How Schools Could Strike a Balance to Improve Race Relations

By
Barry E. Stern, Ph.D.

The issue of improving race relations and helping all groups thrive is likely to be with the Nation for several decades. Following are three suggestions that states should consider to replace Critical Race Theory (CRT) education and sensitivity training with institutionally and age-appropriate courses and initiatives. To summarize:

1. 1. Review U.S. history and civics courses in schools and colleges in order to ensure these include the key contributions made by different demographic groups (e.g. women, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, immigrants, multiracial and Native Americans).
   2. Update or develop and disseminate new course that helps teens and adults responsibly discuss and debate controversial social health issues.
   3. Update or develop course in Minority History and Culture with the help of organizations representing diverse racial and ethnic groups throughout the state.

1. Review U.S. history and civics courses. State agencies responsible for K-12, community colleges and universities would assemble statewide teams to conduct these reviews and make needed changes in state standards. Their mission would be to somehow reconcile the poles of the American story — that we are exceptional and that we have been exploitative. A timely topic for such a revised course could be how well or how badly the U.S. has handled unforeseen events such as pandemics, economic catastrophes, massive immigration, domestic and international conflicts. Once broad agreement is reached on the parameters that accurately describe our history and form of government, the teams would develop curriculum manuals and instructor training and technical assistance materials, along with state funding formulas to encourage adoption of the revised courses.

1. Controversial social health issues course.  Schools, colleges, churches, businesses, etc. provide a valuable service when they encourage people to educate themselves about people who are different. But you don’t improve intergroup relations by making certain groups wrong, as many are prone to do in this age of political correctness and divisiveness, CRT being today’s most evident example. Moreover, one-off anti-bias or sensitivity trainings like Starbucks offers has little lasting value as research has shown, even though these might help disingenuous white business owners feel better and perhaps enhance their bottom line.

Rather than offer anti-bias training apart from other controversial social health issues, help people discover and deal with the various biases that make us human through well-crafted, voluntary courses of study that address several of a community’s hot social health issues. We have no lack of these:

§ Bullying § Opioid/drug abuse § School shootings and disciplinary incidents § Mental health breakdowns § Teen suicides § Sexual misconduct § Interracial strife § Homelessness § Human Trafficking § Deteriorating police-youth relations § Assimilating recent immigrants, § Urban riots destroying and looting property, just to name a few.

Keeping such issues in their disciplinary silos through separate programs to address every problem is neither engaging, effective nor affordable. Much as the work of organizations that address these issues is admirable, their highly targeted responses tend not to provide sufficient time and subject matter breadth for the in-depth training in emotional intelligence that today’s world requires. In a word, our communities must build better people to deal with this evermore complex world, and that requires opportunities over time to practice building healthy relationships in continually shifting situations. Such a course, probably team taught with each class selecting topics from a board-approved list and negotiating with its instructors during the first week how those topics would be covered, is a way to build these relationships.

Students, and for that matter most Americans, need courses, retreats and town meetings that would help them develop and defend points of view on controversial social health issues and listen carefully and respectfully to one another while they argue. I largely developed and taught such a course at Berkeley High School (CA) that remained in the curriculum for over 25 years (links below). Race relations was among the topics that a student class could choose to cover in the course’s 50 hours; however, the issue of race often came up in discussing and debating other topics, such as drug abuse, police-youth relations and human sexuality. Backing into such discussions involving race was just as effective as a unitary focus on it. One of my successors wrote a book about her experiences with this “social living” course.

State education agencies could fund the updating of this course with the help of prominent health and social service organizations and offer the associated teacher training package to schools, colleges and community organizations that would like to run with it. The state should also design and fund a long-term evaluation through the competitive bid process.

http://loudounnow.com/2016/07/22/op-ed-engaging-teens-to-confront-social-and-health-challenges/

http://loudounnow.com/2018/04/18/letter-barry-e-stern-purcellville/

2. Course in Minority History and Culture. In 1969 the Berkeley CA school district required its teachers to sign up for a course in Minority History and Culture. It was the district’s first year of bussing elementary and middle school students. An enthusiastic newbie, grad student between completing coursework and dissertation, and former Peace Corps volunteer, I signed up for the first class that was led a couple evenings a week by a couple of black professors from S.F. State. The content was mostly about the African-American experience in America. Other minorities were largely ignored. Several student members of the emerging Black Panther party were in my classes, so I thought I'd be a better teacher by gaining a greater understanding of where they were coming from. Had it not been for the course, I probably would not have read some works of Frederick Douglas and W.E.B. Du Bois as well as Eldrige Cleaver’s "Soul on Ice". Never being one for political correctness, I enjoyed bantering with the profs and challenging some of their points of view, especially the ones I thought were ridiculous.

In retrospect, although some aspects of the course were a waste of time, on the whole it helped me grow as a person, educator and citizen. States could develop and fund such a course for employees of educational, social service and law enforcement agencies and perhaps other community organizations (e.g. churches, charities). Broad-based teams from our schools, colleges, universities and social service agencies would develop the course objectives and corresponding content modules and instructional methods. Such a course would include the history of the state’s major minorities and ethnic groups, attended on a voluntary basis 2-3 evenings a week with university credit for those who complete the required exams and assignments, and team taught by two professionals with an objective historical mindset and open to alternative ways of engaging adult students. With a modest upfront bonus from the state for trying the course and participating in its evaluation, local agencies would select and pay their own instructors and get reimbursed by the state for the number of student hours attended each semester.