In a controversial move, Tennessee recently passed a bill allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons into classrooms. While intended to enhance school safety, this policy introduces serious risks.
The current education system continues to struggle with a troubling disconnect: 84 percent of Tennessee’s teachers and 62 percent of its students are white. Research shows that racial bias can influence a teacher’s expectations and interactions with students. A study from the Yale Child Study Center found that teachers are more likely to expect academic success from students whose racial backgrounds match their own and are less forgiving of perceived misbehavior by Black students.
With firearms allowed into the classroom, there is a life-threatening risk that biases will lead to murderous misunderstandings or reactions. There is a better solution.
One root of this threat is that Black children are often perceived as older and less innocent than they are. Some research has shown that Black children as young as 5 are consistently viewed as more adult-like and less innocent than their white peers. This misperception often leads to Black kids receiving harsher discipline and less empathy, even in their formative years. This “adultification” of Black children is particularly alarming in the context of armed educators.
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We all harbor both implicit and explicit biases. The writer Malcolm Gladwell explains that it takes less than a nanosecond for our brains to ascribe sociocultural meaning to identities. The presence of firearms will amplify the consequences of split-second decisions influenced by bias.
U.S. