Week-Long Service Experience, Sharing Place Thrift Shop

photo taken from Little Sisters of Assumption website

Reflections by volunteer, Adrienne C., age 23.

Adrienne just completed her Masters in Education at Boston College, where she also received a B.A. in Education and Spanish. She will be teaching Spanish at a junior high in a suburb of Boston this fall.

Sharing Place Thrift Shop at Little Sisters of the Assumption
East Harlem, NY
June 7-10

I spent five years learning about culturally-responsive teaching, biases that exist in standardized testing, and why “minority students” and “underprepared students” are quickly becoming one in the same, but it took volunteering in the thrift shop for me to understand, in part, why the substantial achievement gap between white and nonwhite students exists in this country. As I sorted through piles of children’s books to prepare to help the clients better, I saw some of my favorites from childhood like Chika, Chika, Boom, Boom, Strega Nona, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Stellaluna, and Corduroy. As I picked up some of these classic titles and conversed with Sabrina, I slowly realized that not every child residing in the United States today received the same literature-rich upbringing I did. These titles, and others, which comprise considerable cultural capital in American society, were both available and well-known to me. My mother always took us to the library, and I had a plethora of books to choose from growing up. This picture is a far cry from the lives that many children who enter the doors of Little Sisters of the Assumption on 115th Street lead. It is difficult to take your child to the library if you’re a single parent and work three jobs to make ends meet. Bed bugs, an abusive partner, and cut off utilities are much more important than sitting down to read at night with your child. Teaching phonics, vocabulary development, and reading comprehension is a formidable challenge when the book is published in a language you don’t understand.

The creators of most standardized tests in this country, who more or less hold the keys to the success of America’s youth, do not realize these realities. Or, if they do, they choose to ignore them. All students in a specific state are held to the same standards when they are required to take the state exams to pass high school, and most students wishing to gain access to an institution of higher learning in the United States must take a standardized test. The problem is, students are not standardized, so why should the tool designed to assess them be? To be blunt, students raised in East Harlem with the aforementioned issues have little to no chance of performing as well as me on standardized tests. Period. That may sound harsh, but the truth isn’t always tidy and clean like we want it to be. Expecting the same results from both groups-- the “haves and the have-nots”-- is like expecting two sprinters to finish the 100-meter dash at the same time when one starts 20 meters behind the other. These twenty meters are the endless Clifford, Dr. Seuss, and Boxcar Children books I read or were read to me in my childhood-- it’s pretty damn hard to match “success” as defined by the white, male, straight, English-speaking world when you had no opportunity whatsoever to mitigate your deficit.