Letters to a Young Teacher

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2007

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Chapters 9-10

Chapters 11-12

Chapter 13-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 3 Summary: “Reaching Out to Get to Know the Parents of Our Children”

Kozol’s Halloween visit to Francesca’s classroom included meeting some of the children’s parents. He sympathizes with Francesca about new teachers rarely receiving good advice about building relationships with the parents of students, a something made more difficult when the school has a structural racial imbalance, such as a predominantly white faculty overseeing a mostly Black and Hispanic student body.

Often, teachers give up on uncooperative parents too soon; conversely, parents are often made to feel uncomfortable by school administrators, who subtly disrespect parents and look down on them for things like “ghetto talk” (23). Moreover, problems like high teacher turnover make parent/teacher meetings useless and uninviting, resulting in parental nonattendance.

When he started teaching, Kozol too believed that parents were to blame for many student problems, until one of his Black female colleagues pointed out how discouraged some parents were made to feel about visiting the campus to have a pointless meeting with yet another temporary teacher who would soon be gone.

After this shift in perspective, Kozol had success getting to know parents by visiting them at their homes in the evenings. However, his Roxbury school principal discouraged him from continuing this practice—it was a breach in “professional behavior” (29). Many teachers are given the same advice by school administrators, but Kozol argues that “crossing lines between two worlds of race and social standing” (29) through activities like home visits is good for the students.

Kozol praises Francesca’s teaching sense; he notes that parents are already warming to her, protectively turning their gaze to her when the students fumbled their prepared song. Kozol wishes that students in education programs could see classrooms like Francesca’s to see how a good teacher “is given the reward of loyalty and trust by those whom she has trusted with the knowledge of the human being she really is” (31).

Chapter 4 Summary: “Teaching the Young, but Learning from the Old (A Cautionary Letter)”

Francesca asks Kozol how he made it through his difficult first year of teaching in Roxbury. He answers that good relationships with parents and guidance from an older colleague helped tremendously.

Older teachers are a great resource for new teachers, though they are often ignored by cliques of young teachers. Francesca unintentionally participated in this dynamic, which in her case was heightened by the fact that most of the older teachers were Black, while the young ones were white. This added a racial dimension to veterans feeling “they were being viewed with disrespect and generational hostility” which created “a covert sense of warfare between young and old, and white and black, within the precincts of one building” (37-38).

Impatient young teachers sometimes go on to work at private charter schools, but Kozol is glad that Francesca chose to teach in the public system instead. Kozol himself was tempted to find a career in private education but decided to stay in the public system. The best-functioning public schools can have enormous effects on students: During Kozol’s Roxbury teaching days, some inner-city children “as part of an interdistrict integration program” (40) attended top-tier schools outside Boston. These children thrived in the new environment.

Kozol stresses that although some older teachers probably should be replaced, it would be a loss to both the children and the young teachers to lose all such valuable resources—something that often happens for the crude money-saving reason that younger teachers can typically be paid less.

Chapters 3-4 Analysis

Kozol pursues two threads about relational dynamics in these chapters, arguing that each ostensible conflict can be resolved though better perspective-taking.

What appears to be parental disengagement from children’s education is actually due to structural problems in the public school system. Parents who are least involved are often the most discouraged from attending school campuses by a school administration with regressive views, picking up on the unspoken bias that Black parents have “culturally deficient values” (26). Additionally, issues like high staff turnover show parents that getting invested in parent/teacher meetings or building relationships with any individual educator is a waste of time. Kozol believes the solution is empathy, cultural sensitivity, and the refusal to accept biased prejudgment: His experience shows that, for instance, meeting with parents on their own turf was so successful that it debunks the theory that minority parents are uninterested in the success of their children.

Similar shifts in perspective and bias are necessary to ensure that older veteran educators retain their important role as repositories of organizational knowledge. The older teachers in the public school system Kozol and Francesca are majority Black, while the new generation of teachers is majority white. When the white teachers form cliques that exclude their older colleagues, they further the intergenerational and racial divides within the teaching staff, with the older teachers feeling disrespected. Kozol encourages young teachers to be willing to learn from the older teachers, who have a wealth of practical experience that can’t be absorbed through expert workshops.