"There Are No Weeds"

Last year, at the senior class community meeting in the first week of the school year, I stood before a group of 78 12th graders at City Arts and Tech High School, pointed to a list of their names on the wall behind me, and explained that I expected to see every one of them walk across stage at the graduation ceremony on June 12, 2009 – 9 months later. My words were not intended to be empty inspiration. I truly believed this was possible – for some, it would take extraordinary measures on the part of them, their families, and their teachers - but it was possible.

Such expectation for success did not arise blindly from the liberal heart of an educator detached from the material and emotional realities of his students. Though I do not look like them; though I did not grow up in the same homes and streets that surround them, I have learned from them nearly everything I know about teaching. I have been taught to believe in them – these most informed and honest teachers. They have taught me hope.

Still, most educators disagree. Dialogue about the possibility (or impossibility) of success for all proliferates in our schools – and I believe too much space is being made for impossibility.

Last year, a friend and colleague offered me an analogy that caused me to pause and reconsider my stance. He believed, as most educators do, the expectation of success (i.e. high school graduation) was a setup for failure and disappointment. “Doctors occasionally watch their patients die before their eyes despite their greatest efforts. Lawyers sometimes lose cases that they should win. Sometimes there are just factors beyond our control.” In other professions 100% success is not an expectation. Nor is it a practical expectation in education, given the fact that we operate within a system that does not - has never - embodied the purpose of educating all young people towards success. Be that as it may, the problem unique to teaching lies is the slippery slope - once we concede the demand that every student who enters any school building in this country is supported in reaching their full potential (for the sake of this conversation – high school graduation), the game begins – schools, teachers, administrators, and others start to arbitrate who will be served and who will not. It does not take a veteran educator to conclude what the result of such selection looks like.

Acceptance of any level of failure due to “factors beyond our control” leads to our complicity in the inequities of the system in which we operate: Freddy cannot stay in his seat for more than 20 minutes at a time becomes “maybe school just isn’t for him”; Veronica enters my class reading far below her grade level – “she is too far behind to even have a chance of success”; Jacob’s struggles with English comprehension because he has only been living in the US for two years becomes “the school can only do so much to support him”; and Brian’s constant defiance of her teachers – “he just doesn’t want to learn.” Such separation and disparate treatment based on perceived (and prejudged) abilities begins as young as Kindergarten.

Most teachers have no trouble identifying barriers beyond their control that keep young people from learning in their classrooms – and, as an educator going on my 11th year in urban high schools, I do not reject the burden of any of these myriad factors. However, we do control how we respond to the barriers.

And to build a pedagogical foundation on the acceptance that some of our youth are not going to be successful is to accept failure before our students even have eyes, hearts, minds, and names. This is the culture we must struggle against in our schools and this struggle begins with the affirmation put forth by Professor K. Wayne Yang: “there are not weeds” in our schools.