The Education Paradox

“You aren’t coming here to quit are you?” my principal asked. I reassured her that my request to meet was simply about the hiring progress for the science teacher who would fill the current vacancy. The previous teacher had quit a week prior. I was in my third year of teaching — a beginner teacher still — and was now the 8th grade science department chair. In the last week, four members of staff had resigned and we had suffered the devastating loss of another. Our school was hemorrhaging, and it was only the second week of school.

On February 2 2021, almost a full year after closing schools due to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper announced that the state’s public schools needed to reopen to accommodate in-person teaching. “School is important for reasons beyond academic instruction,’’ Cooper said. “School is where students learn social skills, get reliable meals, and find their voices. Teachers play an important role in keeping students safe by identifying cases of abuse, hunger, homelessness and other challenges.”

I thought of my own students — Rashaun, who ran around the cafeteria stealing packets of chips and stuffing them under his clothes, Hayley, who, despite being unhoused along with her older sister and mother, came into school with immaculate nails and braids, Paige, whose mom had threatened to kick her and her 12 year old sister out of the house for causing trouble at home, Tayveon, whose parents refused to see how his failure in school was linked to his undiagnosed learning disability, Aria, who swallowed half a bottle of Allegra before graduation in an attempt to feel seen, Lupe, whose grandmothers refused to come in for a parent-teacher conference because she was “done raising kids,” and Luis, who borrowed a gun in an attempt to protect his nephew and mother from his own father.

While Cooper’s appeal was meant to help encourage local officials and reluctant families to support reopening classrooms, his statement illustrates America’s gross overestimation of a school’s capacity to support children and the failure of its social safety nets. Schools are no longer considered spaces for education purposes alone. Instead, they are holding places for children whose basic needs are not being met in their communities. We’ve normalized the idea that schools must provide for those basic needs without normalizing the increase in funding to sustainably support those efforts, or without addressing the fact that this need comes from the lack of affordable healthcare and housing, or job and food security. As a result, we have maintained a devastating overestimation of a teacher’s capacity to support students — especially those who are experiencing challenges that far exceed academic concern.

Cooper’s statement conjures up the “whole child approach” a notion that undergirds most government policy initiatives and mission statements. It suggests that education is not solely an academic endeavor, but a social-emotional one too. The term “whole child approach,” was coined when the Obama administration introduced the Common Core State Standards Initiative. This approach promoted the “critical thinking and social-emotional wellness” of all students through its implementation, and it served as a remedy for the shortcomings of the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy.

That policy was born out of the realization towards the end of the 20th Century that the US was lagging in academic success compared with its rivals — namely, Russia, Japan and China.

Bush began what would become a decades-long debate about the degree to which the federal government should intervene — financially and legislatively — in the states’ education affairs. NCLB mandated that states issue standardized testing in Mathematics and English to all third through eighth graders, and once again in highschool. The federal government would then “reward” schools who were improving and “punish” failing schools by cutting funding for districts, based on levels of proficiency on the states’ standardized tests. Since federal funding hinged on whether schools reached proficiency levels, and since each state could create their own tests, it quickly became clear the testing standards were arbitrary at best, and set low expectations for student achievement at worst.

It was not until Obama became President that the education problem was seriously revisited. In 2009, at a conference with the Department of Education, Obama introduced a new act, “Race to the Top” that would again reward states that met benchmark criteria: enforce rigorous standards and assessments, provide good teachers, and turn around failing schools.

The $4 billion recovery act was intended to encourage schools to improvise, and funds would be set aside to be competed for, not just “divvied up” and “handed out” to states. The first benchmark — enforcing standards and assessments — was a subtle push for states to adopt a Common Core that was being developed at the time. The second benchmark — ensuring that “outstanding teachers” are leading classrooms — used data points to determine which teachers were worth keeping around and which were not. Finally, “failing schools” would be “turned around” by firing principals or staff, or converting those regular public schools into charter schools.

The irony of the speech lies within the fact that states would only be rewarded after they improved their education outcomes. Come up with the innovation to fix this problem in the span of four years, and we will reward you!

Almost a decade later, in December 2019, statistics revealed that academic performance had not improved, it was not even stagnant. It had decreased all together. The Gold standard tool — the National Assessment of Educational Progress — reported that only one third of American fourth and eighth graders were proficient readers. Every level of students had declining reading scores over the past two years, and 20 percent of America’s 15-year-olds were not yet reading on the level of a 10-year-old. Worse yet, math and reading achievement gaps between students of color and their White peers remained. In some districts, Black students tracked an entire year behind their White peers in terms of academic achievement.

Education policies coming from the federal government took the well-traveled route and blamed the lack of academic success on low standards for assessments, bad teachers, and failing schools. Not only was this philosophy deeply misguided, but clearly, it did not work. In 2020, research from the Stanford Educational Opportunity Monitoring Project attributed achievement gaps not to bad schools, but to the external socioeconomic factors that put Black students at extreme disadvantages compared to their White peers.

