Equity is the single most compelling and complicating topic facing American education today. The Achievement Gap may be the numerical face of education’s failings in equity, but the faces and lives of its students and families are far more important than any one data point. Education may be the answer to leveling playing fields and providing access, but it needs people to lead it there. My lived racial history, both in and out of educational systems, is blind to experiences of challenge, hardship, or inequity. Yet, I must somehow be a leader who advocates for such equity. How then do I - a privileged, white, male - dare to make any sense of any of these deficiencies let alone assume I can somehow be an advocate for its change? In a system created for me, it is imperative that I first acknowledge that such a system exists. This is much harder to actually do for it supposes that in acknowledging a preferential system, one can understand i...
That’s actually not true. The fingers and toes are there. And most people count on that fact to assure themselves that babies are real people. We took Margaret to a summer pool party when she was only a few weeks old. A few old Italian people commented that she had the long fingers of a piano player. As her father, I hadn’t noticed. I had been getting just barely enough sleep (about 4 hours a night) to remember to duck the low ceiling fan inside the house as my wife took Maggie inside to breastfeed out of the hot sun. Of all the baby clothes that were passed down to us, there was one Halloween monkey outfit. It fit Maggie perfectly. So for most of October which she spent as not a real person, she was a squeaky monkey. Whenever you slipped her in the outfit -- which included a cotton stuffed round belly, a short brown tail, and a little brown hood with floppy ears – she fell asleep immediately. It was like a travel-size sleeping bag for her. And a sleeping baby makes for happy parents. ...
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