Letters to a Young Teacher

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).