Segregation by Experience: Agency, Racism, and Learning in the Early Grades

By Jennifer Keys Adair and Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove

Early childhood can be a time of rich discovery, a period when educators have an opportunity to harness their students’ fascination to create unique learning opportunities. Some teachers engage with their students’ ideas in ways that make learning collaborative--but not all students have access to these kinds of learning environments.
 
In Segregation by Experience, the authors filmed and studied a a first-grade classroom led by a Black immigrant teacher who encouraged her diverse group of students to exercise their agency. When the researchers showed the film to other schools, everyone struggled. Educators admired the teacher but didn’t think her practices would work with their own Black and brown students. Parents of color—many of them immigrants—liked many of the practices, but worried that they would compromise their children. And the young children who viewed the film thought that the kids in the film were terrible, loud, and badly behaved; they told the authors that learning was supposed to be quiet, still, and obedient. In Segregation by Experience Jennifer Keys Adair and Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove show us just how much our expectations of children of color affect what and how they learn at school, and they ask us to consider which children get to have sophisticated, dynamic learning experiences at school and which children are denied such experiences because of our continued racist assumptions about them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9780226765754

Book preview

Segregation by Experience

Segregation by Experience

Agency, Learning, and Racism in the Early Grades

JENNIFER KEYS ADAIR AND KIYOMI SÁNCHEZ-SUZUKI COLEGROVE

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-76558-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-76561-7 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-76575-4 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226765754.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Adair, Jennifer Keys, author. | Colegrove, Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki, author.

Title: Segregation by experience : agency, racism, and learning in the early grades / Jennifer Keys Adair and Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020038853 | ISBN 9780226765587 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226765617 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226765754 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Student-centered learning—Texas. | Active learning—Texas. | Experiential learning—Texas. | Minorities—Education (Elementary)—Texas. | First grade (Education)—Texas. | Segregation in education—Texas.

Classification: LCC LB1027.23 .A33 2021 | DDC 379.2/6309764—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020038853

This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For the children of Ms. Bailey’s class

for Berkeley, Atticus, Gideon, and Nicolás

and for Ms. Bailey and all those engaged in the ongoing fight against White supremacy

Contents

1   White Supremacy in the Early Grades

2   Everyday Life in Ms. Bailey’s Classroom

3   How Educators Responded to Ms. Bailey’s Classroom

4   Limits and Balance

5   Complication and Politics

6   Children’s Responses

7   Justifying a Segregation by Experience

Epilogue: The Children in Ms. Bailey’s Class Six Years Later

Acknowledgments

Appendix

References

Index

1

White Supremacy in the Early Grades

In schools across the United States, many young children of color are forced to walk in prisonlike lines with silent bubbles in their mouths and hands behind their backs. They go through much of the day disconnected from their real lives, asked to submit to significant controlling mechanisms such as behavior charts, monolingualism, punishment systems, and the denial of movement. In other schools, meanwhile, young White children walk in zigzag formations, taking their time, chatting, joking, and sometimes singing with their friends. They read and hear stories that reflect their realities and comfort. What makes it acceptable for children in the United States of America to have such different kinds of schooling experiences, especially in the earliest grades?

In 2011 we received a grant from the Foundation for Child Development to figure out how children’s agency—the ability to influence and make decisions about learning—affects academic and social development. The plan was to spend a year observing first-grade classrooms where children could enact their agency in their learning. We would identify as many forms of agency as we could and then make a video that showed the children using their agency. We would take that video to groups of educators, parents, teachers, and young children and see what forms of agency they noticed and valued. We wanted to work with young children of color—primarily children from Latinx communities. The goal was to create a list of ways that Latinx children enacted their agency in public school settings that would be supported by their families. This list would then be used to advocate for increasing culturally sustaining opportunities for agency of Latinx and other children in early childhood education settings.

As planned, we did spend one year in first-grade classrooms. We did make a film. And we did show the film to over 250 educators, parents, teachers and young children. But people did not respond the way we predicted. We thought they would be excited and even inspired to see young children of color acting as scientists, formulating questions, working deeply and collaboratively, thinking carefully, and being engaged in their learning. But most were not. Educators admired the practices in the film but did not think these practices would work for the children at their schools. Parents of color—many of whom were immigrants from Mexico and Central America—liked many of the practices but worried that they would endanger or compromise their children. Young children we interviewed thought the practices in the film were terrible. They told us that learning requires students to be quiet, still, and compliant. They thought that the children in Ms. Bailey’s classroom were behaving badly.

