"How Come There Are No Brothers on That List?": Hearing the Hard Questions All Children Ask

KATHE JERVIS

National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching, Teachers College, Columbia University

Bias, both conscious and unconscious, reflecting traditional and unexamined habits of thought, keeps up barriers that must come down if equal opportunity and nondiscrimination are ever genuinely to become this country's law and practice.

- Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Pena v. Aderand, a 1995 dissenting opinion on Affirmative Action

Teachers are in an ideal position . . . to attempt to get all of the issues on the table in order to initiate true dialogue. This can only be done, however, by seeking out those whose perspectives may differ most, by learning to give their words complete attention, by understanding one's own power, even if that power stems merely from being in the majority, by being unafraid to raise questions about discrimination and voicelessness with people of color, and to listen, no, to hear what they say.

- Lisa Delpit, The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children

People who have no choice but to live their life in their black skins know racism when they see it. Racism is never subtle to the victim. Only White people say race doesn't matter.

- Carrie Morris, Pathways School Faculty Member

When I was hired to document the first year of a New York City public middle school, my job was to provide feedback and raise questions that would encourage more reflective practice, and then to write about the dilemmas facing this new school.1 As I began this documentation at Pathways, as I am calling the school, I joined a faculty with whom I shared common values and a high degree of trust.2 What I was to focus on was not set in stone; however, when I went over my notes at the end of the first year, the themes of race and ethnicity stood out prominently. Almost every incident that caught my eye seemed tinged by issues of equity, differences, and how children are known as part of their own cultures. Equally striking was that despite the faculty's expressed commitment to structures that supported equity and respected differences, my notes suggested that children's daily experience of race went undiscussed among the adults. I kept returning to how this school, which sought, according to its founding vision, "to enroll students with a diverse racial, economic, ethnic, and ability mix," in fact managed to avoid talking about race, even when events seemed to demand it.3 I was further struck by how I, as a White staff member, had registered events without seeing them and had failed to understand earlier the meaning of what I had recorded.

Neither an evaluator nor a neutral observer, I was a documenter who was also fully engaged in working for the success of the school, and my role included staff responsibilities.4 I had an advisory group that allowed me access to issues I might never have thought to raise were I not meeting with parents, reading student journals, and otherwise participating in the daily life of the school.5 In addition to what I learned from my advisory, my data came from direct observations, interviews, casual conversations, faculty meeting notes, and school documents. I started with observations of children and actual events rather than the literature or theory.

My interpretation of selected school events begins in September 1990 and continues through June 1991. Though I have consciously tried to incorporate other faculty perspectives, this is my story, or at least one that I have shaped. Not everyone on the staff saw events the way I did. When a teacher asked me why I focused this article on race rather than on the development of curriculum at Pathways, I knew that what framed my question was not the burning issue for all faculty. I was in uncharted territory; race had not been a salient category in planning for the documentation. Racial boundaries provoke the deepest questions of personal identity and social structure, as well as the deepest silences, and an exploration of race is not what I or anyone else initially expected from this documentation. Only later, as I created written pictures of daily school life, did I notice how children's questions about race and ethnicity dropped from the faculty's collective memory as soon as the moment of questioning came to an end, and how everyone on the staff, including me, missed what children seemed to be asking: "Who am I in this school community?"

This blindness to racial issues in schools has complex causes and deep roots. This blindness caused Pathways faculty to overlook, deny, or ignore issues of power embedded in race. We did not question who talked honestly, or who listened to whom, nor did individuals look critically at why some children became more central to the school's agenda than others. Faculty of color often vented their concerns outside of formal meetings. In the meetings, according to my notes, the majority White faculty did not appear to question their own perspectives, or ask whether there was a need to see kids more clearly in terms of their race and culture or to consider alternative interpretations of behavior.

Personal silence about race is common, and institutions like Pathways are shaped as much by what does not happen as by what does. Pathways' handpicked faculty had plunged into the hard work of founding a new school without anticipating the need for any overt discussion of race, and ingrained dominant societal norms prevailed by default.

All schools take refuge in silence about race to some degree, and many educators are novices at constructing multicultural, integrated school settings (Grant & Secada, 1990). What my documentation revealed is that racial issues were often invisible to the majority White faculty, or thought not to be about race. But like ultraviolet sun rays, damage from unexplored racial attitudes often appears long after the actual exposure. Building a successful integrated school means paying attention to people of color and attending to White racial attitudes before emergencies require it.

That society's problems play out in schools means that schools also offer an opportunity to open a dialogue about race and equality, yet this dialogue is never easy. At the heart of the story I am telling here is the striking ambiguity inherent in the individual incidents; people at Pathways disagreed about whether, and in what ways, events were racial. I have attempted to present enough details so readers can draw their own conclusions about what may be racial, adolescent, gender, happenstance, denial, or a mix of other factors that influence what happens in schools (McCarthy, 1993).

A lot occurred at Pathways that first year. Bringing into being an educational vision for sixth and seventh graders required instilling an ethos, setting standards, and establishing moral authority while simultaneously facing bureaucratic constraints, learning how to run a fire drill, and mollifying anxious parents. For this article, I set aside these monumental tasks and ignored many unique events that interacted with race. While readers may conclude from the incidents I have chosen to describe that Pathways faculty frequently got caught up in racial crises, that would be inaccurate and misleading.

Documenting Rarely Heard Stories

A colleague, Brenda Engel, influenced my approach to the work at Pathways. She makes a distinction between "documentation," which is a nonjudgmental and neutral selection of systematically collected documents reflecting a "complicated, many-faceted sequence of events that has occurred over a period of time so that it may be examined at leisure," and a "documented account," in which the documents are used to support a thesis (Engel, 1975, p. 3). This article is an example of the latter; I have chosen particular incidents, teased out from a complex whole, to address what I feel goes on everywhere, even in the "best schools," as adults and children try to untangle the larger societal issues that play themselves out in schools.

One purpose of a documenter is to function as a mirror, helping to make practitioners aware of their own practice. In my experience, once all the particulars of any incident are written down - what exactly was said or done - it becomes harder for faculty to stay with comfortable, unreflective thinking. The racial dynamics at Pathways likely mirror what happens in many schools facing similar challenges. In this article, I explore these dynamics and call attention to the deep levels of awareness necessary to change previously unexamined behavior.

This article evolved as I circulated drafts to all the staff, taking their comments into account with each revision. Though faculty talk about race was rare at the time of the incidents recorded here, I have included many of their responses to what I wrote. That the faculty engaged with me in this documentation effort is a tribute to their honesty, good faith, and their willingness to learn from the work.

During the rewrites, colleagues, friends, and family also added information, took issue with my viewpoints, and challenged me to clarify meaning, teaching me all along. For me, this is one way of socially constructing knowledge. Writing this piece has been a struggle to transform a still incomplete learning experience into more solid personal understanding.

What follows are glimpses of daily life at Pathways that invite educators to think about how we can begin and sustain the hard conversations about race that will allow us to hear - really hear - our own, as well as our children's, questions.

Creating a New School

Located on the edge of Harlem in a nineteenth-century elementary school building that just happened to have a vacant top floor, Pathways opened with its facility in a state of terrible disrepair. "As I was walking up the steps for the first time, I felt like I had spiders crawling around in my stomach. How come the school is so dreadfully damaged with cracks? What have I gotten myself into?" seventh grader Hector Zelaya wrote on the first day. To reach Pathways, Hector and his peers had to traverse the barren playground with its netless basketball hoops, climb up the long flights of stairs, the last of which smelled of wet plaster, and skirt the large buckets positioned to catch the water that dripped through the roof whenever it rained. Even the district office liaison called the setting "a hostile environment." Yet the staff was thrilled. Unlike the anonymous, bureaucratic junior highs with escalating dropout rates and demoralized faculties so often depicted in the press, Pathways was founded by teachers excited about exercising their own autonomy in a small, personal community.6 Hector, one of many children who responded to the faculty's excitement, ended his essay saying, "When I got to class I felt at home and my worries were over. Now I know it's not just the outside; its the inside and the people. I'm growing to like it on the first day and later on I'll love it (maybe)."

To build something where nothing existed before captured the founding director's imagination. Jan Palmer had not worked full time since before her oldest child was born. Her biological White and adopted Black children were now grown, and she was ready for the grueling hours that directing a school required. She was not even deterred by her temporary per diem status, which meant that her job showed up on the computer as a vacancy open to any high-seniority teacher.

Unlike a hiring system in which teachers are assigned to a school by a central office, alternative school directors have the luxury of hiring staff from among those applicants who wish to join their faculty. To select committed teachers who shared the values she considered crucial to founding a new school, Jan interviewed candidates, visited them on site, and invited them to observe her own classroom. She assessed their energy level, their willingness to work hard, and looked for evidence that children were at the center of their focus; too many worksheets, too much dependence on canned curriculum, or too much ego were grounds for rejection. As it turned out, none of the people she hired had weekend or after-school jobs, all were married, and all but the youngest had children. On the surface, we seemed more alike than different.

Nevertheless, we were a diverse staff. Don Jackson had previously taught for twenty years in "regular" junior highs, where he was often a minority White teacher. Carrie Morris, a seasoned African American teacher and former staff developer, was a twenty-year-plus veteran of the New York City Public Schools with more varied experience teaching children of all races than the rest of us. Bilingual, bicultural Lucy Lopez-Garcia, a Puerto Rican, moved comfortably within both Anglo and Latino cultures. A nursery school teacher only a few credits shy of a teaching credential, Lucy was delighted to work officially as an aide, but to function as a faculty member who was centrally important to colleagues, children, and parents in her role as an advisor and teacher of art. For Jim Serota, a White Ivy League graduate who had worked in an inner-city after-school program for two years, this was his first teaching job. Marilyn Ross, another young, White, first-year teacher, joined the staff part time in October. For several years, Jan and I been colleagues at a small, integrated middle school. When she decided to start a new school, I saw it as an opportunity to capture the experience in writing, and we conceived this documentation project, which built on my previous descriptions of classrooms and my twenty years of teaching.

