I Wanted to Save Black Students. Then I Became a Teacher

Reading Nikole Hannah-Jones’s reflection on her daughter’s education, I kept thinking about Emily Paige, the New York City schools administrator she references throughout the article. 

I recognized Paige’s efforts and her sacrifices to improve the education system from within. And while the internet uses Hannah-Jones’ article to giddily criticize teachers — especially Black ones —  it rarely asks what it costs us to do this work when we cannot give our Black students what they need. 

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I spent a decade teaching humanities to fourth through eighth graders in New Orleans. The teacher who walked into the classroom on my first day was fundamentally different from the one who left on my last. I hadn’t stopped caring, but I’d learned that people who say they care about the education of poor Black children are comfortable with leaving the teachers of those children to make impossible choices alone. 

Crippled System

Every year, I taught between 60 and 120 children. Like Paige, I struggled to focus my energy on all my students because their cognitive, academic, and social needs were immense. 

After graduating from Howard University in 2016, I came home to teach with a political science degree and a secondary education teaching certification. I wanted to bring history to life through the stories behind the stories, alternative narratives, and Socratic seminars. I wanted to pair the academic rigor I’d experienced in my education coursework with cultural affirmation and the freedom to teach differently than I’d been instructed as a child.

Instead, I entered a poor, mostly Black school system crippled by a revolving door of educators, administrators, and years of experimentation on Black children and their families. Students and parents had every reason to doubt my promises would change anything

I was determined to prove that mine would. Then I had to figure out how.

Hannah-Jones writes about her daughter’s frustration with teachers who seemed to give achieving students a fraction of the attention, care, and support they needed. I thought about the times I was that teacher — the one who overinvested in the small few, leaving the others to fend for themselves. It is painful to recognize yourself in a student’s disappointment when you know how hard you were trying.

‘Effort is Not Mastery’

Each year I worked harder, but effort is not mastery. I felt less certain that my teaching could give my students what they needed. That loss of confidence is difficult to admit when you are a Black teacher who entered the classroom determined to do right by Black children.

Every classroom decision carried more weight than it appeared to. How could I send a child out of my room for misbehaving when I knew exclusion could push them farther into the school-to-prison pipeline? But how could I ignore disruptive behavior that was interrupting everyone else’s learning?

For a while, I assigned homework because my students needed more time with the material I taught in class. Then I had to confront the truth. Children who struggled to take in lessons at school went home with even less support to understand it there. I could see the academic gap between the achievers and the underachievers widening, even as I tried everything: interventions, combined classes, classroom support, engaging lessons, and incentives.

I earned my master’s degree in Teaching and Educational Leadership, hoping to find answers to the questions that kept me up all night. Instead, I learned about the “invisible tax”: shorthand for the extra demands placed on Black educators who care so deeply about Black students they go above and beyond the job requirements to make sure they don’t fail.

For me, the invisible tax was also the knowledge I carried about an unequal school system into every decision. 

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I pushed back when a charter school leader wanted to punish students for wearing hoodies in the building. I was cited after reporting “creative spelling” as racially inequitable. I refused to sign off on an oppositional defiant disorder diagnosis for a student. 

Each time, I protected a child from a decision I believed could do harm. Then I had to return to my classroom and teach.

Sometimes Black teachers’ commitment to Black children is dismissed as “saviorism.” I blanch at the word because I knew how few people, Black or white, felt responsible for my students. I looked at those children and saw my siblings and cousins. I see them now the same way I see my 4-year-old daughter, knowing that Black children need people willing to fight for them—not out of paternalism, but out of a sense of community.

Work Magic, Stay Humble

Yet society places a heavy burden on teachers, expecting us to save children from illiteracy, poverty, and helplessness. We’re supposed to work magic with what little we have and stay humble while doing it.

I missed vacations and family events because they conflicted with the school calendar. I lived with four roommates my first year because my pay was so low I could not afford my own place. When a student or their caregiver died, I grieved along with their friends and loved ones. And I kept teaching even as I realized the promise I’d made to parents, children, and myself—that one good teacher could be enough—was not true.

By the end of that decade, I understood how the promise that brought me into the classroom let everyone else off the hook. Surely a child will encounter at least ONE teacher who can make the difference. Surely someone else will take care of it.

Aabiana, the other little girl in Hannah-Jones’s story, proves it doesn’t; neither does Hannah-Jones’s daughter, Nayja. Both children show that years of compounded educational neglect corrodes the self-esteem and confidence of both teacher and student—a fundamental requirement for engaging with schooling.

I still believe a teacher can change a child’s life. But I am not a savior. I can work until my eyes are tired and I am burned out, but the intractable structural dysfunction of low-performing, mostly Black public schools means the work may not matter much at all.

The teacher I wanted to be could not do it alone; neither can the teachers who are there now. Black children deserve our deepest care, and they deserve more than the think pieces blaming them for their poor education.

They deserve a country that cares about their success, and that doesn’t depend on one teacher, one administrator, and one parent to do it themselves. 

Julienne Louis-Anderson is a former educator and OpEd Fellow who writes about the intersection of culture and politics with education and human development. You can find her on all social media platforms @juliennelouisanderson.