NASSAU — Dr. Tyrone C. Howard warned educators that they have to do a better job at eliminating racial trauma for Black children who attend urban schools.
Howard — who holds the Pritzker Family Endowed Chair and is director of the Black Male Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles — told several hundred attendees at the International Conference on Urban Education that it is their responsibility to disrupt the racial trauma that minority students encounter on a daily basis at the hands of school teachers and administrators.
Families and neighborhoods, he said, are often blamed for the trauma that educators actually inflict on school-age children.
“School induced racial trauma is real,” said Howard. “And we cannot use a one-size-fits all approach when we talk about school induced trauma.”
Howard — the author of numerous books including Why Race & Culture Matter in Schools: Closing the Achievement Gap in America’s Classroom and Black Male(D): Perils and Promise in the Education of African American Males — said that Black children are routinely subjected to racial harassment, racial violence and institutional racism at the hands of Whites and some educators of color who “don’t see their humanity and promise.”
“The question is do we listen to our children when they tell us?” he said about the growing number of students who have dropped out of school because they feel traumatized and disconnected from the learning process.
In an age of technology, students have used their smart phones, Howard said, to “capture the realities” of humiliation and in some cases physical violence that is directed at them by those entrusted to teach them.