The staff agreed with the vision statement that "a good school for preadolescents maintains a diverse community to educate children for life in a democratic society," but no one thought that implementing this vision was going to be easy. As Carrie told the deputy superintendent, "You have to engineer life in a diverse group to make it work. You can't leave it - any of it - to chance." This integrated faculty actively sought out White students to create a diverse student body and, at the same time, took care to keep those students from dominating academically. Although the staff did not spend planning time explicitly talking about race, they did engineer a four-pronged effort designed to achieve a fair and equitable school. First, the school recruited a cohort of academically proficient Black and Latino students, whose presence as role models confounded the stereotype of integrated schools in which Whites remain at the top of the academic hierarchy. Referred by an organization that prepared students of color for independent schools, these high-powered entrants became academic stars. Second, faculty planned heterogeneous classes, which prevented labelling children by their academic proficiency or lack of it. Third, teachers created openings for all kinds of talents to surface. They carefully mixed race, age, and abilities of students in subject matter classes, advisories, and special projects that required various skills. Fourth, they modelled respectful appreciation of differences through a year-long social studies curriculum, "Coming to America," which attempted to honor contributions from a variety of cultures.

The school enrolled sixty-three students. Although children do not actually come in standard demographic slots, convention requires labeling their heritages. We categorized slightly more than one-third of the student body as Latino, slightly over one-third as African American, slightly less than one-third as White, and two students as Asian. All students spoke English; many were bilingual in English and Spanish. Forty-three children applied for either free lunch (if their family of four had an annual income of less than $16,500) or for reduced-fee lunch (family income of less than $23,000). Reading and math scores ranged from the eighth to the ninety-ninth-plus percentile. When school began, no faculty member had taught children so diverse along so many dimensions, nor had their students been in such mixed classrooms before.

Few mortals succeed in meeting their highest goals, including the founders of schools in the first year. The stories I tell about race may suggest that this new middle school didn't come close to providing a good place for children, which would not be true. That Pathways students loved to come to school is amply documented in the essays I asked them to write in October, February, and June. Sixth grader Marie Diaz's June list distills the satisfaction that many students expressed in their essays:

Some things that I like about Pathways are:

1.on trips teachers aren't always watching what you do

2. there's a lot of gossip going on

3. the teachers are very, very friendly.

4. if you have a problem they will talk to you about it.

5. teachers trust us

6. I like science because we get to experiment with things, not just read a science book and then write a paragraph about what you read.

7. they take us to a lot of trips.

Further evidence that Pathways children enjoyed school comes from the official records: On the same day that Marie wrote her essay, a board of education attendance auditor tallied the books and concluded that Pathways had one of the highest teacher and student attendance rates of any school in New York City.

The small size, the strong advisory system, the care with which the faculty observed children, and the trust the school inspired meant that students exposed their feelings and that faculty took note of them. Yet despite conscientious attention to equitable structures and the teachers' concerted efforts to know children well, students' talk about race often caught faculty off guard. When race surfaced at unplanned moments, children's questions went unaddressed.

"He's Not One of Us, Is He?": A Child's Fleeting Question

It is easy to see race as an issue in a school where, day after day, the students in the top tracks are White and the students in remedial classes are primarily children of color. It is harder to make meaning from conversational snatches that easily get lost in the sweep of school life. The following 30-second incident has buried in it a child's real question. From my notes the first week of school:

It is the first afternoon together in the park and the first full day of school. Don, a teacher (White) organizes a football game. Duke, a sixth grader (White), literally mows down Sam (White) on the other team, violating the agreed upon rules. Several kids (African American) complain. Duke calls them "Schmucks," and angrily retreats, muttering under his breath about how he knows the rules because he has played football all his life. Another teacher (White) encourages them to "forget it" and get on with the game, but several kids (all races) from both teams go immediately to Carrie (African American). They are baffled by Duke's behavior, by his insistence that he was playing correctly, by his belief that he had the right to knock Sam down, and his verbal epithet, which these kids took to be a racial slur. Arnold (African American) puts his arm next to Carrie's, and says seriously, "He isn't one of us, is he?"

"What do you mean?" Carrie says. Arnold replies, "You know, his skin isn't dark. He called us `Smokes'." (Field notes, September 13)

"He isn't one of us, is he?" is a basic human way to categorize the world. The disintegration of this football game exemplifies the subtle ways race seeps into children's consciousness. Arnold, as he compared his arm to Carrie's, thought that he heard his classmate say "smokes," referring to his skin color. Arnold's question and its accompanying gesture have become, for me, emblematic of the complicated, ambiguous nature of race and racism.7

Arnold did not hear "schmucks," the Yiddish word of derision in general use, which I heard clearly, and it may not have been a familiar word to him. So while Duke's insult was not a "racist" slur, this exchange illustrates the way Arnold made sense of his newly integrated world. This incident confirmed for me that when adults and children do not know each other and understand even less about each other's cultural backgrounds, race easily becomes the most salient personal attribute. Ambiguous remarks fall into the most obvious category, which is skin color, especially when students see color in discriminatory terms.

Nothing is inherently odd about noticing race and skin color, but in this society they are fraught with hidden meanings. Misinformation and lack of knowledge about race can be a minefield when no acceptable forum exists to raise questions. Although Arnold had never been in the same classroom with Whites before, and Duke had never been a racial minority at school, we never thought to create such a forum at Pathways. As a staff we were unprepared for students' barely articulated questions about this new racial mix. Whether due to conscious avoidance or unconscious denial, or a mix of both, I never talked to either child about what happened, nor did Carrie and I discuss it with each other or think to bring it to a faculty meeting. Arnold's question remained unexplored and Duke's behavior went unexamined. Pathways' curriculum, which was explicitly meant to be "gender fair and multicultural," openly addressed the question, "Who am I and how did my ancestors come to America?" yet it did not provide a place for Arnold to consider the implications of what he really wanted to know: "He isn't one of us, is he?"

The faculty listened to students and encouraged them to articulate their feelings, which paid off in personal relationships and mutual trust, but what was left unsaid or ignored about racial and cultural identity left children with a powerfully negative message. "People identify others by their skin color before their cultural identity," Carrie said after she read a draft of this article, and lamented that "little is embedded in any school's curriculum that really speaks to these issues."

Servant or Slave?

Before the staff was even in place, Pathways received a grant to hire a "playwright in residence" to teach all students "writers' workshop" twice weekly for six weeks. Jan hired Martin Cane, who came in mid-September to share his ideas with the faculty:

Martin Cane, a young [White] playwright, arrived to meet the faculty. During the staff meeting, he explained how he is going to work: "First there will be a staged reading by professional actors of my own play. Putting on my play first means that I put myself on the line before I ask kids to do it. It is also a chance to have a common experience. Then kids will write scenes, from 2-10 pages and I will pick eight of them. The criteria for selection could be diversity of topic, how hard a kid worked, how passionate she is, how much of a breakthrough it is, or how much possibility it opens up for kids. After the scenes have been selected, professional actors will spend the day rehearsing plays with the student writers, and then there will be an all school event for families that night." (Field notes, September 12)

Faculty were impressed with Martin's values and program plans. In early October, he started teaching three sections of writers' workshop. His facility with language, his ability to provide students with instant phrases that got them unstuck, his energy and good actor's voice, and his swift pacing entranced me. After the first day, a sixth grader said about this master of language so skilled in releasing kids' imaginations, "That man sees things the rest of us don't see."

Martin's three back-to-back classes drained even his prodigious energy. Although the school tried to rearrange the schedule, Martin's own work prevented any shift. The emotions unleashed in his classes spilled out in unpredictable ways, especially when his energy ebbed. During the second week of Martin's program, he asked students to write about a scary emotion, and Bart, a White child, recalled an experience from several years earlier that still evoked his strong response. When Bart lived in South Africa, he found a poisonous snake in his garden, and he and a servant killed it. On hearing Bart read this story aloud, Sal, a Latino child, leapt up out of his chair and said, "You had slaves!" It was an accusation, not a question. Martin reddened, and said, "Servant is the word," and moved right on; this exchange took under thirty seconds.

Sal could not calm down, and after class he bullied Bart until a teacher intervened. Sal would not budge from his opinion that having a servant in South Africa meant that Bart's family was rich and owned slaves, both reasons to be hostile toward Bart. From that point on, this physically powerful child hectored the meeker Bart on many occasions.

Although this brief exchange between Sal and Bart appeared in my notes, and others witnessed it, we missed its racially loaded implications. We were inattentive to Sal and Bart when they most needed adult support to work through their strong feelings and to see the world through each others' eyes.

As a part-time, short-term artist-in-residence, Martin may have been the catalyst for this situation, but the regular faculty held the responsibility for helping children interpret it. If individual teachers are to see that children achieve a deeper understanding of class differences and racial issues, they need to generate opportunities for the whole faculty to discuss these topics among themselves. Had the school done so in this case, we might have seen that Sal needed a place to make his deep concerns about slavery explicit so that other students could recognize his perspective about the Black struggle in South Africa and come to understand what set him off. Faculty missed the chance to create such a forum. Instead, the only visible aftermath of this brief incident was Sal's continual picking on Bart, which then became an issue not of race, but of disciplining Sal for his "hot temper." It seems to me that adults' urge to curb unwanted behavior often shifts their focus from children to discipline, especially when rules can be invoked to cover situations, such as discussions of race, that make them uncomfortable.

"How Come There Are No Brothers on That List?"

Once the students had completed their play scenes, Martin chose eight of them to be staged by professional actors. He carefully described his process of selection:

I made choices by first reading all the plays without regard for racial diversity or kids who needed support. I put scenes in three piles - strong, maybes, and rejects. Those in the third pile either were unfinished, had no investment, were unclear, or had no conflict - a central aim of my teaching. Then I reread them to see if I made any mistakes, but didn't move any into the "strong" pile. Then I shaped the performance evening, looking for humor, strong emotion, and a variety of subjects. All three classes had to be represented. Only after I met those criteria did I look at individuals for racial and gender balance. I chose one child who had come far and this would make a big difference to his growth. I couldn't help it that 6 out of the 8 selected plays were by girls. (Field notes, December 3)

On a Monday morning, two weeks after he had last taught, Martin returned to the first-period writing class, now overseen by regular Pathways faculty, and gave a moving introduction before announcing his final selections. He said with feeling, "My plays don't always get produced, and I have to accept that. It is part of being a playwright. I want you to know that when I tell you all of the plays were good, I really mean it. If I didn't believe the plays were good, I wouldn't say so." He named four children whose scenes were chosen and took them immediately to work with the professional actors. Other students quietly continued reading and writing.

