No School District for White Men
During my college fieldwork at a middle school in Waukegan, I saw how difficult life could be for the predominantly Black and Hispanic community—and how poorly the public schools served its children. Schools that could not deliver results further complicated life for students trying to break out of a vicious cycle of poverty and crime. The vast majority of parents and students I spoke with unequivocally supported school choice, despite being largely Democrats. They felt the pain of bad government more than affluent white liberals who benefited from more functional schools.
It was for these reasons that I decided to teach in this school district, despite understandable questions from family and peers about why I would choose a district with such an awful reputation. My education program named me Student Teacher of the Year, and I felt I could make the greatest difference in a district like Waukegan. In retrospect, this view was certainly naive and driven by a youthful degree of white guilt. But I never anticipated the racial animus that other white colleagues and I would face for trying to do right by the community’s children.
Resentment toward white teachers in Waukegan did not begin in a vacuum. It had a long history born of Black dissatisfaction with two elements of the school district:
- Student achievement and academic proficiency, particularly for Black students, whose proficiency rates on state assessments in ELA and math often ranged from 9% to 13%.
- Racial disparities in disciplinary data: to put it bluntly, Black students, particularly Black males, were “overrepresented” in office referrals and disciplinary actions.
I disagreed with those who blamed teachers for these problems rather than examining district leadership, bureaucracy, and sociocultural problems in the Black community. But I understood the frustration. Hell, I didn’t have children in the district, and I had become increasingly disillusioned with the system myself. What frustrated me was that these difficult questions always ended with the same scapegoats: white teachers and racism. To suggest anything else was heresy—evidence of the very “racism” we were charged with.
