3 minute read
Reflection Questions
Reflection Questions
Now that you have read this chapter, please consider the following questions. After reflecting alone, and then reflecting with a team if you are doing a book study, consider what actions you can take today. Who can you contact? What information can you research? Whose voice needs to be heard? What work needs to be done, and how can you be a part of it? • If your child (or your niece, your nephew, or any other young person you care about) wanted to become a teacher, what would your honest response be, and why? • How much do you think the average teacher salary should be? (After deciding, consider a babysitter who charges $12 an hour to watch one child. At that rate, a teacher with a class of thirty students—who, of course, is doing exponentially more work than a babysitter—who teaches six hours a day for nine months would make just under $400,000.) • Considering the preparatory programs of other professions, such as lawyer, health-care provider, and accountant, how rigorous, exclusive, and time consuming should teacher preparatory programs be? • How effective was your teacher preparatory program? How could it have been better? • As a student, when was the first time you had a teacher of color? Have you ever had a Latinx teacher? A Black teacher? An Asian American or Pacific Islander teacher? What do your answers tell you about your educational experience?
DISMANTLING A
Broken
S YS T EM
Actions to Bridge the Opportunity, Equity, and Justice Gap in American Education
The history of U.S. education exposes a system rigged against poor, Black, Latinx, and other marginalized communities. Funding formulas and tax structures; racial, economic, and housing segregation; education curricula; and teacher preparatory programs and pipelines all contribute to this rigged system. In Dismantling a Broken System: Actions to Bridge the Opportunity, Equity, and Justice Gap in American Education, author Zachary Wright equips K–12 teachers and administrators with a research-based understanding of these built-in learning barriers. This book features concrete ideas for engaging in hyperlocal activism, making educational funding more equitable, and providing culturally responsive instruction so readers can address biased conditions in their classrooms and communities.
With this book, readers will:
• Engage in specific ways to increase their cultural responsiveness • Scrutinize the link between school funding and local wealth and how it perpetuates educational injustice • Explore ways to improve programs for new and in-training teachers • Consider teachers’ union policies that can support educational equity • Discover people and organizations that are making change in U.S. education
“Dismantling a Broken System challenges many long-held beliefs about the supposed meritocracy in the United States and encourages readers to understand the oppression at work in our schools. In concise and illuminating prose, Wright makes a compelling case for every White educator to drop the veil of color blindness and get to work.”
—Margaret Thornton
Researcher, Education Research Section, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs
“Zachary Wright shares some important insights and challenges us to dive deeper into understanding the mindsets, practices, and policies that can begin dismantling a broken system. To do so means creating not just safe spaces to engage, but brave spaces in which to learn and, most importantly, act. In his book, Wright lays out a way to begin to develop the muscles and mindsets necessary to be fluent in equity literacy.”
—Sharif El-Mekki
CEO, Center for Black Educator Development
“As the first African American teacher of Greenwood Public Schools, I realize how slow change is even when it is needed quickly. This incredible book is an eye-opener and reminder of what it will take to break down this system that was made by us. You will never know the inside of a person just by looking at the outside!”