We have written about these findings in a number of academic journals. All along, we suspected that the children we interviewed were revealing a problem with early childhood education in the United States that is larger than our initial analysis uncovered. After spending two years analyzing the data from different parts of Texas, we think that our study demonstrates the serious injustice of offering schooling that is engaged, dynamic, and sophisticated to a few while offering everyone else rigid and narrow schooling that is fixated on compliance. This segregation by experience results in short- and long-term injustices that perpetuate an intentional, racist denial of access and opportunity. Segregation by experience is deeply detrimental to young children who are just learning who they are and what society expects of them.

In this book, we will spend time with a first-grade classroom led by Ms. Bailey, a teacher who speaks four languages and immigrated from Burundi as a young adult. Ms. Bailey’s class included mostly children of color, many of whom spoke more than one language. Collectively and individually, the class had many opportunities to enact their agency as part of their learning. They experienced schooling that was engaged, dynamic, and sophisticated. We open up as much of the operational logic and feeling of Ms. Bailey’s classroom as we can while detailing the capabilities children expanded at school through the supported enactment of their agency.

We will also spend time with over 250 superintendents, principals, teachers, immigrant parents, and young children ages five to seven across Texas who watched and responded to the film of Ms. Bailey’s classroom. We try to make sense of why people, especially young children, in our study responded to the film as they did. What do their critical responses to allegedly high-quality early childhood practice tell us about the US educational system and about the realities for children of color as they make their way through it?

Disproportionality in What Children of Color Experience

Most young children in the United States today have narrower and more rigid learning experiences at school than children did twenty years ago (Bassok, Latham, and Rorem 2016). Children are having to sit still for longer and longer periods, completing tasks they do not choose in positions and spaces they do not control. Acceptable behavior in a preschool classroom, for example, might be sitting crisscross applesauce (legs folded like a pretzel) with hands in their laps and their mouths closed for twenty, thirty, even forty-five minutes at a time. This stillness might serve a purpose if a child was choosing to watch intently what a peer or expert adult was doing. But stillness in most cases is about compliance, not learning. The narrowness of acceptable behavior makes it more likely that children will get into trouble. Narrow limits for how and when a child can move increase the chances of a child’s being seen as distracting or disobedient.

This loss has disproportionately impacted young children of color because teachers, schools, and districts serving children of color have to navigate pressures to be efficient, keeping content aligned with what will be on tests. This leaves little room for culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris 2012; Paris and Alim 2014) that engages with students’ and family stories and other early childhood necessities. Young children of color are also impacted by the historical ongoingness of what Ladson-Billings (2006, 9–10) termed the education debt: fewer resources than White schools enjoy, overburdened and undersupported teachers and principals, and the constant presence of racial, economic, linguistic and ethnic discrimination (see also Cardichon et al 2020; López and López 2009).

One result of the education debt is that young children receive very disparate experiences in early schooling. This disproportionality is what we refer to as segregation by experience. As teachers, teacher educators, district consultants, and educational researchers, we have moved within and between a mostly segregated school system in which many White students experience school as a place that welcomes their ideas, identities, and curiosity, while students of color experience school as a place that insists on their compliance, order, and efficiency.

Over the course of this study, we watched things happen in schools serving young children of color that we never saw in schools serving wealthy White children. We have seen Brown and Black children line up and give their number to get sleeping mats. We have seen them line up in a straight line for ten minutes, only to go outside to run laps around the playground. We have seen teachers stop and reprimand children who were trying to help clean up after a spill, opening up a milk container for a classmate, moving a chair closer to hear better, telling a story while pacing, handing a book to a child who was struggling to wait quietly, moving over to allow more people into an activity, or yelling out excitedly that their friend had arrived at school. We have seen young children persist through such bounded and controlled environments to be successful, but as many education scholars have noted, these experiences complicate and burden lives (Muñoz and Maldonado 2012; Valencia 2010).

