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About Portland observer. (Portland, Or.) 1970-current | View Entire Issue (March 24, 2004)
<Elje ^ o rtla n ò (ßbseruer M a rc h 2 4 . 2 0 0 4 Page A S ‘We Need to Know Our History’ areas of accomplishment. The struggle to develop and deliver a curriculum that recognizes the existence of the various cul tures, races and ethnicities that make up our student populations, and that values and honors those groups did not begin within the last The New York Times asked the decade. Recognition that the popu Oregon Dept. of Education to de lation of our state was growing scribe why cultural competence has increasingly diverse, that succeed risen to the level that it has in the ing in acompetiti ve marketplace of state. The department invited Sen. ideas, services and products that Avel Gordly who represents north would become ever more interna east and southeast Portland and tional in scope, and that our state’s others to respond to the question. euro-centric curriculum was not This is Sen. Gordly’s essay: meeting the short or long-term needs I will begin my answer with a of our students is also not a new statement recently made by a high phenomenon. school student at a community fo Some 25 years after Brown v. rum in Portland. The meeting was Board o f Education, the Black one of several convened by com United Front was battling in Port- munity members in the wake of the shooting of a 14-year old girl and a spate of other gang-related violent crimes. The girl was an innocent victim, walking home with her friends, struck by a stray bullet. There was no warning. Suddenly she was ly ing on the sidewalk with a terrible head wound. The suspect in police custody is 16 years old. This trag edy is about much more than two people, much more than a neigh land for an end to busing, for the borhood, much more even than a hiring of more black teachers and community. administrators, and for a curricu Adults at the community meet lum that addressed the multicultural ing asked the young people present needs of students, using tactics to speak about their needs. The including boycotts and demonstra youth responded with statements tions. A North Portland Middle about their needs for encourage School, named after Harriet S. ment and emotional support, about Tubman, stands because of those the lack of love, of caring adults in years o f struggle and as a reminder their lives. of the slave past that the student One student stated, speaking spoke to. It was not— and is not— words that resonated within us, enough. young and old alike: “We need to In 1991, as a Member of the O r know our history. We don’t know egon House of Representatives, I who we are. All we know is that we began preparation to introduce leg once were slaves. We need to know islation addressing the needs of our history.” our student populations and re The statements of these stu quiring Oregon schools to put dents were rooted in their lack of multicultural curricula in place. This self-esteem, a burden they bore in would take multiple sessions to common, and in thejj desire to accomplish. The bill was denied a achieve academically and in other hearing in the 1993 and 1995 ses A struggle to bring our culture into the classroom sions. In 1996,1 was elected to the Or egon Senate. 1 reintroduced the bill in the 1997 session, where it re ceived a “courtesy” hearing, a pro cedure where a committee permits limited testimony and discussion, but has no intention of acting on the bill, lnthe 1999 session, with the bipartisan assistance of Sen. Tom Hartung, we were able to move the bill and see it signed into law. SB 103 required that the Superin tendent of Public Instruction direct the education department to in crease efforts to evaluate the distri bution of ethnic, racial and cultural backgrounds of Oregon’s public school students and advance the use of demographic data for cur ricula and program planning. It required strategies to inform The 2001 and 2003 legislative sessions passed without an SB 103 compliance report from the Super intendent o f Public Instruction. Multicultural curricula and compe tency were clearly on the back burner at the state level, but at the local and community level, there was much frustration and increasing calls for action. Last year, I introduced a budget note requiring the Dept. of Educa tion to conduct an evaluation of the law’s requirements and report its findings to the 2005 Legislative Assembly. I —along with many, many community members across the state— look forward to seeing that report, from our new Superin tendent of Public Instruction, Su san Castillo. 1 expect it to be a progress report. The struggle to know and understand the history of our people continues. We owe it to our young and to future generations to deliver that knowledge. - Sen. Avel Gordly, D-Portland school district boards, administra tors, teachers, parents and the pub lic about multicultural and diver sity laws and policies. It called for the identification and review of ex emplary multicultural curricula for different grade levels based on the needs of students; strategies to integrate multicultural curricula with other educational program; and evaluations on how current laws on diversity and multicultural edu cation are being implemented and applied throughout the public school system. The passage of SB 103 identified some key issues and necessary steps, but represented only part of the scope of work we need to ac complish in order to serve the needs of our students and state. These efforts are fundamental invest ments in our shared futures. Also in 2003, at the urging of my office, the Teachers’ Standards and Practices Commission began de veloping cultural competence stan dards for the certification o f teach ers and administrators. We expect to see those standards im ple mented. I recall a conversation I had in 1999 with a young, bright law stu den t from the U n iv e rsity o f Oregon. I asked the student if she knew the story of Shirley Chisholm. She was not familiar with the name. Shirley Chisholm, descendant of slaves, was elected to the United States Congress from the state of New York, serving the nation for many terms. Among her many ac complishments as a lawmaker, she stands as the first African-Ameri can woman to run for the Presi dency of the United States of America. How can we graduate a student from the University of Oregon Law School, and not reach that stu d e n t— som ew here in the c u r ricula— with the history of our great nation, with the history that re flects the multiplicity of cultures, ethnicities and races that inhabit our land? The absence of inform ation in our public schools that mirrors the respective images o f minority students m agnifies the struggle our students make to find them selves as they learn and mature. This is a great and tragic failing directly related to how students gain self-esteem and achieve aca demically. That cultural com petence has risen to the level that it has in Tbs 46lb Annual E B O N Y A R ’ThSA N n1: a skilled craftsperson, e.g. A baker creating handcrafted breads from wholesome natural ingredients, practicing age-old methods of prepa ration. 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It is the result o f that w ork— their w ork— bearing some fruit— but not all the fruit— that brings the issue to the fore front today. The institutional and social lethargy that has blocked recognition and progress in cul tural com petency is still with us today. The struggle to know and un derstand the history o f our people continues. We owe it to our young and to future generations to d e liver that knowledge, and to do so with com petence and integ rity. They need their history. We must deliver it. W W W .E B O N Y F A S H IO N F A IR .C O M
