The typical American classroom is more diverse than ever. The social issues that divide communities play out in learning environments suddenly fraught with, and occasionally governed by, politics. We – students and educators – bring our fears, resentments and unrecognized biases into a relationship where a failure to communicate too often determines student outcomes. Yes, we are all capable of looking out over a sea of desks and knowing that the students at those desks now come in a wider variety of colors. We recognize the hijab or yarmulke or dangling crucifix as identifiers of faith. We may know the demographics of where we teach as far as its economy, politics and history.

In time, we may know which students are gay, which students are bullied or hungry or wearing gang colors or fearful of immigration authorities.

If and when an educator has that all sorted, there comes a desire to not offend and the difficult task of matching cultural relevance to curriculum.

Some of these difficulties are new. Some are as old as “Huck” and “Jim.” Almost since its publication 20 years after the end of the Civil War, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” recognized as canonical in American literature, has been under attack.

It was reviled immediately for its coarseness and alternately revered for its honesty and fidelity to the vernacular of the time.

To her, converting sensibilities into actual tools for evaluating curriculum is an important part of the process.

“Our district has created what we call a “culturally relevant rubric” that we’re constantly tweaking and re-tweaking in partnership with organizations that specialize in looking at equity through an equity lens,” Stubblefield said. “We are really hoping to create tools and resources for teachers to examine how we make decisions.” 1

Part of that process allows parents of students to opt out of certain material on behalf of their children.

“Our hope is to get to the point where we can offer student options. While we’re not there by any means, we want options for students so that they can hear and value one another’s perspectives … not to bend someone to believe as you do but to have civil discourse around it,” she said.

It is not only the students who need to value different perspectives. The National Education Association (NEA) has a C.A.R.E. program (Culture, Abilities, Resilience, Effort) designed as a strategy for closing achievement gaps. The strategy is available at www.nea.org and it is a comprehensive approach to elevating all student performance.

The C.A.R.E. initiative recognizes achievement gaps among students by race, poverty and other differentiating factors. It also asks educators for some thoughtful examination.

Part of the introduction asks educators to “Reflect upon the ways you think about your students and the causes of low student achievement. How can we focus more on factors within the system, rather than within children, that create barriers to effective schooling for poor and/or culturally and linguistically diverse students?”

The need here may not just be the adoption of more sensitive curriculum. Team names, particularly those that allude to Native Americans, have been the subject of student protests recently. It is not difficult to imagine the discomfort and essential disconnect of a Native American student attending a game, or trying out for a team, which ridicules his or her history.

A careful examination at any school would also include activities and events that are longstanding, but inappropriate to today’s student body like the reenactment of a “Land Grab” where students once rushed across a field to appropriate lands once belonging to Native Americans.

Suppose, too, that the discomfort comes from a school name engraved in granite over the front door.

Following events in Charlottesville, Virginia last summer, considerable media interest was devoted to the tearing down of statuary honoring Civil War generals. In Manassas, Virginia, a battle was begun to rename Stonewall Jackson high school, a school whose student body is 17 percent African-American, 19 percent white and more than 50 percent Hispanic. In a Reuters story, the Southern Poverty Law Center said it knew of at least 100 such American schools named for Confederate generals.

Imagine you are an African-American student passing under an inscription devoted to Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Civil War general and one of the initial leaders of the Ku Klux Klan. Would any educator attempt at sensitivity allay that discomfort?

The counterargument to that discomfort, of course, is that changing those names does a disservice to history, costs scarce resources and that everyone needs to “get over it.”