Martin gave the same introduction to the second class, and took two children out. Only one boy, Derek, objected loudly, "My play was so fresh. It's not fair." Third period was different. This noisy class, for which Martin had the least energy, still did good work. Martin gave a short, less heartfelt version of what he had said to the other classes. Without talking about himself or the quality of the plays, he said wearily that "choosing play scenes was hard," and named two authors, who left with him to rehearse. Both of these winners were White, although those chosen from the other classes were children of color. After Martin's departure, Marilyn, a White faculty member newly hired to teach the writers' workshop, introduced an assignment, but the kids were not with her. Amid some commotion in the back of the room, Jerome, an African American, said rather tentatively, but in a voice loud enough to make everyone listen, "It's not my question, but someone wants to know, 'how come there are no brothers on that list?'"

Above the noisy responses - everyone wanted an answer - Jan took over. In the room to help with the play scene logistics, she moved to the front of the class and began, "That is not true. The list is balanced." Pulling a list from her pocket, she read it aloud, naming an Asian and a Hispanic; when she got to Bianca, whose surname is Hispanic, she looked up and said, "Bianca is Hispanic." The class exploded. Everyone had something to say at the same time, and the voices got even louder before the crescendo peaked. Forgetting the original question of why no Black boys were chosen from this class, kids shrieked: "Bianca told me she was Black!" "How could anyone who talks like that be Hispanic?" "She has a Black attitude." The kids were astonished that anyone thought Bianca was Hispanic. Bianca's heritage is extremely complex; she is the biological child of a Latino father and a White mother, and the foster child of African American parents. Her peers saw her as Black. They totally overlooked the fact that if she were Black, then the list included at least one Black person. Bianca was not in this section of writers' workshop, so she could not answer questions about her background. For the adults in the room, all we thought we knew about supporting children's need for self-identification went down the drain, and the issue raised by Jerome - "How come there are no brothers on that list?" - went with it.

Voices were getting still louder when Lisa, an African American, changed the subject, which generated even more heat. "Why did I do this play anyway if it wasn't chosen?" she protested. "I spent half a week thinking of a topic and the other half writing seven pages. A waste. A pure waste." She was raging. Her anger at not being chosen despite her hard work sent hot sparks into the room. Serena, a Latina, answered her articulately and passionately: "Not everyone can be chosen. You still learn from writing." Energy whirled around the room and kids weren't in any state to listen. The period ended, mercifully for us, with a deus ex machina when two unplanned visitors arrived, almost as if in answer to our prayer for a diversion. Amid much chaos, the visitors offered us good wishes for our new school, and the class left for lunch. Jerome's question remained unanswered.

Although a child's whispered remark about the race of the winning playwrights should have alerted us to the conversation students were eager to have, we were more inclined to bury this uncomfortable 45-minute period in oblivion. Neither Jan, Marilyn, nor I brought it up informally or at any faculty meeting. The issues of children's racial and ethnic identity could have provided fertile ground for weeks of curriculum, but the pace of the day crowded out time for a topic that was hard for faculty to discuss and for which no particular space had been created within the school structure. Instead, we were embarrassed by a classroom eruption that took us beyond our own comfort level. To us, this noisy digression merely interfered with our pedagogical intentions, and we missed the opportunity for inquiry it might have provided. The issue of race as a factor in the selection process had disappeared from any formal discussion among children or faculty. The incident, however, did not end there.

The Pathways faculty worked hard to support children who struggled to find their own voices and act on their views. Lisa, still harboring strong feelings about why she wasn't selected, appropriately took this issue to her advisory, which wrote Martin the following letter:

12/3/90

To Mr. Martin Cane

In our Advisory we all discussed about how you chose the scenes for the plays.

1. I think we all understand that only a certain amount of people would be chosen. We all wish that we would be recognized for our work.

2. Before the plays were chosen you gave some people the idea that their plays were going to be chosen by giving them the idea that their work was Excellent.

3.What was the reason those people got chosen over the rest of us?

Lisa's initial outrage about how hard she worked on her play cut to the heart of the school's double message: We are inclusive until we decide to be exclusive. Lisa's concerns in class, mingled with the talk about race that charged the atmosphere, grew out of her sense of powerlessness when confronted with the subjectivity of the play scene selections. She regained some control by going to her advisory. The advisory's letter, a mature, logical response devoid of the intense feelings she expressed in class, lacked explicit mention of race, perhaps because word had spread that Martin's list was, in fact, racially balanced. On it were a Black boy, a Black girl, two Latinas, a White boy, a White girl, an Asian girl, and Bianca with her complex background. Since evidence disproved the contention that there were no brothers on the list, the original question slipped back underground.

Had we adults who witnessed these complicated feelings listened more carefully and been more attuned to the crucial importance of students' questions about race, we might have discussed the explosive class at the next faculty meeting. Then all of us, including Lisa's advisor, who had not known about what happened, would have been better prepared to open conversations with children about racial exclusion and identity. Just because there was one brother on the list didn't mean the discussion should have ended.

Conversation about children's racial identity - so obviously ripe for exploration - never reappeared, at least not in any form that caught my attention. Only in hindsight did I see the possibilities for supporting children's understanding of their own heritages (Cohen, 1993). As for other fallout, a district colleague, one of our visitors who arrived in the midst of this classroom chaos, bruited it around that he was surprised discipline was so lax at Pathways. Such criticism was frequently leveled by adults in the school community when kids expressed volatile feelings about race, as in the struggle between Sal and Bart.

This incident might have been lost, except that I took notes. After I circulated a description of this episode to the staff as part of my first draft of this article, the faculty wondered what initially prompted LaTasha, an African American student, to question the composition of the play scene list, and what caused Jerome to repeat her question. Why didn't LaTasha ask her own question? Was hers a casual query, which then sparked Jerome's urgent need to know? Why had the issue of race not come up during class sooner? Gender issues had been debated heatedly in other classes since the beginning of the year, yet talk about race had been essentially absent. Lucy speculated that perhaps Pathways' emphasis on belonging to a new school community, conveyed in the much-repeated phrase "we are all pioneers together," may have felt to the children like a "melting pot" philosophy that discouraged rather than invited discussions of differences. Did kids not feel safe enough to ask hard personal questions until now? And, even more disturbing, how much energy did kids of color spend wondering what was safe to say in a White teacher's class (Delpit, 1990)?

Equally significant was the issue of selectivity. No one absorbed what Martin had said in September: "The hardest task is to provide an inclusive experience and then be exclusive about it." Although children and teachers knew only eight plays would be selected, the reality hadn't sunk in. The children felt misled and took the route available through race to express their discomfort with a White male who closed the gate on their aspirations to be selected. A more established school might - just might - have thought more about the consequences of competitiveness interjected by an outsider.

These three vignettes caught faculty off balance. The following two incidents, involving Duke, who "mowed down" Sam in a football game the first day of school, and Derek, who also singled himself out on the first day, are weightier, with more apparent long-term consequences for these students and the school. While the stories differ, both boys shared a deep uncertainty about their place in school, and neither ever became fully part of the Pathways community.

Whites as a Minority

Changing demographics have produced a relatively new phenomenon in public education: White students as a racial minority in urban schools. Pathways staff believes that integration is worth preserving, but even if it were not - as many families of color are beginning to say - public schools are open to every child and all children deserve to be part of the school community. Only in retrospect were faculty able to raise the question, How do we serve all children together in the same educational institution?

That first year, faculty assumed that enough White children at Pathways were comfortable so that little attention was paid to the issue of "minority" White children. Faculty were disinclined to talk about children whose White skin already gave them a privileged position in society. Jan said later that the particular White children who were struggling were "finding out that in this school they are not the aristocracy." Carrie added, "It's good for their souls," but she also pointed out that "White kids are paying the price of a discriminatory society, as are Black and Latino kids."

My notes about Duke's experience as a White student at Pathways highlight one example of what teachers face if they want to integrate all children in a school community. White children do experience fewer problems in society; "Duke will always be able to get a taxi in the middle of the night," Carrie reminded me. Nevertheless, Duke needed to find a place at school. These excerpts from my advisory notes early in the year show my own inadequate and tentative responses as I threw myself into unfamiliar territory:

One of the Black kids brought his sketch pad from home full of magic marker cartoons, and explained that he does them by eye, not by tracing. Everyone admired the drawings. When he came to a black-faced Mickey Mouse, Duke said, "Hey Mickey Mouse isn't Black." Kids said emphatically, "Why not?" and Duke backed off.

Then, Bianca read her book report on The Miss USA Pageant. In the course of it, she was asked: "How did you know how old the new Miss USA was?" She answered, "I bin knowing it." Duke snapped, "You can't say that. It's not right." I said, "It may not be standard English, but it is absolutely correct in Bianca's home language. It means she has known it for a long time." (Field notes, September 18)

Though Duke's two contributions to this advisory session were sharply rebuffed, I never thought to explain to him why his peers and I objected. My notes from that day include another incident:

The next thing I knew Jose was yelling, "Fight in the gym." When I arrived in the gym, Michael (African American) - and Duke were indeed fighting. Michael, feeling the sting of Duke's behavior over the last few days, said to me, "I don't like the way he has an attitude with teachers." I took Duke - the more upset - into the office; teary-eyed and angry, he said, "I'm one of the few White boys here. I grew up in an upper class White community and I'm not taking anything from anybody." I was surprised to hear a child use the term "upper class" and ignored it, but I wondered if he assumed that he would be treated differently from others. I quoted Jan's line reminding him America is changing and he will be better prepared to be a leader if he learns how to get on in a diverse group. I reiterated emphatically that this has to be a safe place for everybody - no fights, no snap judgments about the way others speak or draw. He agreed and pulled himself together while I went off to explain to Michael that fights are not allowed, and that while we have to teach Duke a few things, it isn't his responsibility to change Duke's attitude by himself. Relieved that I did not call his mother, he said, "Thank you for this talk." (Field notes, September 18)

At the time, I wondered about Duke's sense of entitlement - what I knew about his neighborhood or his family background gave me no clue to how he understood his self-proclaimed socioeconomic status. To my knowledge, he was a regular middle-class kid. Yet I never addressed his feelings of superiority, nor did I recognize that uncertainty and fear about this new school might be the real issue for him. Instead, I pointed out that White children do face fewer problems in society and told Duke he would be better prepared for today's society if he learned to lead by experiencing life as a racial minority. My reaction reflects an unexamined assumption about White privilege, and is one reason why people of color oppose integration that historically focuses on benefits for White children (Foster, 1993; Ladson-Billings, 1994). While I impressed upon the boys our desire to make the Pathways community safe for everyone, and I thought I made sense talking to Michael about Duke's prejudices, it never occurred to me to sit them down to talk with each other.

