Inequality in Education with Special Guest Dr.Mirra

Could you please introduce yourself and tell us what exactly you do? Sure, so my name is Nicole Mira and I'm a professor of teacher education at Rutgers University, which is the State University of New Jersey. I used to teach high school English in New York City and in Los Angeles. And now I've been back here teaching teachers before they go in the classroom for almost three years at Rutgers. So what exactly do you teach them? I teach courses in urban education, which is a course that we're preparing all of our teachers to teach in urban areas in cities. And so I teach a course to help students understand what some of the issues are that are facing schools in urban areas and how they can be the best teachers they can be. And I also teach courses in English education, so how to teach English language arts in particular. Awesome. All right, so could you define what inequality means to you in like your experiences with it? Specifically an education or in general? In education. So I think you might have heard about the difference between the words equality and equity. So whenever I think about I don't think I don't think that education should be about equality. I don't think that every student should get exactly the same education necessarily. I do think that all students need to meet a certain standard in terms of knowledge and skills. But I do think there should be equity, which means that every student gets what they need in order to be successful. And I think that's not always the same thing for every child. But I think it's a little bit hard because if you think about all the millions and millions of students in the country and all the schools that are trying to educate young people. It's really hard to meet every student's individual needs. So I think a lot of schools the best they can try to do is to try to at least give everyone a base level of equality. But in doing that, they're kind of accepting that some students are always going to fall through the cracks. So I think it's a very tough job that schools are trying to do. Unless you're lucky enough to be in a place where you have one-on-one learning or very small class sizes. It's always going to be hard for every student to get exactly what they need. Do you think that there is inequality in schools across America? Yes, unfortunately I do. And I think there's lots of different kinds of inequality, right? So there's inequality by race, like the racial background of students often determines the kind of education that they're getting. Social class, so the amount of money that your family makes, religion sometimes can be a de facto that can make a different gender, sexual orientation. There's a million different, in every way that people can be different. All the differences that can matter in our everyday life can matter when we get into schools. The goal of schools is to treat every young person with respect and honor them all. But unfortunately, because of the way that schools are set up, the fact that human beings set them up based on their own ideas, and they don't often understand the ideas or the experiences of every other kind of different person, schools were set up originally to educate white people who own land. And so because of that, they've changed over time, but a lot of times they haven't been designed for all students that live in this country. So because of that, we're still dealing with a lot of inequality. Yeah. Unfortunately, a lot of people then look at like test scores and say like, oh, schooling is unequal because some kids do better on tests than others. But I don't think it's right to always look at the result and look at what the kids do. I think it's better to look at what we're putting into the system first, because not all schools have the same amount of money, the same amount of resources, teachers that have experience, that care, you know, a lot of them have an urban area, this turnover where people are leaving all the time. So I think there's a lot of things that on the end, like before you talk about how the kids do in the end, you have to look at everything we put in to give them in the beginning for them to be successful. Yeah. All right. So with some of those examples that you gave us, how do you think we could improve some of that just to make education better as a whole? And I know equality can be perfect, but what can we do to get as close to perfect as possible? So interesting, because there's so many different angles to come at. I mean, schools are so complex, and there's so many different factors going on that people try lots of everything. So some people say that if we just give more money, if we can equalize the amount of money that schools have, or if we can give more money to schools that are in areas of high poverty, maybe then the money will help solve the problems. And that's important, but at the same time, money doesn't solve everything. You also need to have teachers who are qualified and are passionate about teaching the students that they have. They have to know how to reach the students they have, and that might be different if you're in a rural area, versus if you're in a suburb or in an urban area, depending on elementary versus high school. So teacher quality is important, and also curriculum, so the stuff that we teach you needs to be engaging to young people. We have too many places where things are taught in a vacuum, and they're not fun or interesting, and they're not relevant to your lives as young people. And we know that students are more engaged and motivated if the learning actually matters to them if they feel like it connects to their lives. So there's so many different like curriculum, instruction, money, leadership, so strong leadership that understands how to keep a school running and how to keep teachers and students happy and parents. So there's a lot of development that would also be helpful, but respecting parents, because they also have lots of other jobs and things to do. So I think there are people that are researching all of these different things at the same time, so I don't think there's one answer, but I think there's lots of different ways that we could intervene in the system to try to make things a little bit more equitable and fair. So now have you witnessed any quality in the classroom? So I always say that like, I didn't have a lot of awareness when I was in school of the fact that not every young person was getting the same education as me. You know, like when I was your age in ninth grade, I went to school, I thought that like the curriculum must be the same everywhere that all ninth graders must be learning, probably the same thing. I figured that if people didn't do well in school, that it must be their fault, because if