authors that learning was supposed to be quiet, still, and obedient. In Segregation by Experience Jennifer Keys Adair and Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove show us just how much our expectations of children of color affect what and how they learn at school, and they ask us to consider which children get to have sophisticated, dynamic learning experiences at school and which children are denied such experiences because of our continued racist assumptions about them.

1

White Supremacy in the Early Grades

In schools across the United States, many young children of color are forced to walk in prisonlike lines with silent “bubbles in their mouths” and hands behind their backs. They go through much of the day disconnected from their real lives, asked to submit to significant controlling mechanisms such as behavior charts, monolingualism, punishment systems, and the denial of movement. In other schools, meanwhile, young White children walk in zigzag formations, taking their time, chatting, joking, and sometimes singing with their friends. They read and hear stories that reflect their realities and comfort. What makes it “acceptable” for children in the United States of America to have such different kinds of schooling experiences, especially in the earliest grades?

In 2011 we received a grant from the Foundation for Child Development to figure out how children’s agency—the ability to influence and make decisions about learning—affects academic and social development. The plan was to spend a year observing first-grade classrooms where children could enact their agency in their learning. We would identify as many forms of agency as we could and then make a video that showed the children using their agency. We would take that video to groups of educators, parents, teachers, and young children and see what forms of agency they noticed and valued. We wanted to work with young children of color—primarily children from Latinx communities. The goal was to create a list of ways that Latinx children enacted their agency in public school settings that would be supported by their families. This list would then be used to advocate for increasing culturally sustaining opportunities for agency of Latinx and other children in early childhood education settings.

As planned, we did spend one year in first-grade classrooms. We did make a film. And we did show the film to over 250 educators, parents, teachers and young children. But people did not respond the way we predicted. We thought they would be excited and even inspired to see young children of color acting as scientists, formulating questions, working deeply and collaboratively, thinking carefully, and being engaged in their learning. But most were not. Educators admired the practices in the film but did not think these practices would work for the children at their schools. Parents of color—many of whom were immigrants from Mexico and Central America—liked many of the practices but worried that they would endanger or compromise their children. Young children we interviewed thought the practices in the film were terrible. They told us that learning requires students to be quiet, still, and compliant. They thought that the children in Ms. Bailey’s classroom were behaving badly.

We have written about these findings in a number of academic journals. All along, we suspected that the children we interviewed were revealing a problem with early childhood education in the United States that is larger than our initial analysis uncovered. After spending two years analyzing the data from different parts of Texas, we think that our study demonstrates the serious injustice of offering schooling that is engaged, dynamic, and sophisticated to a few while offering everyone else rigid and narrow schooling that is fixated on compliance. This segregation by experience results in short- and long-term injustices that perpetuate an intentional, racist denial of access and opportunity. Segregation by experience is deeply detrimental to young children who are just learning who they are and what society expects of them.

In this book, we will spend time with a first-grade classroom led by Ms. Bailey, a teacher who speaks four languages and immigrated from Burundi as a young adult. Ms. Bailey’s class included mostly children of color, many of whom spoke more than one language. Collectively and individually, the class had many opportunities to enact their agency as part of their learning. They experienced schooling that was engaged, dynamic, and sophisticated. We open up as much of the operational logic and feeling of Ms. Bailey’s classroom as we can while detailing the capabilities children expanded at school through the supported enactment of their agency.

We will also spend time with over 250 superintendents, principals, teachers, immigrant parents, and young children ages five to seven across Texas who watched and responded to the film of Ms. Bailey’s classroom. We try to make sense of why people, especially young children, in our study responded to the film as they did. What do their critical responses to allegedly high-quality early childhood practice tell us about the US educational system and about the realities for children of color as they make their way through it?

Disproportionality in What Children of Color Experience

Most young children in the United States today have narrower and more rigid learning experiences at school than children did twenty years ago (Bassok, Latham, and Rorem 2016). Children are having to sit still for longer and longer periods, completing tasks they do not choose in positions and spaces they do not control. Acceptable behavior in a preschool classroom, for example, might be sitting “crisscross applesauce” (legs folded like a pretzel) with hands in their laps and their mouths closed for twenty, thirty, even forty-five minutes at a time. This stillness might serve a purpose if a child was choosing to watch intently what a peer or expert adult was doing. But stillness in most cases is about compliance, not learning. The narrowness of acceptable behavior makes it more likely that children will get into trouble. Narrow limits for how and when a child can move increase the chances of a child’s being seen as distracting or disobedient.

This loss has disproportionately impacted young children of color because teachers, schools, and districts serving children of color have to navigate pressures to be efficient, keeping content aligned with what will be on tests. This leaves little room for culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris 2012; Paris and Alim 2014) that engages with students’ and family stories and other early childhood necessities. Young children of color are also impacted by the historical “ongoingness” of what Ladson-Billings (2006, 9–10) termed the “education debt”: fewer resources than White schools enjoy, overburdened and undersupported teachers and principals, and the constant presence of racial, economic, linguistic and ethnic discrimination (see also Cardichon et al 2020; López and López 2009).

One result of the education debt is that young children receive very disparate experiences in early schooling. This disproportionality is what we refer to as segregation by experience. As teachers, teacher educators, district consultants, and educational researchers, we have moved within and between a mostly segregated school system in which many White students experience school as a place that welcomes their ideas, identities, and curiosity, while students of color experience school as a place that insists on their compliance, order, and efficiency.

