Journal of a Black Teacher

"...If we treated education the way we treat sports, failing leaders wouldn't survive a season. Coaches who can't win get fired. Players who don't produce get pushed harder to improve. But in education, the most important playing field of all, we tolerate failure year in and year out."  By Don Allen, Journal of A Black Teacher  Walk into most Twin Cities schools today, and you'll see gleaming new lockers, polished hallways, and floors freshly waxed. They gleam like museum pieces of what "progress" is supposed to look like. This also depends on the location of the school. I had a friend who said his classroom was mopped twice in the 2024-2025 school year. His building served African American students in one of Minneapolis’ poorest neighborhoods. But scratch below the surface and you'll find that too many children still cannot read at grade level, do basic mathematical calculations, or pass science benchmarks. The truth is unavoidable: children di...

No one should be treated differently but addressing race and inequitable education is toxic; but in Minnesota, spending more than $600 million a year on closing the achievement gap with ZERO successes in any district is considered a win?   By Don Allen, M.A. Ed./MAT - Journal of A Black Teacher©  2022 All Rights Reserved (Editorial Opinion - Not Written for the Guilty or Weak Minded) Besides everything else, W.E.B. Du Bois must have also been a fortune teller back in the day.  In all of his authored books, Du Bois sternly warns Black folks in the United States about our Black and Brown children being used as “doormats to be spit and tramped upon and lied to by ignorant social climbers.” Today, the proverbial ‘doormats’ and ‘spit’ come in the form of the generational minimal proficiencies for Black and Brown children born in the United States, and the phenomenon has spread quickly to our new kids - some Somali, Latin, and Asian children whose families exited a bad sit...