On October ninth, Duke apparently told a Latino fifth grader from the elementary school downstairs to "bug off" (at least that is what he said in his sanitized version). He admitted the child's only provocation was to be in the way. The offended child had threatened to bring an older brother and his friends to the playground "for protection," and Pathways students standing nearby (all Black, except for one White friend of Duke's) had refused to get involved. Understandably sensing danger, they had gone immediately to the Pathways office to report what had happened. The dangerous feeling lingered for a few days and to straighten things out with the elementary school, the building principal met with this fifth grader and the Pathways students who had witnessed the challenge. From my notes:

The principal lectured the Pathways' kids on how they were outsiders in the neighborhood and tried to get them to see how the elementary kids felt with new non-neighborhood kids on the playground. At first it seemed like her lecture only exacerbated the middle school kids' feelings of nervousness and Duke's feelings of being in the minority. In talking it over in our own staff meeting we concluded her message about outsiders is so basic to the neighborhood ethic that we have to take it seriously. It was decided that rather than have the building principal and Jan supervise the playground for the next two weeks ("Two ladies for protection - no way," the men on the faculty said), kids would just be sent home immediately after school. Don pointed out what everybody needed to remember: "Duke doesn't understand that talk connects up with action much more quickly in this neighborhood. Duke has a lot to learn." (Field notes, October 15)

Faculty continued to watch Duke. By the time of his self-evaluation, we saw some small progress. This mid-semester exercise asked students, "What are the most important things you have learned?" On his first draft, Duke answered "math facts." The next day, on his final draft, he wrote instead, "I learned a lot about other kids." By Thanksgiving he had stopped reacting negatively to differences - at least out loud. He still had few friends and hung out only with White males, even when their most obvious commonality was being White. At the parent conference following this self-evaluation, his father agreed with us about Duke's social growth: "Yeah, things are better. He doesn't come home with stories anymore about how he's the only one who knows anything and everyone else is dumb."

Duke and Carrie had a good relationship, though she had no compunction about describing him, out of his hearing, as a racist. She often said, "after all, he is a kid." At Carrie's insistence, he stopped telling her offensive off-color jokes and apologized when she pointed out his arrogant behavior. He declared science with Carrie "my best subject." If given a choice in class with whom to work, he never chose a child of color. He did not socialize after school or join the basketball team, though he did play pickup games at lunch with racially mixed teams. He even played on the girls' kickball team when "they needed a good kicker." He knew a lot about baseball - statistics, history, strategy - but in the classroom Duke shared reluctantly, and others listened equally reluctantly. He affected the student body very little, except that kids were aware of his racial attitudes, as shown in my notes from the spring:

The kids are watching a slide show in preparation for the three day camping trip. The quality of attention borders on the disrespectful. Many in the audience have never been to camp - or even away from home overnight, and nervous tension is high. The slides, shown by the camp director, picture much younger children - all White. The (Black) boys on the back bench were loud and disruptive. One of them said derisively: "Look at all those Dukes up there." I was not meant to hear their remark and they didn't know that I did. When I reported this remark to the faculty, frankly thinking the kids had observed Duke well, Marilyn (White) rightly reminded me that, "If they had been White boys talking about a Black child, you wouldn't have hesitated for a minute to stop them." True. It never occurred to me to intervene. (It was easier for me to label Duke "racist" than initiate a hard conversation about "all those Dukes" with the boys on the back bench.) (Field notes, May 1)

Late in the spring, Duke began to talk about leaving Pathways. At first he said, "This school doesn't have enough extracurricular activities (though he never stayed for what they had), or that the "work isn't hard enough" (though I believed he didn't push himself to excel); finally, after some urging to be honest, he said it wasn't the school he didn't like, but he wanted to be where his friends were. In advisory, he did what was expected, joined games, and spoke when called on, but he was never central to the group. On a final assignment to write what was important about Pathways, he said:

It's a small school. The teachers can get to know you better. They have time to work with you. In fact I think they get a little too personal. Like telling you to interact with people you don't really like instead of being with your friends. They worry too much about racism. They worry too much about your personal life instead of your academic life. I met a lot of nice people in my one year, but I really don't feel right here.

This essay matched what other children often noticed about Pathways' size and personal atmosphere. It also called attention to Duke's feelings of being separate and disconnected from the group. Late in the year, I tried to open a discussion with him about what I perceived as his narrowness in his choice of friends, and he didn't like it. Perhaps I didn't know how to talk about race effectively, and had not created enough openings during the year for him to say what was on his mind.

Whether Duke is biased because of family or societal attitudes or is merely unhappy with his minority status is not really the issue. If integrated schools are going to succeed, it is imperative to find a way to include "all those Dukes" in the community. Duke never became an accepting or acceptable member of Pathways. Jan willingly admitted that "White children who come from the power structure with more experience and opportunities didn't get enough attention from us," while Carrie pointed out that "all children suffer from racism." The issues around White children may not be the most essential - children of color definitely pay a higher price for society's biases - but if public schools are to be successfully integrated, faculties will have to think harder about Whites as minorities, just as schools are now thinking harder about supporting children of color in predominantly White institutions.

For many White families, sending their children to schools where students are predominantly children of color requires giving up a privileged status gained by virtue of their White skin (McIntosh, 1988). Basic to the problem is this statement overheard at the district office: "If the mix is one-third Black, one-third Hispanic, and one-third White, White parents see the school as two-thirds non-White." Pathways is deliberately trying to achieve that one-third, one-third, one-third ratio in order to maintain an integrated setting. As part of managing that ratio, faculty must do more to insure that White parents are willing partners.

From the viewpoint of justly allocating school resources of faculty time and attention, that expenditure does not seem fair. To call for a big investment of faculty energy might create the impression of giving more of a scarce school resource to the dominant group. Children of color need an equal share of teachers' energy. Even in a school that is respectful of difference, it takes time-consuming, committed, moral leadership to build a school community based on the agreement that we are all citizens in this society together. Certainly, integration must be built on something other than a White, middle-class model for the benefit of Whites, as many Black families are now charging (Ladson-Billings, 1994). Yet, if White children are to learn to be comfortable when they number only a handful in a large group, they and their families will need this leadership. Such moral guidance to do what is right, rather than what is politically expedient for those in power, is not so easily given. My experience at Pathways and other schools suggests that many school communities are not yet prepared for what that leadership might entail.

Veteran White teachers may have thought about educating the increasing numbers of children of color, albeit often in terms of assimilating them into White middle-class norms. Many White teachers - who have rarely been a numerical minority themselves - have little empathy or knowledge about what would make the transition smoother for children who come from a predominantly White setting to a predominantly Black and Latino setting. I have already noted that the faculty made assumptions about White children's comfort levels. Indeed, it was easier for me to ignore Duke's lack of ease because he was White. In comparison with White faculty, Carrie's own racial experiences gave her more insight into Duke's minority status. Yet it was an unfair burden on Carrie to expect her to educate the faculty about race. White faculty already ask too much of faculty of color in interpreting students' behavior; this is work Whites must learn to do.

Do I Have a Place in This School?

The story of Derek's expulsion centers around the daunting challenge of educating other people's children as we would our own (Delpit, 1988). The "we" here refers to any of us who teach children across racial, ethnic, or class boundaries, which includes most teachers in today's urban settings. The background of this story is governance: Who sets the boundaries? Who is "the boss" of the school? What happens when standards of behavior are ignored or defied? In the foreground is Derek, who did not connect with enough Pathways adults to learn as we would like our own children to learn. The vision that every individual was valued faded when faculty seriously disagreed over Derek. Whether the staff used every means at their disposal to help him, and how they interpreted their responsibility or lack of it for Derek's predicament, is one of the story's unresolved and guilt-provoking themes. This story also calls attention to what happens when adults reach an impasse with a child who does not meet their standards of behavior.

Since Pathways faculty ostensibly shared the same values, governance by consensus worked fine when no one had passionate feelings, and the issues were not loaded. Congenial meetings, good parties, and genuine friendships cemented faculty bonds. But in a crisis - and no one knew what form it would take until it happened - the method of consensus failed. We had no practice with confrontation, no precedent for resolving heated arguments, and no way to talk at meetings about differing perceptions of each others' actions. As a result, consensus collapsed in a crisis around Derek. No one heard his unarticulated question: "Where is my place in this school?"

From the staff viewpoint, Derek was trouble. Even on the first day of school, when kids were on their best behavior, Derek stood out. In my journal notes of the first all-school meeting, I speculated: "Derek didn't wait to sit on the rug when everyone else did, nor did he want to line up by height for Don's game. Was his reluctance related to his being one of the shortest boys in the school?" Since that first day, this twelve-year-old African American boy could disrupt class merely by walking across the room on his way to the bathroom. He might provocatively pull his sweats up and down, or whack a child as he passed, which may have been an affectionate gesture, but was disruptive nonetheless. He frequently refused to engage in anything even vaguely academic, thus he never became competent enough at school work to demonstrate that he was making progress.

Over the year, Derek's disrespect for adults - at least the White adults - escalated. Or, perhaps the White adults disrespected Derek by interpreting his behavior though narrow lenses, causing events to escalate.8 Something about Derek locked faculty into battle with him. Derek was not a "middle-class" kid.9 He may not have been well understood by White faculty, who focused on his "attitude" and failed to see how he was setting himself up for school failure right before their eyes. We need to understand more about children like Derek who often push adults beyond their own limits, but we also need to recognize how those limits relate to culture, class, and race.

With no one looking carefully at anything about this child except his transgressions, Derek became increasingly lost to view. School structures and faculty support that might have helped him find his way were absent. Yet Pathways faculty did have structures for paying attention to individual children. Each month, we scheduled a Descriptive Review, an activity designed to build a community based on shared knowledge about children, which entailed an in-depth look at one particular child. For each Descriptive Review, the faculty chose children who caused them to "tear their hair out" or who raised particular linguistic or pedagogical issues.10 Based on those criteria Derek qualified, but each month we chose children who appealed to us more than Derek.