Over the course of this study, we watched things happen in schools serving young children of color that we never saw in schools serving wealthy White children. We have seen Brown and Black children line up and give their number to get sleeping mats. We have seen them line up in a straight line for ten minutes, only to go outside to run laps around the playground. We have seen teachers stop and reprimand children who were trying to help clean up after a spill, opening up a milk container for a classmate, moving a chair closer to hear better, telling a story while pacing, handing a book to a child who was struggling to wait quietly, moving over to allow more people into an activity, or yelling out excitedly that their friend had arrived at school. We have seen young children persist through such bounded and controlled environments to be successful, but as many education scholars have noted, these experiences complicate and burden lives (Muñoz and Maldonado 2012; Valencia 2010).

The already narrowing emphasis on compliance and stillness intersects with historic and ongoing institutional racism in schools. Too often schools have been (and continue to be) sites of harsh discipline more reminiscent of prisons and punishment than deep learning and care (Noguera 2003). Children of color are often in classes where the discipline approach restricts their movement and talk so much that they have minimum opportunities to interact with one another (T. Howard 2013; Milner 2015). Race is still the most salient factor in school discipline (Gregory, Skiba, and Noguera 2010; McDermott, Raley, and Seyer-Ochi 2009). National Council of La Raza, now called Unidos US (Sallo 2011), reported a severe increase in the mistreatment of Latinx students, citing harsh zero-tolerance policies that control movement and interpret Latinx student behavior (even that of young children) as threatening at worst or distracted at best. Courtney Sherman Robinson’s (2013) research on incarcerated Black men found that their early schooling experiences had been characterized by strict control. Racialized surveillance of young Brown and Black bodies has led to children of color being forced into special education classrooms against their will (Ahram, Fergus, and Noguera 2011; Artiles et al. 2010; Blanchett 2006; Lee 2017) and harsh disciplinary measures such as physical restraints and suspension for younger and younger children (Milner et al. 2019; Skiba and Peterson 1999).

Racist ideologies systematically position young children of color as threatening, out of control, wild, disobedient, and misbehaving despite evidence that White children act in similar ways but are not disciplined nor labeled as problems (Adair 2015; Gregory, Skiba, and Noguera 2010; Noguera 2003). Instead of being supported in language use, young children of color are disciplined more harshly for being loud (or similar behaviors) than are their native-born White peers, a trend that starts when they are just four years old (Dumas 2016; Skiba et al. 2011; US Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights 2014). Controlling children’s movement as a form of discipline is a continuation of racial trauma that prefigures the school-to-prison pipeline (K. Brown 2016; Ferguson 2000; Robinson 2013).

There are powerful exceptions to this patterned segregation by experience in the schooling lives of young children of color. Educators and communities do resist the kinds of control and narrowness that have too often been imposed on young children in classrooms. There is, for example, a long history, predating Brown v. Board of Education, of Black teachers offering dynamic, thoughtful learning experiences to children in Black communities (Peters 2019; Acosta, Foster, and Houchen 2018; hooks 2014). Skilled, knowledgeable Black teachers were able to balance the realities of segregation with an empowering and emboldening view of young children of color as capable, smart, and impressive (K. Brown 2016; see also Grant, Brown, and Brown 2016). Indigenous efforts to foster community participation through a range of listening and observational practices that honor elder and ancestral knowledge are found in many communities throughout the United States (Dayton and Rogoff 2013; Nxumalo and Cedillo 2017; Sandoval et al. 2016; Urrieta 2015; Yazzie-Mintz et al. 2018) despite pressures to mirror White-centered practices, regulation, and assessments. Bilingual teachers, before and after Horne v. Flores, have believed in their young children of color so much that they’ve offered dynamic experiences rooted in the reality of segregation and the knowledge that young children are capable. Their effort and conocimiento has been necessary to systemic improvements towards equity and access to higher learning (Goodman and Intercultural Development Research Association 2010; Portes, Canché, Boada, and Whatley 2018). There are tremendous examples of teachers working to empower young children of color to use their minds and critical thinking skills (not just their obedience) to learn (see Love 2016; Palmer et al. 2014; Souto-Manning 2013).

Ultimately, offering young children of color a range of rich, dynamic, and sophisticated learning experiences in which they are able to engage their identities and repertoires of practice needs to be normalized so that it doesn’t have to be an act of resistance. All of us play a role in doing this, because we are all involved in a system that is much larger than the teachers, administrators, families, and children in our study. We are all responsible for removing what Charles Mills calls the personhood–subpersonhood line that justifies some receiving freely what others have to earn or demonstrate worthiness for in order to receive.

Young Children and the Racial Contract

Charles Mills is a philosopher originally from Jamaica who studied in Canada and now teaches in the United States. He calls himself an oppositional political theorist. Others refer to him as a Black liberationist Marxist. He critiques liberal philosophy, particularly the Kantian notion of the ideal social contract. The social contract is the idea that people give up some of their power to the state in exchange for the state’s protecting the remainder of their freedoms, privileges, and safety. In the social contract, the state is supposed to enforce equality since everyone is living under the terms of the same social contract. The social contract is the means through which human beings work toward an equal society, devoid of status or privilege. Mills (1997), however, asserts that a social contract is not possible—and is actually never attempted. What we call the social contract is for White peopl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1   White Supremacy in the Early Grades
• 2   Everyday Life in Ms. Bailey’s Classroom
• 3   How Educators Responded to Ms. Bailey’s Classroom
• 4   Limits and Balance
• 5   Complication and Politics
• 6   Children’s Responses
• 7   Justifying a Segregation by Experience
• Epilogue: The Children in Ms. Bailey’s Class Six Years Later
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix
• References
• Index