Our kids deserve sensitive schooling

According to the Daily News, during a lesson on slavery in the United States, Patricia Cummings, a white middle school teacher in the Bronx, had her black students lay on the floor while she stepped on them in order to show them “what slavery felt like.”

This allegedly happened in multiple classes, and the city’s Department of Education allowed Cummings to return to the classroom until a reporter exposed the story. (She is now under investigation.) This is not a relic of the Reconstruction Era, or recently segregated schools. Cummings taught this “lesson” this year.

Our schools should be sanctuaries of learning, not nightmares of cruel and racist behavior. These so-called lessons are more than culturally insensitive; they can misguide and scar our children for years to come.

In the most diverse city in the world, all teachers should receive cultural competency training, all schools should have mandatory culturally responsive curriculum, and the city’s Education Department should have an office of culturally responsive education. New York City not only has none of the above, but also the most segregated school system in the country. This needs to change.

For those that might think these proposals are an overreaction, what is described in Cummings’ classroom is not an isolated incident. This month alone, we’ve learned of three other incidents in our city. In the Bronx, a principal supposedly blocked a teacher from teaching lessons on black history that would have covered topics such as the Harlem Renaissance. In Brooklyn, a parent-teacher association announced a speakeasythemed fundraiser using pictures of performers in blackface. In a Queens Catholic school, a student was banned from having his given name — Malcolm X. — printed on his sweatshirt because school officials found it offensive.

The vast majority of our teachers, our principals and our PTAs are well informed and well meaning, but even those with the best intentions can benefit from cultural competency training. This type of training was launched last month for 450 of our city’s teachers. While this initiative is laudable, it only reaches half of one percent of all the public school teachers in New York City. We need to do more. We need a more comprehensive culturally responsive education program citywide.

Such a program would include providing a culturally relevant curriculum that reflects the vast diversity of our students, reshaping the curriculum to reflect our country’s history accurately, and ensuring that we recruit and maintain educators who reflect our student body.

In New York City public schools, 83% of students are students of color, whereas only 40% of teachers are teachers of color. More than 250 schools have no or only one Latino teacher, 327 schools have no or only one black teacher, and 690 schools have no or only one Asian teacher.

There is ample research that shows having ethnic-studies courses and a teacher of color increase students’ grades and attendance, including a Johns Hopkins study that shows having just one black elementary school teacher decreases the high school dropout rate among black boys by 39%. That is why in November 2016, I called for the creation of a chief diversity officer in the city’s Education Department to oversee all diversity efforts.

I am once again calling on the mayor to create this position. We must ensure that we are hiring and retaining qualified, diverse candidates not only to teach in our classrooms, but to work at the DOE overseeing our students’ education.

The mayor has committed to ensuring that every student has access to Advanced Placement and computer science courses. He has committed to universal pre-K, and 3-K, throughout New York City. This mayor cares about education. In the same way he committed to these initiatives, he must commit to creating an office of culturally responsive education and a chief diversity officer within the DOE.

We cannot pretend that this is about one teacher or one school. This is about teaching all of our children the story of our history, our present and our culture. This is about treating our children with respect and dignity, and teaching our children respect and dignity. This is about ensuring our schools remain sanctuaries for learning.