Of all the faculty, only Carrie got on well with Derek. Her ability to hear the hard-to-ignore children who were often disliked by others served him well. When she asked in a strong throaty tone, "Darling, what are you doing?" Derek frequently stopped his misbehavior and apologized in his own distinctive deep voice. Though I did not teach him, I saw how Derek's behavior aggravated those who were not as clearly connected to him as Carrie was. In the minor contretemps that teachers deal with daily, Derek managed to resist adult eye contact ("Please look at me when I am talking"), continue the offending infraction ("I asked you once to stop drumming on the table!"), and draw his friends into his court of appeal ("I wasn't talking, was I?"). Not everyone was as able to set clear boundaries for him as Carrie was. Perhaps Carrie's more ready acceptance of children like Derek who tested adult authority prevented her from calling sooner than others might have for drastic measures. And maybe she absorbed and took care of so much of his particular misbehavior that the rest of the faculty didn't need to signal for help. In any case, until Derek got into hopeless confrontations with the rest of the faculty, attention to other children took precedence over his annoying behavior and undone homework.

Derek's first real blow-up with an adult came in January. Everyone acknowledged that Derek was the star player on the basketball team, though something of a "hot dogger." When a referee called a foul on him during a regular intramural game, Derek lost his temper and kicked over a trash can. Carrie calmed him down and the school imposed no sanctions. In retrospect, some faculty considered this tolerance of Derek's unsportsmanlike behavior an egregious error. Later Don said, "We should have suspended him right then."

Even though Don was particularly vexed by Derek's behavior with other faculty members, he and Derek had no particular tension in their relationship. Don's math classes were popular, well organized and executed, with high standards for all children's achievement, and Derek behaved in them. In October, Derek wrote a description of his new teachers, including Don: "My math teacher plays too much, but I like him. When he gets to business he's strict." Don pointed out, "He may not have always done his homework, but he never gave me trouble in math class."

But skirmishes with Derek did take place elsewhere, especially outside the school walls. Field trips became increasingly hard for him when he refused to obey adults other than Carrie, even for seemingly simple instructions like, "The museum guard said to put your lunch away." As the year progressed, Derek began to cause so much trouble that Jan started a written record on him, which included such phrases as, "resisted authority . . . shouted out . . . refused to follow directions."

No one challenged Don in formal meetings when he reminded us of Derek's charismatic influence over other children. A teacher with over twenty years' experience, Don had a district-wide reputation for excellence. Former students remembered his teaching. Don quickly saw through logistical dilemmas, and staff accepted his authoritative solutions. As the ranking White male on this newly constituted faculty, his strong deep voice carried weight. The director listened. When Don repeatedly said that "Derek didn't care about us or the school," no one disagreed, nor did they counter his assertion that "Derek had too much power." Later in the year, everyone agreed with his conclusion that "Derek was unpredictable and all of us were thrown off balance."

Yet in retrospect, we saw that Derek never got into fights with other kids, came to school on time, was a star in basketball, had a good relationship with his advisor, and had lots of friends. Both girls and boys jockeyed to be part of his group at lunch. His inability or unwillingness to do academic work should have singled him out early for special attention, but it didn't. Students with more visible needs climbed to the top of the agenda, and as the year proceeded, Derek's name never came up at a staff meeting in answer to the regular question: "Who are you worried about?" By early spring, his inappropriate behavior with adults obscured any attempt to figure out how to support his academic learning.

By mid-April, Derek's behavior had become intolerable. When teachers tried to reason with him, distract him, or isolate him, he resisted by turning away, cursing, shouting, and kicking. Jan was usually unperturbable, able to tolerate children's idiosyncrasies and even their occasional misbehavior. But Derek's particular intransigence, his refusal listen to adults, and the way he challenged them by resisting their requests broke down Jan's usually calm exterior. She could no longer see the twelve-year-old boy in front of her.

A crisis began to build on April 18th. From the school's "incident record":

During gym, with no apparent provocation . . . Derek got angry. Carrie put her arm around him and started to talk to him, but he pulled away from her and hit a student who just happened to be behind him. Later in the office he threw his bookbag on the floor toward Jan, used the phone without permission, and was rude when told to hang up. (School records, April 18)

The crisis erupted on April nineteenth. Derek outraged the adults, first when he violated a serious school rule by returning twenty minutes late from lunch, and then when he interrupted an all-school meeting. At this meeting, planned by Carrie and the Student Advisory Council, students told their own stories of discrimination. From my notes:

When Leonora tells a story, Derek yells, "No wonder they kicked you out of Woolworth's, you've got a dirty looking face." Sonia tells a story about how she, Erin, and Josie were on the subway in the Bronx and a policemen tore up Josie's Brooklyn bus pass. Derek shouts out, "What did you do?" Josie responds with where she was walking and Derek interrupts impatiently: "No, what did you do to make him tear up your bus pass?" He is agitated and can't be calmed down. Several stories later, Pam tells about gender bias she felt on the all school basketball team and Derek yells out that he doesn't think boys should have girls on this team. (Field notes, April 19)

Derek behaved as an audience of one, asking his own questions and injecting his opinions at will. The faculty cut him no slack. Carrie moved him off the floor and onto a chair immediately and, as she monitored the group, other adults took turns sitting next to him. At the time no one suggested that talk of discrimination against young Black males might have contributed to his agitated behavior. As someone who often stood out in a group, Derek may have easily identified with Leonora's panic and anger at being singled out. Derek's question, "What did you do?" was apt, but it went unheard as other than an unacknowledged interruption.

Right after the meeting, Jan asked Derek and several other boys to stay after school to account for their lateness. From her written description:

Derek began to sing rather than listen. I asked him to leave the room and wait in the hall. He went instead to the gym and began to play basketball. When Don sent him back to the hall, he came into the classroom without permission, banged his bookbag on a desk, sat down and began to talk to his detained friends. He cursed at me and then at Don and threatened us physically. We told him to wait in the hall and we consulted with Carrie. We all agreed he should be suspended. I asked Carrie to tell him. (School records, April 19)

As his advisor, Carrie was Derek's official advocate and the liaison between home and school. As Carrie and Jan stood together to decide Derek's fate, Carrie was visibly exasperated. She was tired enough of Derek's behavior not to argue his case. She agreed to the suspension and sat him down directly to tell him. From my notes:

About 3:00 Carrie and Derek sit down very close together on the stacked blue mats in the office. Derek is crying. As they lean their backs against the wall with their bodies almost touching, it seems a very personal contact. About 3:20, they stand up and Carrie says "Goodbye, you have to go home right now."

Carrie then said to me that she told him she was going to call his mother, but not that he was suspended. She was moved by the talk with him. "I just can't suspend him until I talk to his mother." But rather than leaving, Derek went into the gym and began to play basketball. When Jan walked though the gym, she told him that since he was suspended, he should leave. Hearing that he was suspended, he lost control. He had a two-year-old tantrum with a twelve-year-old's vocabulary. He finally left, upset, but he left. (Field notes, April 19)

That was a public account. In my private journal I described Don's response to Derek's tantrum. I saw Derek as genuinely out of control, hence my comparison to a two-year-old. Derek's obscenities were hard to hear, but even harder for me to hear was Don's powerful White male voice saying to this distressed twelve-year-old: "Call the police. I'm going to call the police. . . . He is damaged goods." I had no idea what Derek absorbed in the midst of his own tantrum, but other teachers heard it. I was enraged, as were others, but no one, including me, took a public stand. Later, in the women's bathroom, several of us agreed that White males get away with a lot, but no one ever said anything directly to Don.

After Derek finally left that Friday afternoon, the faculty was worn down. His lateness from lunch, his resistance to the consequences, his worse than usual behavior in the meeting, and this last vivid outburst had taken their toll. Don and Jan decided to expel him rather than suspend him. Carrie did not argue for keeping him. She said with deep weariness, "Derek tries my soul," and wondered whether anything could be done to change his behavior.

On Saturday, Jan phoned each faculty member. Individual phone calls prevented faculty from hearing each other's deliberations, so it was harder to share their thinking, but it was the usual way faculty communicated on weekends and evenings. Don never wavered: "Derek is taking over this school and we can't have that." Faculty argued variously that you can't escalate a suspension to an expulsion over a weekend when the student was not at school; that it was morally wrong to accept Derek in the school community and then expel him without trying every option; that without due process or knowledge of the public school legal issues, expulsion was inadvisable; that expelling a child without warning is threatening to other children. Everyone did agree that Derek was a pain to have around. His mother was available only sporadically and his father even more rarely. If we could have magically pushed a button to send him to a better school where he got along with adults more easily, we would gladly have done it. Faculty agonized over where Derek could go, but Derek's options were limited, and even after the weekend, many of us felt Pathways was the best place for him to finish his sixth-grade year.

On Sunday night, the calls resulted in a plan created by Jan and Carrie for a Monday morning meeting with Derek and his parents. No expulsion, they agreed. But at the meeting, when Derek seemed to Jan to be unrepentant and lacking an understanding of his suspension, she decided on the spot to expel him. All the weekend talk about community, trust, and even the legal issues fell by the wayside in the face of Jan's reluctance to have Derek return to school. Afterwards, Jan said the school's inability to cope with Derek determined her decision, despite her Sunday-night intentions. Whatever caused Jan to lose faith in this child's possibilities, or the possibilities of Pathways, was in full gear at that meeting.

The school day proceeded as usual, but after school, the news of Derek's expulsion spread and feelings ran high. Faculty accepted the decision as a done deal, despite their discomfort with it. Carrie had vehemently opposed the expulsion in conversations with Jan, and admitted privately that she was startled and angry during the Monday morning meeting when Jan ignored their plans. She felt "Derek was contrite and near tears," but, she conceded, she would never, never contradict a director, especially in front of parents. Some faculty felt Jan heard only Don's view that expelling Derek was the right decision.

