Current politics, initiatives, and institutionalized madness aside, is it really any wonder that we’d want to return? Indeed, most of us who desire to return to school as teachers are returning to the very institutions that have been set up to benefit us all along.
Conversely, why would historically marginalized populations elect to eventually become teachers for the very system that (likely) underserved them in some way? Why would minority populations elect to serve a system that will (likely) continue to underserve minority students if the current discourse of “accountability” has its way?
In other words, who willingly, and in their right mind, returns to a system that failed to adequately educate, represent, respect, and appropriately mentor their own student body?
An underserved schooling experience might be examined in a couple of ways. We might think about it in terms of the desperate skill-and-drill measures that Jonathan Kozol illustrated long ago, fraught measures which have been shown to impact schools inequitably.
Moreover, the guarantee of seeing your race represented positively in your daily experience, or of seeing your race reflected back at you by people in power (as with our teachers and administrators) is a core tenet of Peggy McIntosh’s iconic White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.