Advantage and DEI: Teaching, learning, living

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of guest commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

I live in Minneapolis in a beautiful 1929 apartment building sandwiched between the American Swedish Institute and Abbott Northwestern Hospital in what anyone who has eyes would call a privileged community — surrounded by less than privileged people in the neighboring houses — people I share bus rides with multiple times throughout the week. The only way I could be more of a minority on these bus rides would be if I were my female reciprocal — a senior white woman Ph.D.

In the years I’ve commuted by bus, I’ve only had a few altercations — which I’ve decided to not take personally. I know what I look like, and I know what I seem to strangers — a rich senior white man.

I periodically have conversations with my fellow passengers with many of them simply working at guessing what I do for a living. I play along because they genuinely are curious. Most of them have never met a university professor or attended a college class; my fellow passengers are the working poor.

Headed for the Minneapolis Club each morning at 5:40 a.m. is when I am in the real minority. I am headed for a morning lap swim and to work out in a facility that my Black, Latino and Asian fellow bus riders could never conceive of. They are headed for north Minneapolis and jobs that my colleagues and I are thankful we don’t have.

I often ask myself what I would do if I were in their positions. Could I move up the social ladder? Yes, I could if I had access to the resources that I currently have — few of which are available to my fellow passengers. Later in the day, I see children with their parents and can’t help wondering what their schools are like, and what lies ahead for each of them — and who their teachers are.

Spending 28 years in higher education, and 46 teaching all together — from rural Minnesota to the south side of Chicago, I’ve made a few observations about processes in teaching and learning — especially when I was serving as the chair of the department of teacher education at the University of St. Thomas. One of them is that students learn best when they share the same ethnicity as their teachers. Numerous studies, including a recent one, “Student-Teacher Ethnoracial Matching in the Earliest Grades: Benefits for Executive Function Skills” by Michael Gottfried of the University of Pennsylvania published in Early Education & Development, indicate this. It isn’t particularly hard to figure out though.

So, how do we get more teachers in classrooms to whom our huge and growing population of Black, Latino and Asian students can relate? I suspect that this is where diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) comes into play. Unfortunately, DEI is making some folks feel bad about themselves, and is encouraging other folks to think that the issues that DEI is trying to solve don’t exist anymore. As if. Come ride the bus with me.

Because of these attitudes, the University of St. Thomas in the last few weeks has lost more than $7 million in federal grant funds that were aimed at addressing teacher shortages. To quote St. Thomas President Rob Vischer, “The grant provides scholarships for School of Ed students planning to work in special ed or elementary ed. The scholarships are open to all students regardless of race … . [T]he grant is being canceled because it is classified by the Trump administration as a ‘DEI initiative.’ As a condition of the grant, the Biden administration had required applicants to explain how the funding would advance diversity in the teaching profession, which we of course did. And we are proud of our progress preparing teachers (of all races) to work in high-need schools.”

A second grant was canceled this past week: “This TQP (Teacher Quality Partnership) grant was designed to remove financial barriers to teaching careers by allowing partnering charter schools to provide living wage stipends to approximately twenty students per year completing the internships required for licensure.”

Because it was decided that minority students (and non-minority students) were getting something that they didn’t deserve, the funds have been canceled. Students of all races will need to figure out if they are continuing in their programs or not — shortcoming scores of schools and neighborhoods — and affecting very few people who will be reading this post.

But with these cost savings, coupled further with the millions of dollars the U.S. will be saving because of all of the recent firings of 200,000 federal employees, I’m looking forward to my income taxes being reduced correspondingly. And I’m pretty sure that grocery prices will finally get back to reason.

Bruce P. Gleason is a professor in the Department of Music, Film and Creative Enterprise at the University of St. Thomas.