Counterpoint: How to close the learning gap, in one lesson

The closing of Minnesota learning gaps seems to have become a longstanding industry employing many people and costing millions of dollars ("Lack of progress on learning gaps," editorial, March 23). For years we have heard that only more money and better "home lives" for underachieving students will solve the problem.

In the 1970s, I taught human relations at St. Cloud State University. This was a required course for preparing and in-service teachers subtitled "Sexism and Racism in the Schools." In the classes, in our research and in discussion with Black consultants, we identified one element that would make a huge difference, but it has not been used and is rarely mentioned.

To introduce this element, I tell a personal story: A few years ago, I volunteered as a reading tutor at Hamline Elementary School. I applied a structured program to help a third-grade boy bring his reading up to grade level.

He was a bright, lively boy I will call Adam. We connected well and worked hard during the sessions, with him reading aloud to me from books he had chosen. I was patient, he came regularly and he made some progress. All this was what teachers do all the time: Apply what they know, use good materials, care about the students.

But we worked in a room with other tutor-student pairs at other tables. Nearby was a young Black man who was studying to be a teacher at Hamline University and getting experience in the reading program. He was tutoring a Black girl, whose legs would swing underneath her seat expressing her engagement with him as they talked and laughed at the books they read.

Adam's attention was drawn to the scene and he would look at the other tutor longingly and lose focus on the lines he was trying to read.

It was clear to me that Adam needed a relationship with a Black man to teach him — not just a white woman like me, caring as I was.

How would we do this? If we focus we can find ways. Talk to Black children about teaching, pay current Black teachers and preparing teachers to visit high schools and promote the teaching profession, set up appealing Future Teachers of America groups, actively recruit Black college majors into education, develop scholarship programs specifically for Black teachers, search them out to hire. Brainstorm ideas.

This obvious solution may be hard to talk about because white parents might fear having their children taught more often by Black teachers.

I can't think of a better argument than that to underscore the need Black kids have for Black teachers.