At the weekly staff meeting the next day, we mechanically dispensed with the regular agenda in thirty minutes in order to develop a written policy on suspension and expulsion that would prevent future lack of clarity. Given the uncertainties of a new institution, it was not surprising that faculty were so willing to set school-wide policy to cover discipline. Jan began by saying evenly and without affect:

We need a policy for kids who are giving us trouble. I realize that somewhere last week I gave up on Derek. Something happened that made me not listen and I didn't realize it. There are things we didn't do. We didn't suggest counseling, we didn't suspend him, and we put up with things from him that we don't accept from others. (Field notes, April 23)

Jim wondered whether we should reconsider our decision to expel Derek or just move on. "I am still working on my feelings," he admitted, speaking for himself, but implicitly for the whole group. Don repeated his consistent position that whatever happened wouldn't have occurred if we only had had better rules, clearer discipline, and sharper boundaries for kids to know "what's what."

Jan and Don were still convinced expulsion was the correct decision. If a faculty could be characterized as depressed, this faculty was. The adults' anger and sadness mixed with Derek's classmates' surprise and confusion weakened everyone. Used to operating consensually, we had no experience openly disagreeing with Jan or with each other. Ousting Derek from the community made everyone feel badly, yet life with him had been undeniably hard. This decision brought to the surface differences in faculty values and assumptions about children, about schools, and about each other. The limits of the school's ability to support a difficult child were suddenly on view for everyone to see.

As usual, Don posed the question that framed the discussion: "What are the conditions for membership in this school community?" Marilyn, a first-year teacher, responded immediately, "You can think of communities that never expel members and ones that excommunicate. What kind of a community do we want to be?" The power of her question got lost as the talk returned to Derek. Carrie felt that Derek was more contrite at Monday's meeting than Jan's description portrayed. Considering the passionate feelings I heard her express in the halls, Carrie's tone at the staff meeting was moderate. She said evenly:

I would rather err on the side of the child. The reason I didn't want to suspend Derek was because he'd be on the street all day or in the arcades. But after we accept kids, we have to include them and get them connected. We didn't act sooner because we had to get to other problems sooner. Derek's healthy. He defends himself. He's not resigned. That's a strength. In reality, it is easier not to have him, but are we being fair? (Field notes, April 23)

As much as Jan sympathized with the attempt to be fair, she wanted Derek gone - for reasons I believe even she did not understand at the time. Jan again reiterated that there had been no progress in Derek's understanding of his egregious behavior: "Derek couldn't retell what he did. It was not like he just left out chunks of the story, he didn't understand."

Don repeated what he had often said: "Derek is an incredibly powerful person. We cannot do anything for him. He is more powerful than we are." At 6 feet, 5 inches, Don's sheer physical presence is a factor in any meeting, and his forceful voice leaves nothing tentative about his contributions, whether he means them to be dogmatic or not. Softening his stance, Don added, "I feel a sense of failure, of course, but he did not respect us or care." No one presented any evidence to counter Don's statement. Not I or anyone else argued Derek's case. There was dead silence. Something intransigent in Don and Jan's position made it seem just as hard for me to get through to them as it was to discipline Derek on a field trip.

Jan then spoke in support of Don's opinion: "Kids have to be willing to listen, willing to change. There has to be a parent or an adult to work with." To which Carrie responded, without missing a beat, "But some kids don't have a parent and you have to work with that kid anyway."

The discussion returned to the need for a policy. Don pointed out, "The problem is not making a policy or writing it down, but in implementing it consistently. Discipline has to be consistent or it is nothing." At 5:05, Don stood up to signal that for him, the meeting was over.

After Don left, Carrie turned to me and said passionately what she did not say in the meeting: "Don's position disturbs me. You can't decide on boundaries and then expect kids to arrange themselves to fit. You can't have static boundaries when you work with children. Especially kids like Derek. I am still upset. You don't cut off a kid's finger when he touches the hot pie."

Talk about Derek went underground. The next day, when rehashing the staff meeting, Carrie observed, "We talked, but we didn't engage." Her perception matched mine. We agreed that the previous day's meeting was intense and fast paced and that faculty had differing perspectives; there was a little snapping, but no raised voices, no questioning, and no arguing. This unfinished incident left everyone tired and irritable. Underlying the tension was our inability to find a solution for Derek that worked for him and for us. The focus on a general policy kept the faculty distanced from Derek and obscured any recognition of his needs. Disagreement over the treatment of Derek prevented faculty from hearing this strong-voiced adolescent or each other. We retreated from the conflict.

It is easy to invoke society's hierarchies here: the unspoken constraints that kept a Black teacher from countering a White director or women from challenging male authority (Delpit, 1988; Fine, 1991). The small size of the faculty makes generalizing much like walking into quicksand, yet it is possible to see stereotyped power relations at work. In this case, Don, anticipating that his voice would be heard, repeatedly articulated his opinion and kept focused on translating it into action. Others did not challenge him, and those power relations became entangled with the issue of who speaks for an advisee. Carrie privately expressed feeling that Derek's fate was predetermined and that "I would be wasting my breath," which prevented her from advocating more strongly for his retention, even though she was his advisor. Her reluctance to speak on his behalf made it less likely that others would argue for him when she did not. Other teachers did not contradict Don when he described Derek's power to disrupt the school. Jan supported Don, since she felt the health of the school would suffer if Derek stayed. Don told me that because I did not teach Derek I could not know what other faculty faced, and his pointed logic reinforced whatever powerlessness I already felt. I and others remained mute. This interactive dynamic - Don and Jan expecting to have their opinions valued, and Carrie and I convinced that we would be dismissed - confirmed the conventional power relations between men and women, Blacks and Whites, directors and teachers.11

As Maxine Greene (1993) reminds us, "There are ways of speaking and telling that construct silences, create `others,' invent gradations of social difference necessary for the identification of norms" (p. 216). Until we find another way, until power to speak is equalized and reciprocal so that all faculty can expect to be heard, children like Derek will not be well served.

School officials who set and legitimate boundaries have tremendous power over children's lives, and the interplay between institutional norms and individual adult's attitudes complicates what happens to students like Derek who do not meet standard expectations.12 How to serve the Dereks of this world is not only an educational question, but also a political question that links power, discipline, and race. None of this speculation, all done in retrospect, could have helped us with Derek. Events occurred too quickly.

The following afternoon, the District Office guidance counselor phoned Jan to summon her to a meeting with Derek's parents. Jan took the call in the school office as Don and I sat nearby. From my notes:

Jan was calm and not at all defensive. She apologized for her first year naivete, gave details of Derek's behavior, told how hard it was to reach his parents, and listened. She could have been ordering supplies for all the emotion in her voice. It soon became clear that expelling a child is not an option. Jan was asked to appear in the Central Office with an incident report to meet with Derek's family. On the phone she was gracious and accepting. Off the phone she was upset. Don said ominously, "Can you imagine what he'll be like if he knows we have no recourse to expulsion? He'll be uncontainable." (Field notes, April 24)

After the meeting with Derek's parents, Jan reported that Derek would be back. Expulsion was legally indefensible because Derek never had the two non-contiguous five-day suspensions, which the district requires.

Jan modelled decorum for the staff and kids. Derek came back without a fuss, and with an agreement not to go on any school field trips without his mother or father. His parents never participated, and since trips were a central part of the curriculum, Derek was often absent. His return was also predicated on foregoing the three-day overnight camping trip, leaving him out of the pre-trip excitement. His presence reminded everyone of the expulsion controversy, which undoubtedly affected his treatment by adults and children. Carrie took responsibility for his last two months. This excerpt from my notes shows Derek's better and worse days:

Derek came back and was better. He still had to be spoken to at the City Fair [not technically a trip but a district-sponsored requirement]. Carrie had to speak to him four times and called his father immediately. She said she could not take him to the Central Park Challenge unless his father came. He said he would. On the day of the Challenge his father didn't show up and Derek was devastated. Carrie agreed to take him on the grounds that kids have to be in groups to learn how to behave. He was fine. When she talked to the mother about his father's not showing up, the mother said, "That's the story of Derek's life. He never shows up." (Field notes, May 15)

The decision to expel Derek was Jan's most naive decision of the year and, as she agrees, her biggest mistake. That she accepted Derek's return so readily and with such good grace helped rectify it, but Derek's place in the school community was already compromised and this experience took its toll on everyone. The next year, Derek's parents put him in Catholic school.

This child, who was caught in family and social circumstances beyond his control, called Pathways's basic values into question and brought faculty differences into focus. The last week in April I recorded in my journal that "I didn't take notes because it was too painful for everybody to see me carrying a notebook." In a number of small but perceptible ways that were tied to particular events surrounding Derek, our collegial bonds loosened. Don felt that Jan could have stopped Derek's misbehavior had she been a more powerful director. Carrie said that she couldn't stand Don talking negatively about children, as he sometimes did. Separated by these differences and by declining trust, faculty could no longer tap each other's knowledge or work out the human tangles.

Overall, the faculty poured astounding energy into educating children of all colors, and most children were treated as well as any parent would want. Black children are numerous enough at Pathways that it is hard to say that Derek's Blackness made it difficult for him to be treated respectfully by White faculty. But since Derek is Black, that fact cannot be divorced from his interactions with faculty. Some faculty thought Derek one of the most "difficult" students. In retrospect, it may have been easier - at least consciously - for White faculty to focus on his "attitude" rather than his race.

It is also hard to say whether Derek's Blackness affected Carrie's ability to connect with him. I cannot know whether her more solid relationship with Derek had anything to do with their shared race. She understood his strengths and his precarious stance in the world as a Black boy. Carrie included Derek in the school community and she didn't flinch at his misbehavior. But Derek needed more than what this one African American teacher could provide. Had Carrie felt less constrained by the dynamics described earlier, she might have convinced others that Derek was being shortchanged at school.

Dismissing Derek and other similar "problems" as too troubled for schools to educate is often easier than dealing with their difficulties, and many educators practice this kind of triage. Small schools should be particularly able to reach students like Derek, but these students must be known in all their complexity, not just as a thorn in the side of adults who have no investment in their lives. For such a promise of personalized schools to be fulfilled, faculties have to adopt Carrie's attitude about children. She often says, "When I am in a quandary about how to handle a child, I think `What would I do if that child were my child?' and `How would I want that child handled were my son or daughter in that situation?'" Parents have an urgency about their own children. We all need to feel the same urgency when we teach other people's children (Delpit, 1988).

Faculty Leadership: "Does Woolworth's Discriminate?"