they just work hard and study, like I did, it shouldn't everyone be able to just do well. Because I didn't really see outside of myself, I didn't see a lot of people that were different than me. My school was pretty not very diverse, so it was a suburb of New Jersey where a lot of people were white, a lot of people had the same kinds of jobs, the families had the same kind of jobs. And I didn't know enough at that time to know that there were places that were not like my community. It wasn't until I started to teaching myself in Brooklyn, New York, and saw that my students didn't have access to the same resources that I did. And their curriculum wasn't the same as what I had, and there were teachers that were not treating them with respect that they needed. It wasn't until I became a teacher and saw students who were not like me that I realized that inequality existed. I realized that when I took my students on field trips on the subway, there were people who were, you know, my students were mostly African-American and Latino, and there would be people in the subway that would look at them as if they were up to no good for no reason, except the color of their skin. The experience raises them like that. In my life, I saw it finally in my students, and it helped me to see that that wasn't fair, and that kind of changed my life, because it made me want to think about how to make sure that all students could have powerful education that respected them, that treated their lives as important, and that would give them the tools to succeed. So that's kind of like, now when I travel around the country, I work with lots of different schools to try to figure out, you know, what kind of inequalities are there in their schools, and how could they actually work to make them better? Yeah, I feel like a lot of people in our grade could relate to that as well. We don't really witness or experience inequality because we grow up. There's not a whole lot of diversity in our schools, but this lesson is really helping us reach out to professionals, and like see their perspectives on things, which is really nice, and it's really cool seeing people's perspectives from other parts of the world and how they witness them. So do you feel like inequality that students face at home, like social class, and how their parents might accept them for who they are, or what they believe, affects students at school and how they learn? Yeah, I definitely think that could be a factor. I do think sometimes that's not as big of a factor as what happens at school. So I think obviously there's different categories here. If there are parents who are abusive to their students, that's obviously a huge problem, and of course that's going to affect. Hopefully that's a minority of cases where there's actually abuse or parents who don't love their children or are neglectful. That's a horrible situation. I think most parents are trying to do the best they can. I think most parents love their children. Most parents want the best for their children. They want them to have an amazing education and succeed. But they might not always know like the ins and outs of school. So for example, my parents didn't really know they knew, you know, they went to high school, they didn't understand that. But when I started getting into higher grades at school, they didn't always understand my homework. But they wanted me to do well. They just told me to listen to the teacher and to do what I was told and to do have them help me. I think sometimes now we expect so much of parents to know like everything about school, like how everything's supposed to work, come to every parent teacher night even if they're working and have other responsibilities. I don't think that's fair always to blame parents or to blame students or to say, you know, there's this myth that was going around for a long time that students whose parents didn't speak English weren't helping them enough for their education. Or they weren't hearing enough words at home, but that has actually been debunked to be shown not to be true. It's just that what they're talking about at home is not being valued in school. It's not really our job to criticize or tell parents like how to talk to their children and how to love their children as long as they're loving them. It's their job to then just bring a child who is loved to school. And it's our job to them as teachers like help those parents support those parents support their children and like help them succeed. So I think I worry sometimes about like a lot of times, you know, when we see students who aren't succeeding a lot in schools, schools don't want to take responsibility for that. So they just say like, well, it's because their parents don't care about education or because they let their kids do the support for that. And I think that except in just a few cases that are extreme for the most part, that's not a fair thing to say about parents. It's more about every kid and every parent is doing the best they can and that's our job to take everyone as they come in. And give them the best education possible. Have you experienced any quality growing up in schools? Yeah, I think like we were talking about like, I don't know if you've ever heard the word tracking, but tracking is something they use to say like, do you have AP classes at your school? Yes, ma'am. Yes. So I was tracked and it means that like, you know, like once you start in ninth grade, you're going to start as you move on, like getting kind of like track to they call it into different classes. So if you're really good in math, maybe you're going to start getting tracked into like the AP pre-Calc and calculus classes or whatever. And I, my school was very big. I've been to your school. I was there last year. So I know you're very small, but my school had like 22,500 students in it from nine to 12. So really, really big. And once you were tracking to AP classes, like I was the only students I saw, like even though I was in a graduating class of like 600 students. I was only like 50 students that I saw all the time because we were all kind of tracked together and we would see each other in the same honors classes as an AP classes. And then I wouldn't like meet or see other people who are in different tracks because somehow along the way we decide that students are going to be good at certain things or not. And we start to like make their path for them. And the problem with that is that it's really hard to like break out of that path once you're in it. So if a student maybe wanted to do well and get into AP English, but they were tracked into lower classes from the beginning. It's really hard to then even show that you should be able to get up to a different level. You just kind of stay where you are and your schedule becomes