Snapshot: Towards the end of her Masters in Teaching, a preservice teacher grapples with whether or not to accept a job offer to teach at an urban charter school and discusses what it means to teach for social justice with a group of her colleagues.
Case Description: Over 50 years from the landmark Brown v. Board of Education, American schools remain as segregated as ever - if not more so. For new teachers, that means they must enter a deeply segregated educational landscape, marked by historical and contemporary inequities, and figure out how to do good work. This case is centered around a group of educators at the Harvard Graduate School of Education discussing what it means to teach to dismantle oppression. One of the teachers must decide whether or not to accept a job offer at a charter school in Oakland, California. Should she as a white women accept a job working primarily with students of color across the country? Or should she work in a school where the students will share a more similar background to herself?
"The Job Search" is especially useful for preservice and early career teachers who want to think deeply about what it means to do good work as a teacher in a time of deep educational inequity and hypersegregation. Groups may want to use the “case study discussion protocol” to guide their conversation about this case.
Additional Resources:-
For information on the causes and effects of segregated schooling, please see:
http://www.naacpldf.org/news/thurgood-marshall-institute-senior-fellow-richard-rothstein-we-can%E2%80%99t-meaningfully-integrate-sch
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/19/america-schools-segregation-race-class-education-policy-bobby-scott
-
For a rich discussion of one parent’s journey to find a school for her daughter in a segregated school system, please see:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/magazine/choosing-a-school-for-my-daughter-in-a-segregated-city.html?mcubz=1
-
And for an interview with the author of the New York Times article above, see:
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/01/16/509325266/how-the-systemic-segregation-of-schools-is-maintained-by-individual-choices