In the spring, a spontaneous discussion on bias grew into a project involving every student at Pathways. The project originated in Advisory Council, Pathways's fledgling student government, and resulted in an all-school meeting on discrimination (the one where Derek so outraged the adults). Jan recounted how this topic arose in the first Advisory Council meeting:13

After spring vacation, Carrie and I were all sitting around in a circle with about 12 kids, two from each advisory, and I asked, "What issues should we address here?"Bias" Sudi answered. "People ask me to speak Chinese, even though I am Japanese. Or ask me about Korean green grocers as if I knew everything."

Then older boys of color began to tell stories of how they were being treated in stores. "Racism," kids said. Carrie built on their responses by talking about the civil rights movement, fact finding, protests and sit ins. She said to me later, "These kids don't know history. They don't know how to protest. We have to do something." (Field notes, April 7)

While faculty managed to avoid talking about race by advocating more explicit rules and discipline policies, the students, under Carrie's leadership, confronted racial discrimination directly. After hearing kids' stories about police officers, store clerks, and the random person on the subway who said to Jessica's racially mixed group, "Whites shouldn't be with Black people," faculty readily agreed that teaching children to confront discrimination as they travelled around the city was essential to their well-being. Discussing circumstances facing children outside of school was clearly easier than discussing how race plays out in school with one another.

Every Thursday, during class time, and occasionally over pizza brought in for lunch, the Advisory Council met in Carrie's science classroom. The Council included three Whites, one Asian, four Hispanics, and four Blacks. Once the students decided to plan and practice for the all-school meeting on discrimination, Carrie proceeded. She had a clear goal, moved the discussion along at a pace that she dictated, elicited discussion from her questions, monitored the side conversations, noticed behavior beyond the norms, acted on some of it, and drew out the kids in order to help them understand what she wanted to teach:

1. A racist experience is anything that happens to you because of your race.

2. You can protect yourself against bias and not be diminished by it.

3. You can feel like a whole person after something unpleasant has happened to you.

4. Be careful what you call racist - not every discriminatory incident is racist. It might be against children, women, teenagers with loud voices, or teenagers in groups. Still people often discriminate against young boys of color who get stereotyped and judged by the color of their skin.

Carrie's entry into this teaching was through kids' shared stories. After hearing each story, she asked "How did you feel?" and "What recourse do you have?" By the second and third meeting, kids asked these questions themselves. At the end of every meeting, Carrie reminded kids of their belly button. "What is something that no one can take away from you? Your belly button is what holds you together. So when someone judges you unfairly, remember your belly button. No one can take that away from you. When you are angry have one thing that you can say that will pull you back together."

On April nineteenth, the Advisory Council sat on chairs in a circle surrounded by fifty children on the floor listening to their stories. The tone of this "fishbowl" was calm - except, as already described, for Derek. The largest boys struggled to keep their legs in a confined space, and this sensitive topic produced some nervous fidgeting, but students were interested in their classmates' dramatic, sometimes painful, stories:

Lisa began: When Stella, Sudi and I were in Woolworth's looking around, a saleslady stopped us and asked, "Who's here with you?" When we told her we weren't here with any adults, she said, "Sit in a corner and write a list of what you want and then come back."

Juan told a variation: I was with some friends standing in line at the Woolworth's cash register getting ready to pay for a notebook and some White guys were ahead of us. They paid, but when it was our turn, the man at the door came over and asked us to empty our pockets.

Bianca followed: When Jessica, Ramona and I were in Woolworth's and Ramona was buying a water gun, Jerome, Arnold, and their friends wanted to come in with us. The guard let us in, but not the boys. (Field notes, April 19)

The take-home lesson from these stories was that it matters how children present themselves in public. Students noticed that their adolescent voices can be as threatening as their skin color. The biggest boys of color had the biggest problems. In addition to bringing patterns to the surface, this public forum allowed children to testify to their pain and hear the community respond sympathetically to their stories of hurtful devaluation and exclusion.

When the meeting broke up and students moved to their homerooms, the subsequent smaller group discussions about discrimination were both intimate and orderly. Serious talk flowed easily without any of the out-of-control rage that occurred in December during the (admittedly more immediate) discussion of "how come there are no brothers on that list?" The formal process of the large meeting showed respect for everyone's perspective. Faculty agreed with the aims of the meeting: to give children a chance to tell their stories and learn some strategies to confront discrimination. However, and this is still the heart of the matter, Carrie made this meeting happen.

All children at Pathways benefitted from Carrie's charismatic personality, her commitment to academic achievement, her willingness to give freely of her time to kids (she preferred to have lunch with children rather than with adults), her consistency (if she said during class "see me later," she never forgot), her clear expectations (she insisted on complete sentences when children responded), and her scaffolding of what children needed to do as students (she practiced having them come into the room "like you have a purpose and something to do"). Yet it was Carrie's personal knowledge, her own experience with what children of color face, and her parenting of her own Black children that made it possible for her to run this assembly. Had she not been at Pathways, the assembly might never have happened.

Based on the Advisory Council assembly, Carrie developed an all-school project entitled "Does Woolworth's Discriminate?" Students conducted a controlled study of who was allowed to go into Woolworth's at lunchtime. They designed the study, sent groups with different racial makeups into Woolworth's at different times to test Woolworth's "admission policy," analyzed the data, and extrapolated the findings beyond their original sample. Advisory Council members modeled role-playing in each Advisory so that children would learn a technique to help them understand different perspectives. Then all the children role-played how to approach and respond to various acts of discrimination. Carrie received a grant to help other teachers construct similar curricula. "Does Woolworth's Discriminate?" was a model for honest talk with kids. Based on issues they care about, this project recognized that students felt secure in their own school community, encouraged them to raise questions about their problematic status in the outside world, and gave them the means to seek answers, and develop actions to gain personal control.

As successful as this program was, programs do not eradicate racism; rather, beliefs and attitudes lead people to make changes. Individual transformation comes through reflecting on values that underlie programs and actions. At Pathways, more fundamental change came from thinking together about Derek and Duke than from any of the programs, curriculum, or initial structures that the school set in place.

Conclusion

One lesson that could be taken from this selective account is that even in the "best" schools, where faculty try hard to pay attention to individuals, Whites' blindness to race clouds their ability to notice what children are really saying about themselves and their identities. Safe spaces rarely exist in schools for adults or children to explore race, especially when Whites - who tend not to think of race all that often - determine the agendas, and teachers from other backgrounds become used to the absence of talk about race, or are convinced they will not be heard.

At Pathways, as in many schools, faculty members' personal backgrounds and assumptions about race, ethnicity, and class were little known to each other and not much explored. When school life went smoothly, our habits continued without examination. When conflicts arose, we had no way to untangle the knots. Faculty members need to be open with each other in order to have honest discussions. Such openness may not be possible in a new school, where the pace is like the title of John Adam's musical composition, A Short Ride in a Fast Machine. The first year at Pathways was exhilarating, but each day passed much too quickly to begin to have the extended discussions necessary to develop openness and honesty. Yet in my experience, even in an established school where a slower pace might allow for more conversational possibilities, race is often not well understood or thought to be a topic for discussion.

Talking honestly about racism may be the hardest thing faculties do in schools. Racial issues in America are complex, full of strong feelings and equally strong denials; anyone who has sat around a table with adults who feel awkward and tentative about having these conversations knows this is so. The initial task for educators may be to figure out how to make these conversations commonplace. How to do this within the already overloaded school day is not easy. Without a commitment from every person to participate and trust that others will listen and change, the effort is futile.

Teachers at Pathways and elsewhere are often good at observing who is stuck in math, whose writing needs help, who needs more skill in reading comprehension. Good teaching entails such observations. But until teachers, especially White teachers, get in the habit of looking more closely at the nuances of race and seeing patterns, building up evidence to anchor their impressions, sharing their conclusions with one another, and examining their own racial attitudes, they will not learn enough to provide for all children.

Only as I wrote up these glimpses of school life did I begin to hear, really hear, Carrie say, "People who have no choice but to live their lives in their Black skins know racism when they see it. Racism is never subtle to the victim. Only White people say race doesn't matter." Certainly, in our society, Whites in power are more interested in downplaying race, and it is Whites who decide what is and what is not racist (Sleeter, 1993; Tatum, 1992). What I learned from Carrie prompted me to write this article.

Complicating the dialogue about race is the ambiguity inherent in racial issues. However, the point is not to get the right labels - often no clear answer exists as to what is a racial incident, or whether an event involves bias, and if it does, whether it is conscious or unconscious. The very fact that it is difficult to say what is and is not a racial issue both makes it easier to avoid a discussion of race and gives an added edge to any exchange. Participants disagree not only about the substance of an issue, but also about what they are talking about. This makes conversation even harder, and it takes a committed faculty to keep talking (Burbules & Rice, 1991; Henze, Lucas, & Scott, 1993; Murphy & Ucelli, 1989; Olson, 1991).

The incidents related here focus on what faculty didn't hear, didn't understand, or didn't choose to pursue. This account does not relate the many times faculty stuck with kids to work through differences or put energy into including children in the community. Just as Marie Diaz's essay stands for many kids' responses to school, let sixth grader Serena Martinez's interview with me at the end of the year speak for faculty effort and children's learning:

Serena [on handling racial conflict]: Each teacher helps you a lot because if there is a little problem they make it a BIG DEAL and that helps. Even though at the beginning you think, "Oh this is boring; I don't want to do this because it's not going to change anything." Then you talk and you see the other side of the person and then you understand and then you know how they feel. Its nice when you talk it out. . . . At other schools after you have a fight with somebody, you don't resolve anything so there is still something in there and you still want to fight. Here you discuss the problems and you get to hear other people's sides. And you understand. (Taped interview, May 30)

This eloquent statement by a child confirms that not all opportunities to confront racial problems were missed. Carrie agreed: "When things arose, most individual racial incidents were handled well enough, quite well in fact. By that I mean kids understood their own responsibility and how it affected the outcome."

The staff learned from Derek's exile and Duke's withdrawal. Five years later, Pathways has become a stronger school for having lived through those serious missteps. In order to learn, faculties not only have to make mistakes, they also have to recognize them as mistakes. This documentation made what happened visible and discussable, and the following year the entire faculty began to talk about race more publicly. After the addition of more Latino and African American faculty, several outside researchers, and longer meetings with more overt conflict, this reflective faculty began to unlock the silences. Out of these experiences, several staff members have produced their own articles. More importantly, faculty now do better with the successors to Derek and Duke.