The already narrowing emphasis on compliance and stillness intersects with historic and ongoing institutional racism in schools. Too often schools have been (and continue to be) sites of harsh discipline more reminiscent of prisons and punishment than deep learning and care (Noguera 2003). Children of color are often in classes where the discipline approach restricts their movement and talk so much that they have minimum opportunities to interact with one another (T. Howard 2013; Milner 2015). Race is still the most salient factor in school discipline (Gregory, Skiba, and Noguera 2010; McDermott, Raley, and Seyer-Ochi 2009). National Council of La Raza, now called Unidos US (Sallo 2011), reported a severe increase in the mistreatment of Latinx students, citing harsh zero-tolerance policies that control movement and interpret Latinx student behavior (even that of young children) as threatening at worst or distracted at best. Courtney Sherman Robinson’s (2013) research on incarcerated Black men found that their early schooling experiences had been characterized by strict control. Racialized surveillance of young Brown and Black bodies has led to children of color being forced into special education classrooms against their will (Ahram, Fergus, and Noguera 2011; Artiles et al. 2010; Blanchett 2006; Lee 2017) and harsh disciplinary measures such as physical restraints and suspension for younger and younger children (Milner et al. 2019; Skiba and Peterson 1999).

Racist ideologies systematically position young children of color as threatening, out of control, wild, disobedient, and misbehaving despite evidence that White children act in similar ways but are not disciplined nor labeled as problems (Adair 2015; Gregory, Skiba, and Noguera 2010; Noguera 2003). Instead of being supported in language use, young children of color are disciplined more harshly for being loud (or similar behaviors) than are their native-born White peers, a trend that starts when they are just four years old (Dumas 2016; Skiba et al. 2011; US Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights 2014). Controlling children’s movement as a form of discipline is a continuation of racial trauma that prefigures the school-to-prison pipeline (K. Brown 2016; Ferguson 2000; Robinson 2013).

There are powerful exceptions to this patterned segregation by experience in the schooling lives of young children of color. Educators and communities do resist the kinds of control and narrowness that have too often been imposed on young children in classrooms. There is, for example, a long history, predating Brown v. Board of Education, of Black teachers offering dynamic, thoughtful learning experiences to children in Black communities (Peters 2019; Acosta, Foster, and Houchen 2018; hooks 2014). Skilled, knowledgeable Black teachers were able to balance the realities of segregation with an empowering and emboldening view of young children of color as capable, smart, and impressive (K. Brown 2016; see also Grant, Brown, and Brown 2016). Indigenous efforts to foster community participation through a range of listening and observational practices that honor elder and ancestral knowledge are found in many communities throughout the United States (Dayton and Rogoff 2013; Nxumalo and Cedillo 2017; Sandoval et al. 2016; Urrieta 2015; Yazzie-Mintz et al. 2018) despite pressures to mirror White-centered practices, regulation, and assessments. Bilingual teachers, before and after Horne v. Flores, have believed in their young children of color so much that they’ve offered dynamic experiences rooted in the reality of segregation and the knowledge that young children are capable. Their effort and conocimiento has been necessary to systemic improvements towards equity and access to higher learning (Goodman and Intercultural Development Research Association 2010; Portes, Canché, Boada, and Whatley 2018). There are tremendous examples of teachers working to empower young children of color to use their minds and critical thinking skills (not just their obedience) to learn (see Love 2016; Palmer et al. 2014; Souto-Manning 2013).

Ultimately, offering young children of color a range of rich, dynamic, and sophisticated learning experiences in which they are able to engage their identities and repertoires of practice needs to be normalized so that it doesn’t have to be an act of resistance. All of us play a role in doing this, because we are all involved in a system that is much larger than the teachers, administrators, families, and children in our study. We are all responsible for removing what Charles Mills calls the personhood–subpersonhood line that justifies some receiving freely what others have to earn or demonstrate worthiness for in order to receive.

Young Children and the Racial Contract

Charles Mills is a philosopher originally from Jamaica who studied in Canada and now teaches in the United States. He calls himself an oppositional political theorist. Others refer to him as a Black liberationist Marxist. He critiques liberal philosophy, particularly the Kantian notion of the ideal social contract. The social contract is the idea that people give up some of their power to the state in exchange for the state’s protecting the remainder of their freedoms, privileges, and safety. In the social contract, the state is supposed to enforce equality since everyone is living under the terms of the same social contract. The social contract is the means through which human beings work toward an equal society, devoid of status or privilege. Mills (1997), however, asserts that a social contract is not possible—and is actually never attempted. What we call the social contract is for White people only and thus ignores oppressive histories and continued racial injustices.

