Confessions of a white teacher in an urban school
“This next mistake was not mine, but a flaw deeply ingrained in the system. As a new teacher in the school, I had the lowest ‘track’ of students, so my second-graders were 11 years old. They had repeated kindergarten and first grade, and they were on their second year of second grade with me. They didn’t know their letters, numbers or colors. But they were still expected to keep up with the city’s standardized, mandatory curriculum. At 9:00 a.m., for example, we needed to be on page 28 of the second-grade reading anthology, whether they could read it or not.”