Attempts to educate all children in today's climate are fraught with pedagogical and social uncertainties that defy a single response. Many possible entry points exist, but developing structures for faculty members to reflect on their experiences and share their own perspectives is essential. Faculties need protected time during the day to talk, a willingness to question previously entrenched assumptions, and encouragement to be honest in collegial forums rather than in the hallways. As Lisa Delpit (1988) says, teachers need to be "unafraid to raise questions about discrimination and voicelessness with people of color, and listen, no, to hear, what they say" (p. 297). Connecting with each other and seeing the implications for educating children requires an alertness to what happens inside schools and out, a consciousness about how others see the world, a willingness to talk honestly, and a commitment to change the power relationships in the world.

When Whites in power don't hear the boiling lava that lies below the surface, they perpetuate silences about race. Then they are surprised when racial feelings erupt, although it is they who have paid no attention to the volcano.14

References

Burbules, Nicholas, & Rice, Suzanne. (1991). Dialogue across differences: Continuing the conversation.Harvard Educational Review, 61, 393-416.

Cohen, Jody. (1993). Constructing race at an urban high school: In their minds, their mouths, their hearts. In Lois Weis & Michelle Fine (Eds.), Beyond silenced voices: Class, race and gender in United States schools (pp. 289-308). Albany: State University of New York Press.

Delpit, Lisa. (1988). The silenced dialogue: Power and pedagogy in educating other people's children. Harvard Educational Review, 58, 280-298.

Delpit, Lisa. (1990). Seeing color: Review of White Teacher. Hungry Mind Review, 15, 4-5.

Engel, Brenda. (1975). A handbook of documentation. Grand Forks: University of North Dakota, North Dakota Study Group on Evaluation.

Fine, Michelle. (1991). Framing dropouts: Notes on the politics of an urban public high school. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Foster, Michele. (1993). Resisting racism: Personal testimonies of African-American teachers. In Lois Weis & Michelle Fine (Eds.), Beyond silenced voices: Class, race, and gender in United States schools (pp. 273-288). Albany: State University of New York Press.

Grant, Carl, & Secada, Walter. (1990). Preparing teachers for diversity. In W. R. Houston (Ed.), Handbook of research on teacher education (pp. 403-422). New York: Macmillan.

Greene, Maxine. (1993). Diversity and inclusion: Towards a curriculum for human beings. Teachers College Record, 95, 213-221.

Hale, Janice E. (1994). Unbank the fire: Visions for the education of African American children. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Henze, Rosemary, Lucas, Tamara, & Scott, Beverly. (1993, April). Dancing with the monster: Teachers attempt to discuss power, racism, and privilege in education. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans.

Jervis, Kathe, Carr, Emily, Lockhart, Patsy, & Rogers, Jane. (1996). Multiple entries to teacher inquiry: Dissolving the boundaries between research and teaching. In Linda Baker, Peter Afflerbach, & David Reinking (Eds.), Developing engaged readers in school and home communities (pp. 247-268). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Jervis, Kathe, & McDonald, Joseph. (1996). Standards: The philosophical monster in the classroom. Phi Delta Kappan, 77, 563-569.

Knapp, Michael S., & Woolverton, Sara. (1995). Social class and schooling. In James A. Banks & Cherry A. McGee Banks (Eds.), Handbook of research on multicultural education (pp. 548-569). New York: Macmillan.

Ladson-Billings, Gloria. (1994). The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African American children. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

McCarthy, Cameron. (1993). Beyond the poverty of theory in race relations: Nonsynchrony and social difference in education. In Lois Weis & Michelle Fine (Eds.), Beyond silenced voices: Class, race, and gender in United States schools (pp. 325-346). Albany: State University of New York Press.

McIntosh, Peggy. (1988). White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women's studies (Working Paper No. 189). Wellesley, MA: Wellesley College Center for Research on Women.

Murphy, Donald, & Ucelli, Juliet. (1989). Race, knowledge, and pedagogy: A Black-White teacher dialogue. Holistic Education Review, 2(4), 48-50.

Olson, Ruth Anne. (1991). Language and race: Barriers to communicating a vision (Reflective Paper No. 1). St. Paul, MN: Supporting Diversity In Schools.

Prospect Archive and Center for Education and Research. (1986). The Prospect Center documentary processes. North Bennington, VT: Author.

Raywid, Mary Ann. (1990). Successful schools of choice: Cottage industry benefits in large systems. Educational Policy, 4(2), 93-108.

Sleeter, Christine. (1993). White teachers construct race. In Cameron McCarthy & Warren Crichlow (Eds.), Race, identity, and representation in education (pp. 157-171). London: Routledge.

Tatum, Beverly Daniel. (1992). Talking about race, learning about racism: Application of racial identity development theory in the classroom. Harvard Educational Review, 62, 1-24.

This work unfolded over several years and often I cannot untangle what I learned from whom. I am most indebted to my Pathways colleagues who met me for coffee, talked on the phone, and worked with me at home on Sunday afternoons. The file of their responses is thick and rich.

The Documentation Study Group responded to early drafts and kept me focused on the importance of the topic: David Bensman, Janet Carter, Priscilla Ellington, Heather Lewis, Sondra Perl, Jon Snyder, and Nancy Wilson. Others shaped my thinking by generously responding to drafts; their ideas are by now deeply embedded in the way the article evolved: Nancy Cardwell, Patricia Carini, Virginia Christensen, Beverly Falk, Michelle Fine, JoEllen Fisherkeller, Norman Fruchter, Maxine Greene, Herman Jervis, Steven Jervis, Elaine Joseph, Ann Lieberman, Maritza Macdonald, Hasna Muhammad (who heroically read three drafts), Peggy McIntosh, Diane Mullins, and Donald Murphy.

From 1991 through 1993 I participated in the Urban Sites Writing Network, a national teacher research group that deliberately invited equal membership of people of color and Whites. The result was a diverse network of National Writing Project teachers talking across cultural boundaries as we grappled with the complexities of urban classrooms in formal discussions and informal talk. It is here that I learned the importance of having the hard conversations.

I especially thank my husband, Robert Jervis, who encouraged me throughout. He pushed me to refine my thinking, and then patiently reread each new revision.

Notes

1 This work was funded by the Aaron Diamond Foundation, which is not responsible for the thinking expressed here.

2 Despite their permission to use real names, I have changed both the name of the school and the names of the teachers to preserve their privacy. I have also changed the names and details of children and their parents.

3 Initially drafted by the founding director and polished by me, this vision statement explicitly committed the school to an integrated, untracked student body. Faculty agreed to it in principle when they came to work at the school.

4 Although my position as a part-time documenter allowed me time and distance to reflect on my work as a member of the staff at Pathways, mine was not the outside perspective of an academic researcher (a tradition in which I have not been trained). Throughout my teaching career and involvement in teacher-research communities, one of my purposes in writing about classrooms has been to make practice explicit for a larger audience. Ultimately, what I write also contributes to improving my own practice as well. For further discussion of my work, see Jervis, Carr, Lockhart, and Rogers (1996).

5 At Pathways, every adult had an advisory of nine or ten students. Advisories met four days a week for an hour to discuss school and non-school topics, read novels, celebrate birthdays, and sort out school experiences together. Advisors acted as liaisons with parents, advocated for advisees with other faculty, and talked individually to students about their progress and problems.

6 In New York City's thirty-two decentralized elementary and middle school/junior high districts, Mary Ann Raywid's (1990) definition of alternative schools applies: "Alternative schools are likely to be small; independently launched from program to program; separately operated without a great deal of external oversight or district-level coordination; internally less differentiated than other schools as to status and role; and quite variable from one program to another" (p. 96). New York's alternative schools draw from the whole city, but they generally strive for mixed abilities and diversity. It is important to note that Pathways's autonomy is linked to its small size as well as to its status as an alternative school. A small faculty can more easily make up their own schedules, report cards, or curricula, and also decide to change them if they do not work well.

7 On the day of this incident in 1990, I recorded Arnold's words and gestures in my notebook. That night I typed up the incident, threw away my handwritten version, and forgot about it. Then in the fall of 1994, while sorting my files after yet another revision, I found one page of the original handwritten notes. On that page, but not in my typed notes, I had recorded that "a [White] teacher encouraged kids to `forget it', when Arnold objected to Duke's behavior." In 1990, I had apparently "registered" that something, perhaps racial, went on between Arnold and Duke, but did not "see" that a White colleague urged kids to ignore it. Though somehow I knew to save that handwritten page, it took me years to understand, and then express, how White resistance to seeing, exemplified in my own actions as well as my colleague's advice to Arnold and Duke, is an enormously complicated aspect of racism.

8 See the chapter "African American Schoolchild in a Strange Land" in Janice Hale (1994) for a discussion of this interpretation.

9 See Knapp and Woolverton (1995) for a review of these issues.

10 Descriptive Review, developed by Patricia Carini and her colleagues in North Bennington, Vermont (Prospect Archive, 1986), is one method Pathways faculty used to help them understand children. In this process, a teacher collects, for presentation to other teachers, observations of one student's behaviors organized around a focusing question intended to illuminate some puzzling aspect of the child's school life. The presenting teacher describes the child fully, rendering physical gestures, temperament, relationships, interests, and approaches to formal academics in as detailed a way as possible. Other teachers ask questions to clarify the description. Then the group makes recommendations for practice. The underlying goal of a Descriptive Review is to describe a child as carefully as possible, to avoid evaluative judgments, and to develop strategies that build on the child's strengths.

11 Don's strongest reaction to my interpretation of this data was how he had not heard Carrie. "Was it really so hard for me to listen?" he asked. I noticed that the following year, when I attended several faculty meetings, he listened more carefully, and Carrie's voice became stronger. This may be a good example of documentation stimulating change.

12 For a discussion of standards, see Jervis and McDonald (1996).

13 Two representatives from each advisory were appointed by advisors or elected by advisories. That students came to the Council by different selection processes did not seem to be an issue, since they all felt it was an honor to serve. Carrie volunteered to oversee this Advisory Council. Jan, as director, worked with her, and I participated in the weekly meetings.

14 I would like to acknowledge Michelle Fine for suggesting this metaphor when she commented on a draft of this article.

15 As is standard feminist practice, I have included first and last names of authors.

Back to Table of Contents

Related Articles

Send a Letter to the Editors

Back to HER Home Page