This week I had the incredible fortune of working with the teachers and students of Richmond-Burton Community High School in Richmond, IL. I facilitated two assemblies of my workshop, “The Wall,” and I led a student leadership training with an AMAZING group of young people. I also had the unique opportunity to lead a professional development session for teachers based on the feedback I had gotten from students about what could be improved in the school. The professional development was entitled, “Best Practice in Serving Diverse Student Populations.”
One of the things that I stressed in the PD is something I firmly believe about diversity in our schools: there is no social issue or form of diversity that will affect your classroom more than class. Class, indeed, is the great, oft-unspoken divider in our society. Though we like to think of our society as one built upon equality, the reality is that we live in a class-divided country (and world), and it has been that way since the U.S. was founded.
Take, for instance, the reality that approximately 13% of the American population is officially classified as living within 125% of poverty level, where a family of three earns approximately $17,163 per year (and those statistics come from 2008, a time in which the U.S. economy was doing much better than today). The statistics for child poverty are even more alarming.
Children Under 18 Living in Poverty, 2008
|Category||Number (in thousands)||Percent|
|All children under 18||15, 451||20.7|
|White only, non-Hispanic||4, 850||11.9|
SOURCE: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2009, Report P60, n. 238, Table B-2, pp. 62-7. Accessed here.