By the fall of 2020, in the aftermath of a nationwide reckoning with America’s racist history, school districts began readjusting their missions and visions to reflect the current sentiments regarding race relations. School leaders (some for whom backlash ensued) encouraged educators to adopt antiracist approaches, picking up on vernacular that had populated progressive conversations that summer.

By the following spring, the Biden administration signed the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, a piece of legislation emblazoned with the buzz word “equity.” Equity, while not a new concept in discussions surrounding education, held more weight when considering the ways in which COVID-19 shed light on American racial disparities.

Historically, our country considered equality to be the philosophy rooted in fairness. The “separate but equal” policy was deemed unconstitutional in the Brown v. Board of Education decision not because the concept of separating students based on skin color denied the humanity of school children and their educators, but because the schools themselves were glaringly unequal. In the majority opinion, Chief Justice Warren stated, “We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” The word “equity” comes up twice in this opinion, but only in the context of the court’s equity powers. In contrast, the word “equal” comes up 39 times.

Over time, the word “equal” or “equality” was slowly replaced by “equity” or “equitable.” The report for No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 included the word “equal” 26 times, and “equity” 12 times. In both the report for Race to the Top Act of 2013 and the report on the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, the word “equal” is only used in reference to the construction of spending or monetary calculations. The word “equity,” however, is used several times in reference to the promotion of community programs and grants and the distribution of services to diverse populations.

Equality and equity are two distinct concepts at odds with each other, yet continue to get weaved into the fabric of major pieces of legislation pertaining to education. “Equality” refers to the fact that all students must receive the same resources for the education system to be considered fair. Today “fair” does not mean “same,” and instead allows that students’ access to quality education can vary according to socioeconomic status. Therefore,“equity” acknowledges that students need varying degrees of support — that resources should be tailored to meet individual needs. In a room full of people with differing ailments, an “equal” solution would be to give all patients a bandaid, whereas an “equitable” solution would be to offer a variety of antidotes to meet individual complaints as some people may have broken limbs or appendicitis, while others may have a papercut, an upset stomach, or a headache. The irony becomes painfully clear as we champion “equity” yet still enforce one size fits all structures such as the Common Core — a structure that is justified by the concept of equality — or rely on futile state funding models such as student count. So what do we do with the challenge to become “equitable” when our systems and values are inherently unfair?

The expectations of our education system are twofold and at odds with each other: 1) All children, no matter where they live or what their circumstance, should learn the exact same skills and take the same assessments nationwide and 2) All children must be provided resources that nurture their critical thinking skills, their social-emotional skills, and their mental and physical health. Thus lies the great paradox: Equality vs. Equity. You cannot have both.

The ramifications of the paradox manifest in the form of unsustainable school structures that are buckling under the pressure to provide for students. Assuming that teachers can give both rigorous academic instruction in addition to psychological, emotional, physical, and structural support of their students without adequate training or resources is setting them up for failure. During the throes of the pandemic, I was told I was doing god’s work, trying to teach children through a computer screen. Teachers were consistently labeled “essential workers” and “heros,” which perpetuated the idea that we could realistically adhere to the unattainable expectations.

I was expected to continue to push through my curriculum with less than a third of my students present. Adi would get into fist fights with his sister, also trying to attend class in a common area they shared with several other family members. Billie showed up to zoom bouncing her baby sister on her knee, Shania logged in from the grocery store with her mother.

In the fall of 2021, following Roy Cooper’s announcement about the reopening of schools, Charlotte MecklenburgSchool district saw a devastating wave of teacher resignations. WCNC of Charlotte announced that over five hundred teachers left the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School district within the first month of school, almost one hundred more had quit by December.

Meanwhile, the teachers that remained were dealing with the consequences of how almost two years at home had impacted the students. Students had little trust in their teachers or their peers, socially stunted by the exorbitant amount of time spent socially isolated. Multiple fights broke out over middle school relationships, stepping on each other’s shoes, rumors spread. Teachers were met with Tik Tok challenges, prompting students to assault their teachers and peers and destroy school property.

The narrative around education in our country is not only misguided, but also detrimental to the possibility of truly reforming our school systems. As long as we continue to ignore the fundamental failure of government to provide basic needs to families, we will continue to see the fabric of our schools disintegrate.

We have to dig deeper than throwing out progressive buzzwords and misplacing funds and competing for better scores. We cannot apply “equitable” solutions to a structure that is already deeply broken from decades of discriminatory practices and systemic oppression. If we want our schools to nurture students in a way that encourages them to advocate for themselves, to be critical thinkers and empathetic citizens, then we have to radically change our approach to education reform, not because we want to outperform our global competitors, but because we want to imagine a more hopeful future for our kids.