set. And so I think there's lots of inequalities that happen that I didn't even realize about like the way we determine what we think kids are capable of and how we put them into different classes. And the problem is that those ideas are often influenced by racism, sexism. Like there are oftentimes we see less students of color in AP classes and it's not because students of color are not as intelligent because we know that they are. It's because somewhere along the way because of the teachers they had or a bad experience they weren't tracking to those classes and then it kind of snowballs over time. And then that can like make the inequality get worse and worse. Yeah, I think we kind of like notice that a little bit at school especially if parents have a high standard for their kids that they're always in higher classes working extra hardball. They might not feel prepared to be in that class or mentally ready. Yeah, like my parents didn't know what AP was so there might be parents that don't even know that they can fight for their students to get into AP because they didn't have that experience. And so then like in education they call that like capital so capital is not just money like we use money we use money capital to buy things. But we also have social capital which is like the knowledge we have about how to get ahead and different people have different kinds of knowledge about how the system works. And if you are a parent that knows the system then you can play the system to make sure it's the best for your kid. But that's not the fault of the people that don't have it it's it's something that we need to that's how like you know that winds up it's not nobody's intention that it winds up making more inequality over time. So you've traveled across the country and toward a bunch of schools correct. Yeah, would you say that America is has a lot of inequality in the education system as a whole or do you think it's like pretty well developed? Sure, as you start to talk and get to know your people in your group you're going to see that every place in America like we're all part of the United States of America but our experiences are all so different like our communities are so different. And I think everywhere I go teachers and students and parents want the best for their students but inequality pops up in different ways in every place slightly differently. So like the U.S. is very very segregated still even though it's not legal anymore the U.S. is still very segregated and where people live by race and by class because realtors start to send people to houses that they can afford and that winds up being in different neighborhoods that wind up being separated. So that means that schools are going to be separated because if neighborhoods are segregated then you're going to wind up having schools that reflect that and are segregated. And so then that's kind of the opposite of what our laws were all supposed to stop like back in the 50s and 60s we had big like you know Supreme Court decisions to get rid of separate but equal. But now we're kind of in a place where that's still happening and it's frustrating because people don't want that to be happening. But because of things that there's all those factors we talked about before all the money and the preparing the teachers and who writes the curriculum and what's the policies that just seems so complex that it feels like really hard to get a handle on all of it at the same time. But at the same time I do think that almost every school that I go to people are trying really really hard they care about the students in the school and they're trying to do everything they can to meet their needs and so I feel like really exciting and powerful things are happening everywhere at the same time that everyone's dealing with these challenges. That's why I like the idea of like I think the communicating across these boundaries finding ways for students like you to talk to other students for teachers to talk to other teachers like the more we know each other the more we all can see our different plans and strategies and the more that we communicate we can like get rid of some of these stereotypes and assumptions and actually like work together across our different experiences. So what do you think we could do today to take more steps towards equal education? I think who we vote for matters so I think it's important for all of us when we turn 18 to look at the platforms of the politicians who are running in our districts not only president but like all the way down to our local areas and to ask them their opinions and their platforms about education because it really matters. So political parties want to just want to give kids more money so that they can go to like a private school if they want to and that takes money away from public schools and that's going to make inequality worse. Other politicians understand that we need to put more money into public schools and so we need to think about who we vote for and get people into office who have the same beliefs that we do about making public education stronger. We also need to like share like the best strategies for teaching and I think teachers are trying to do that in schools of education like every college has a school of education and if all the schools of education are sharing and getting teachers to share like the things that they do that get students to learn the most and making sure that that's available to everyone then we can start getting like positive things going on in all of our classes. And and obviously money is what helps that to happen so we have to think about how we're going to take money away from other things in our economy we don't have an unlimited amount of money but we need to think about what we value in this country so you know what if we took some money away from the military to make education better you know we have to make choices but if we want to care about the next generation. Then we have to think about where we where we put our funding because that's how you get good teachers good teachers are not going to stay in places where they're not getting paid a livable wage. Good money is going to help you get better resources so that students can have technology and field trips so like all of those resources kind of they have to be things that we demand from our communities. I think to make things better. So for colleges do you think that it's unnecessarily overpriced same goes textbooks and different resources that students and colleges need? Yeah I mean I'm sure you all have seen and your parents are already thinking about how you know nowadays you need scholarships to be able to go to school because it's just the most your parents have tons and tons of money. It didn't used to be like this like back in our