It is tempting to believe in a meritocracy in which everyone should be judged the same because everyone starts out on the same playing field. But such a perspective conveniently ignores ongoing effects of historical and contemporary racist policies, demonstrated, for example, in who goes to college, gets loans, inherits money, owns property, or leads sports teams, hospitals, banks, and technology and investment firms. Instead of a social contract, Mills (1997) explains, there is a racial contract that serves to ensure that White people have access to their rights and privileges, often at the expense of people of color.

The racial contract happens through the maintenance of the personhood–subpersonhood line, a line that consistently offers rights to full persons (mostly White people) and marks people of color and some poor Whites as subpersons. Full personhood is for persons who are each other’s equal and have full access to their rights and privileges. Subpersonhood is for subpersons who are equal to each other but not equal to Whites and so must show they are worthy of the rights, privileges, and safety afforded to personhood.

Full persons have full agency. They enjoy self-rule, or the ability to govern and make decisions over their life, and often (unfairly) the lives of others. In schools, the racial contract writes children of color into a subjecthood in which they have to prove they are ready and worthy of crossing the line into full personhood. Personhood in a schooling context is the privilege of having one’s identities, preferences, interests, knowledges, perspectives, and lives outside of school considered important for learning. The racial contract positions subpersons—children of color—as having to earn affection, encouragement, respect, and high expectations. Leonardo explains this positioning as a systemic institutional effort to maintain White supremacy through thinking of students of color as subpersons. Epistemologically, ontologically and existentially, students of color are written into the contract as subpersons, where they function as alibis for the provision that Whites are always already persons, a principle that is parasitic on personhood of color (2015, 1).

While full persons—or full students—walk into school with the expectation that they will be offered certain rights and privileges of safety, strong curriculum, exceptions, respect, experienced teachers, and some leeway when it comes to behavior, subpersons expect that they will need to change or fight to get the same privileges. These settled expectations (Bang et al. 2012, 302) are considered natural and difficult, if not impossible, to change.

Here, we want to ask what it might mean for learning and development if we were to dislodge the ‘settled expectations’ that current practice . . . imposes on subject matter, learners and teachers (Bang et al. 2012, 303). If schools are to be detangled from their racist and segregationist past and offer deep, sophisticated learning to all children, young children must be viewed through a strengths-based lens instead of the settler-colonial one that has justified low expectations for so long.

False Promises in the Racial Contract

In systems operating with a racial contract, children and families of color are promised that if they change (improve) their behavior, dress, attitude, geographical location, neighborhood, friends, immigration status, or economic situation, they can cross over into full personhood and claim all its rights and privileges. Personhood is almost always aligned with what wealthy White people believe and want. The promise is that if you do certain things, you can earn passage into personhood with all the accompanying protections and privileges. But this promise is rarely actualized, because when enough people start crossing over to full personhood, the requirements or expectations change and the Line essentially moves.

Many families from historically marginalized communities are asked to talk, behave, and think like middle-class White parents so that their children can be successful at school (López 2001). Parents are told to play with their children, use flashcards with their children, read to their children, take their children to the library, speak directly to them. They are told to speak English at home even if that isn’t the family’s first language, or to volunteer at the school with the promise that this will result in higher academic achievement. If parents do all of these things, their children have a greater chance of being considered full persons with access to the rights, privileges, and safety of full personhood.

Full personhood or Whiteness determines the quality, appearance, and regulation of the personhood–subpersonhood line. Cheryl Harris, in her monumental argument Whiteness as Property, posits that Whiteness equals control over one’s life. Her own mother, she says, tried to pass as White to have better opportunities for agency over her life. Becoming White increased the possibility of controlling critical aspects of one’s life rather than being the object of others (Harris 1993, 1713). The closer people came to being considered White, the more legal and practical control they had over their lives.

