Street roots., March 18, 2016, Page 12, Image 12

Commentary
Page 12
oppresses them. Most children and youth will
not see a reason to learn, or to focus on
learning, until the institutional purposes of
schools are in line with their own,
autonomous purposes as human beings.
Gillen is not just a dreamer or an academic
with his head in the clouds — he’s a teacher
in Baltimore Public Schools, deeply involved
with a project that he believes exemplifies a
way to get young people to learn. But he s not
a history or a social studies teacher. He
teaches math.
That’s right, math.
The Baltimore Algebra Project is a
nonprofit run by high school students and
recent high school graduates, using grant
money to hire students and former students as
math tutors. By all accounts, it’s been a
success in spreading math literacy, as well as
giving young people jobs in a city where the
youth unemployment rate is high. The project’s
website boasts that it has paid out more than
$2 million in wages to youth in the 15 years of
its existence.
But, as Gillen puts it, getting funding to
teach math is just a way to create a “crawl
space” - a concept he takes from the Project’s
founder, civil rights veteran Bob Moses >- that
gives students a place where they can try out
new roles and ways of being. It provides
students ways to organize themselves and
become accountable to themselves and others;
of practicing democracy and learning how to
demand from the school district and from the
society at large the things they need.
Gillen talks about what’s pushed to the side
in current debates about school reform. As an
Class(room)
matters
BY MIKE WOLD
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
altimore math teacher Jay Gillen offers a
revolutionary alternative to the punitive
nature of public education
Don’t be put off by the awkward title. In
“Educating for Insurgency,” Jay Gillen writes
about a subject that most people in the
education debate don’t want to face: that the
chief result of most schools in poor
neighborhoods is to prepare students to accept
a lifetime of subordination, unemployment and
poorly paying jobs, not to put poor kids on
equal footing with their better-off peers.
Luckily, he proposes an alternative.
The education reform movement has tried to
blame the difference in educational outcomes
between schools full of children in poverty and
those from more prosperous backgrounds on
everything but poverty and racism. It finds fault
in teachers, in parents and in insufficient focus
on core curriculums. It proposes to apply
B
“science,” as measured by test scores and
behavioral modification, to fine-tune discipline
and curriculum. It’s as if, Gillen observes,
children are automatons who will absorb skills
and knowledge if only the right inputs are
applied.
Gillen cuts through this fog, combining
realism — schools as we have organized them
simply don’t function for children in poverty —
with an incisive radical purpose — to motivate
children in poverty to learn, schools will have
to teach them to change the society that
example, be examines the irony of teaching
that Brown v. Board of Education made
segregation in public schools illegal: “at best,
the lesson ... must be understood by the
students as revealing deep duplicity in the
curriculum and in the country’s unifying myth
... At worst, the lesson is nonsense.” Gillen
points out that the curriculum in such schools
is the least of what’s taught — what’s really
taught is obedience to authority and self-blame
for failure.
Street Roots • March 18-24, 2016
Gillen points out that the repressive
atmosphere in most schools is based in the
belief, shared by teachers and students alike,
that teenagers would “run wild” if they weren’t
strictly controlled. As an alternative, he
compares the classroom to a dramatic ritual in
which the conflicts generated by the
“embarrassments of caste” - of racial and class
hierarchy - can, instead of interrupting
learning, be integrated into the learning
process.
“There are many ways to treat an outburst
as an opportunity ... rather than as a crime,”
Gillen writes. If what takes place in a
classroom is a form of
theater, it’s easier to
see alternatives to the
“no-tolerance” policies Jay Gillen writes about a
that end up
subject that nobody in the
suspending or
education debate wants to
expelling students:
face: that the chief result of
“The nature of the
most schools in poor neighbor"
ritual is such that...
hoods is to prepare students
cussing, or any other
action initiated by a
to accept a lifetime of subor­
student short of
dination, unemployment and
violence, can be
poor-paying jobs, not to put
incorporated into the
poor kids on equal footing
dialogue by an
with
their better-off peers»
adjustment of terms
and suppleness of the
actors’ responses.”
This is heady stuff,
but Gillen provides a couple of examples of
how that might play out in his “idealized”
Algebra Project classroom.
Half philosophy and politics, half anecdote
and dramatization, “Educating for Insurgency”
doesn’t offer a quick fix or a cookbook
approach to teaching in poor schools. Being a
teacher using Gillen’s approach would require a
willingness to make mistakes and enough space
to figure out what it means to treat youth in
schools as collaborators in their education. But
at least it provides a place to start
Reprinted from Street Roots sister paper, Real
Change news, Seattle, Wash.