By Alyssa Allemand
Teachers cannot force students to learn, but they can allow them to learn, according to Ali Muldrow, executive co-director of GSAFE, an organization to help LGBTQ+ students in the Madison school district.
For teachers, that may mean giving up authority in the classroom, she said. “I am no longer the most important person in the classroom if consent culture is on the table,” she said.
Consent culture in the classroom is when teachers and students share power.
Through Muldrow’s position as co-director of GSAFE and her campaign efforts, she said she is always imagining “what is possible when schools are welcoming and inclusive and celebratory of all students.”
Muldrow, who is running for the Madison Metropolitan School District Board (MMSD), was on the Edgewood College campus March 6 at the invitation of Cabell Gathman, lecturer and co-director of Women’s and Gender Studies.
“I usually have Ali come and talk, as she did this semester, when we get to the topic of family, school, and community since she has both personal and professional experience with the Madison public schools,” said Gathman. Muldrow attended East High School.
Introducing the ‘achievement gap’
Muldrow said there is achievement gap in Madison schools. “We produce some of the best outcomes in the country for our white students,” Muldrow said, referring to levels of college readiness and ACT scores. “We produce the exact opposite for black and brown children,” she said.
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Black students in Madison had a 38 percent graduation rate when Muldrow finished high school in 2005. She said this was not a well-known statistic.
Muldrow, who attended East High School, said as a black student she was treated differently from her white peers.
“What I did know,” Muldrow said, “was that there were a series of things that had happened over the course of my education that had put me at a disadvantage in comparison to my peers, and those things are not going to be captured in data.”
Incidents hinder education
Muldrow said several incidents hindered her education.
“Difference was made wrong over and over and over again throughout my education,” she said. “I was made wrong for being different.”
In kindergarten, Muldrow’s teacher asked students to spell every word they knew. Muldrow wrote down the names of her siblings.
“My teacher came over and did not acknowledge any word I spelled correctly,” she said. However, the teacher did tell Muldrow that she spelled her brother’s name wrong.
Muldrow responded by telling her teacher, “That is how you spell my brother’s name. Call my mom.” And so she did.
After the phone call, the teacher said to Muldrow, “I am so sorry. Nobody in your whole family knows how to spell.”
Muldrow also said she had headaches as a child that affected her reading ability. Because of her difficulty reading, she was often separated from the rest of the class into a smaller group of struggling students.
“It was reinforced that I was slow,” Muldrow said.
One day, Muldrow had such a bad headache that she vomited at school. When her teacher brought her to the office, she said, “I think Ali’s mom braids her hair too tight.”
“I was very lucky because there was a black woman working as the secretary,” Muldrow said.
The secretary said Muldrow’s hair was not the problem and encouraged her to tell the nurse about her headaches.
It turned out that Muldrow’s eyesight was very poor, and she got glasses. Wearing them made her nervous, though, because while they made her appear smart, she did not feel smart.
“That was the tremendous impact of having it reinforced to me over and over that I wasn’t a good learner, that I wasn’t a good student, and that I didn’t work hard enough,” Muldrow said.
Civil disobedience shapes
Muldrow said there is something interesting happening in education. “Civil disobedience as education has shaped the last decade of education,” she said.
For example, one cold, Monday evening, there was a school board meeting for MMSD. The meeting was moved to a private location rather than a public forum in order “to avoid civil disruption.”
“They were outraged because an 11-year-old black girl had been harmed by an adult at school,” Muldrow said. “Because our schools are responding to gun violence by putting metal detectors in our schools, because having police in schools has resulted in black students being six times more likely to be arrested than anyone else.”
Full circle
Muldrow said the achievement gap is racist.
“We agree racism is wrong when we’re calling it racism, and that’s why we have the term ‘achievement gap,’” she said. “So why is it that when I walk into a classroom, and you get taught to read and I get taught that I’m bad, we call that the achievement gap?”
Muldrow’s goal in her work as an educator is to “[empower] young people with the skills they need to achieve their dreams, not [her] dreams for them.”
Gathman said she invited Muldrow to speak because she wanted “students to understand that school systems are experienced differently by different students” and to “think about how schools could be structured in ways that would better allow for children and students to have autonomy.”
Along with Gathman’s LGBTQ+ Studies course, Professor Ashley Byock’s English 377 class – Gender, Race, and Class in the British Empire – attended.
“I think that it is vital for students to understand that the structures of power and oppression that we look at in our course on European imperialism are a significant prologue to the world we inhabit today,” Byock said to explain why she brought her students to Muldrow’s visit.
“We cannot talk about consent without understanding how the right and capacity to say ‘no’ [is] circumscribed in different ways depending on who you are. That is a question of race, of gender, and of class, among other things,” Byock said.
“That is also why we need to think not just in terms of oppression and abuse, but also in terms of the crucial work of fostering a culture of consent as Muldrow set out for us.”
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