In US schools, children and families of color are not asked directly to racially pass as White, yet they can feel pressure to change or fix aspects of themselves in order to be successful (hooks 1992; Spencer et al. 2001; Tyson 2011). Throughout this book we will give examples of how the racial contract’s false promise was absent from Ms. Bailey’s classroom yet highly visible in the schooling lives of the children and educators to whom we showed the film. Many young children of color across Texas have been positioned as subpersons and so are consistently denied the experiences that were so abundant in Ms. Bailey’s classroom.

Agency and Personhood

Sometimes at school children can choose between markers or pencils, among colors of paper or whether to read a book about pigs or horses. This is not the type of agency we are referring to in this book. Agency is a component of racial justice and related to personhood and humanization.

Our definition of agency—the ability to influence and make decisions about how and what is learned in order to expand capabilities—comes from the work of Amartya Sen (see Adair 2014). In 1990 Sen worked under Pakistani economist Mahbab ul Haq to help produce the Human Development Index (HDI) for the United Nations. Their task was to produce a more nuanced and human-centered measurement of a nation’s development. At the time (and still today in many ways) a country was considered developed or developing based on its gross domestic product, or GDP. GDP refers to the total production of the people and companies in a country. Ul Haq and Sen were publicly critical of using only GDP to determine the development status of a nation. They argued that agency and well-being are the two precursors to development (Anand and Sen 1994). Development, ul Haq explained, is not about a nation’s singular GDP score but about whether people are living the lives that are meaningful to them (ul Haq 2003). In the introduction to the first Human Development Index report, ul Haq wrote,

Human development is a process of enlarging people’s choices. . . . Development enables people to have these choices. No one can guarantee human happiness, and the choices people make are their own concern. But the process of development should at least create a conducive environment for people, individually and collectively, to develop their full potential and to have a reasonable chance of leading productive and creative lives in accord with their needs and interests. (ul Haq 1990, 1)

A nation’s development, or the process of becoming developed, the UN Human Development Committee argued (ul Haq 1990), should be measured by how well people’s choices are being enlarged so that they can lead lives in accord with their needs and interests. Sen extended ul Haq’s argument that development is about human life, not economies. Single-indicator systems such as GDP or, in the case of education, standardized test scores cannot represent how people are doing, because development is about people’s ability to live meaningful lives.

Meaningful lives require the expansion of capabilities so that people can ultimately have more choices about what they do and who they want to be (Sen 2004). Development is not simply a biological process or the accumulation of skill sets dictated by others. Development is the expansion of capabilities both of individuals and of peoples. Sen writes, The process of development can expand human capabilities by expanding the choices that people have to live full and creative lives (1999, 8). The goal of any economic development in local, national, or international terms, then, should be the promotion and expansion of valuable capabilities (Sen 2003, 10). He argues that if a country has an increased or relatively high GDP but its people do not have the well-being or agency that leads to expanded capabilities and choosing lives that are meaningful to them, then this is not actual development.

The Capability Approach frames development as the expansion of capabilities. Agency and well-being are critical for capability expansion. According to Sen, agency prompts and motivates experiences that expand skills and knowledge in much broader ways than tasks determined by others (see Saito 2003). Agency is both a means to expanding capabilities and a positive end result of it because more capabilities mean greater agency. Increased agency expands capabilities, improves human well-being, and helps people lead more productive and creative lives. Thus agency is both a means and an end in itself. The whole point of development is agency: that people can choose lives that are meaningful to them. Choosing one’s participation, action, thinking, influence, and contribution to collective pursuits results in a broader, more sophisticated set of experiences and so expands capabilities. Agency is not simply about individual autonomy but about individual and communal agency that is dynamic and creative, not just reactive and reductive (Urrieta and Noblit 2018, 11).

Agency is a part of identity formation, especially of an identity that can see around or perhaps outside of an oppressive dominant perspective. As Aimee Cox demonstrates in her ethnographic study of young Black women in Detroit, agency can manipulate and be shaped by partial citizenship or discursive identity forces (2015, 19). Urrieta’s work is especially helpful here because he argues that identity is always a process of ‘figuring’ or becoming through social formation (Urrieta and Noblit 2018, 12). Identity is shaped by social interaction, the availability of agency, and unequal distributions of power (Urrieta and Noblit 2018, 4). Agency (both individual and collective) in practice impacts how people see themselves in relation to local and larger systems of power. Agency also impacts how, which, and whether identities are accessible and taken up