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Vahram Muradyan T he first day of my first year of teaching began with a bundle of nerves and a half-eaten honey bun. At 5:30 a.m., I drove from the cheap apartment I shared with five roommates to the high school in Prince George’s County, Maryland, where, 22 years old and just a year out of college, I’d been hired to teach English. My trunk was full of colorful posters, flip charts, and laminated quotes from my favorite writers. I was hoping to make my stuffy, windowless classroom a more inviting space for my students. As I drove, I practiced how I would present myself, searching for the sort of first impression that would make me seem authoritative yet approachable. Could I be the “cool” teacher, inviting students to share what was happening in their lives, but also a figure of authority? Could I be empathetic, sensitive to the difficulties transpiring in their lives, yet not let such circumstances create a spiral of low expectations? Could I emphasize the importance of doing we...

Danielle Del Plato T he litany of tragedies and inconveniences visited upon Americans by COVID-19 is long, but one of the more pronounced sources of misery for parents has been pandemic schooling. The logistical gymnastics necessary to balance work and school when all the crucial resources—time, physical space, internet bandwidth, emotional reserves—are limited have pushed many to the point of despair. Pandemic school is clearly not working well, especially for younger children—and it’s all but impossible for the 20 percent of American students who lack access to the technology needed for remote learning. But what parents are coming to understand about their kids’ education—glimpsed through Zoom windows and “asynchronous” classwork—is that school was not always working so great before COVID-19 either. Like a tsunami that pulls away from the coast, leaving an exposed stretch of land, the pandemic has revealed long-standing inattention to children’s developmental needs—needs as basi...

Editor’s Note: In 1988, a teacher most commonly had 15 years of experience. In recent years, that number is closer to just three years leading a classroom. The “On Teaching” series focuses on the wisdom of veteran teachers. For the past 26 years, Chuck Yarborough, the U.S. and African American history teacher at the Mississippi School of Mathematics and Science in Columbus, has been surveying his students on how American history is taught. Students come from all over the state to spend their last two years of high school at this diverse public boarding school, and he wants to know what they’ve learned by the time they get there. The feedback from more than 1,400 students over the years has been consistent. In each class of about 18 students, an average of five come in with some basic knowledge of the Civil War, but very few have studied the role that slavery played in it—or the connections between the war, white supremacy, Jim Crow laws, and how this legacy continues to uphold ra...

Editor’s Note: In 1988, a teacher most commonly had 15 years of experience. In recent years, that number is closer to just three years leading a classroom. The “On Teaching” series focuses on the wisdom of veteran teachers. One of this year’s largest youth-led Black Lives Matter protests took place on June 3 in front of Mission High School in San Francisco , where Robert Roth taught U.S. History and Ethnic Studies from 2005 until he retired in 2018. Roth was in the crowd, listening to teenage speakers who were urging white people like himself—including white educators, who make up 79 percent of the U.S. teaching force—to step up as allies in the fight for racial justice. It was a message that Roth has been attuned to for a long time. In 1964, when Roth was himself a teenager, he joined what became the nation’s largest anti-school-segregation boycott in New York City. As a student at Columbia University in 1968, he was a key part of one of the largest college anti-war and anti-r...

Each installment of The Friendship Files features a conversation between The Atlantic ’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship. This week she talks with two elementary-school teachers, both in their 16th year of teaching. They have been friends since the beginning of their careers, but they’ve never faced a school year like this one. They discuss how their relationship built their confidence as educators, the toll that pandemic schooling is taking on students, and how they’re supporting each other, so they can in turn support the kids. The Friends: Trevor Ferguson , 38, a fourth-grade math and science teacher who lives in Tampa, Florida. Amy Gabriel , 39, a fifth-grade math and science teacher who lives in Tampa. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Julie Beck: You’ve been friends for most of your teaching careers at this point, right? Trevor Ferguson: We’ve been close ever since we met, during ...

In 1954, the Supreme Court decided that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional—but it was thousands of children who actually desegregated America’s classrooms. The task that fell to them was a brutal one. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education , vicious legal and political battles broke out; town by town, Black parents tried to send their children to white schools, and white parents—and often their children, too—tried to keep those Black kids out. They tried everything: bomb threats, beatings, protests. They physically blocked entrances to schools, vandalized lockers, threw rocks, taunted and jeered. Often, the efforts of white parents worked: Thousands upon thousands of Black kids were barred from the schools that were rightfully theirs to attend. But eventually, in different places at different times, Black parents won. And that meant that their kids had to walk or take the bus to a school that had tried to keep them out. And then they had to walk in the doo...

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth story in The Firsts , a five-part series about the children who desegregated America’s schools. I t was February 23, 1966, and Frederick K. Brewington had to walk less than a mile to get to school. He and his mom had mapped the routes: He would cross the street and enter the band of trees, tramping over the rocks in the creek. He would emerge from the trees to Bob Whelan Field, then trek across Ocean Avenue, the thoroughfare that cut the district in half. The side streets would carry him from there to Lindner Place Elementary. It was the first day of court-ordered desegregation in the Malverne School District on Long Island, New York, more than a decade after the Brown v. Board of Education decision ordered the integration of the nation’s schools. Black people in the area would often say theirs was a city “an ocean apart.” White Americans have long used railroads, highways, and bridges as dividing lines, and Ocean Avenue, Malverne’s dividing line...

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth story in The Firsts , a five-part series about the children who desegregated America’s schools. M illicent Brown could only be honest. It was the summer of 1960, and she was standing in front of the school board in Charleston County, South Carolina. She was preparing to enter the seventh grade. The row of men—all white—studied her as they lobbed loaded questions her way. “Don’t you like your teachers?” one asked. “Don’t you like your friends?” asked another. The issue that ultimately lay beneath these questions was simple: Why did a Black child want to attend a white school? Sixty years later, Brown can remember how frustrated the interrogation made her. “How dare they try to make me speak ill of my Black community?” she says. But she didn’t bristle. “Oh, I love my teachers, and I love my friends, it’s not that at all,” she remembers saying. “It’s just that I know there are things and facilities that are made available to other schools that we do...