parents generation or two generations ago like a student could work at a part-time job and make enough money to pay their tuition to go to college and that's pretty much like not possible now for most places. Except maybe community college but even then it's really hard to balance a job and tuition and some schools are crazy amount of money. I went up getting student you know again because I didn't know my parents hadn't been to college I was very excited to go to college. I could have gone to my state school for less money but I really worked hard and I really wanted to go to NYU even though it was expensive and I was lucky to get a scholarship but I still had to take out student loans and I didn't understand enough about like. How those loans come back over time and what it's going to mean when you graduate to pay them all back. So I think we need to like think more about like again this goes back to money again you see some of the people running for president now who are Democrats are saying they want to get rid of student loan debt because if students have loan from paying too much money to go to college they can't start their lives and like get ahead they can't buy a house if they have to keep worrying about this debt. So I think it's gotten it's definitely gotten out of control like it's risen too high to the point where there are students who are making choices to not go to school or to go to school they don't want to go to because of money and that shouldn't be the consideration it should be like the best place for you. Yeah I read an article about how somebody used to be able to go to college on it a waiter's salary and like nobody could do that anymore you'd be in debt for a long time which is really unfortunate. And the college is important but it's like what message are we sending if we make it so expensive that only certain people can afford it. Do you think college is worth it still because a lot of jobs are social media based or just different just media in general and people don't need college education for that yet they're making millions. Yeah I think it's hard because there are definitely jobs that don't require college education but a lot of times like to have your options open it's still kind of like the basis that you want to have because it limits your future choices it's like you might think right now I only want this one job and that doesn't require a degree so I'll be okay. But our economy now means that like like my dad for example he graduated from high school got a job at the phone company in the union and worked at that same job his entire life like can just retired and I don't think that really happens much anymore of people getting one job and staying there their whole lives because our economy is changing. So we can never just assume that whatever you needed for your first job is going to be enough to get you through the whole rest of your life because our economy keeps changing the requirements keep changing. So I think we need to find a way to make college more affordable because it's still the best investment that you could make to make sure that you've got options for when you leave school so you might not use it right away but you want to have that kind of ready. And plus you learn so much in college that's not even about just your job you learn how to be an adult you know you learn like different topics to meet different people it's an amazing life experience that's beyond just getting a job but I think I wouldn't be comfortable if any of my students like just took it off the table because I feel like we just don't know you don't know where you're going to want what you're going to want to do in 10 years and you want to have that option. So why are there inequalities in schools in America? I think it's interesting because when schools were first founded like when the founding fathers thought about creating a system of education their main goal was not to like for students to like get good grades and then get good jobs it was really about becoming a good citizen so they wanted everyone to go to school to learn like what means to like participate in a democracy together in America but over time and it used to be like a really collective thing like we all go to school and that's something we all had in common as American students like no matter what we went to were in the country over time it's becoming more and more about like individuals getting ahead and like you know every parent wants the best for their children but in a society where it seems so like hard to get ahead. It's hard to remember that you're fighting for everyone and it just becomes about like you like I know everybody wants their kid to get the best like shot. So I think that fosters a sense of like we're not always worried about whether or not the kids in the next town are getting good education as long as our kid is getting good education. But if we only look out for ourselves and we don't think about the fact that like it's not fair if a kid in Dallas not too far from you is not getting the same resources you are. That's not fair but it's so hard to like take care of yourself and care about everyone else but like as a society we have to kind of like remember that you know when I get old it's your generation I need to trust that everyone's getting a good education because you're all going to be the ones in charge. Not just the people I know not just my kid you know so I think it's hard like we've kind of got to care about each other a little bit more and that also means dealing with things like racism, sexism, homophobia. Like there's so many things that are big in society that mean that we don't care as much about those kids as we do about people that are like us. And that's something that we still need to work on as a country. I also think test scores and like we have the STAR test which is a state academic test and teachers and not just teachers but like the government and everybody's whole really takes those scores of a test and like you're saying track students and get them in the classes that they think that they need to best suit them. When some people are really smart but they can't do well on tests. Yeah tests are hard because they can tell us something but now they've come to mean too much so if you're not a good test taker and it doesn't show the best of your ability then you're getting kind of like pushed into something that's not right for you and that's not the way it was supposed to be. I read an article about the people who created that SAT and ACT and stuff like that didn't intend for it to be a category rising students based off their knowledge. It just meant to like see where they're at and how they could. Thank you Dr. Mera for an amazing podcast. Thanks for joining us. We hope you learned something.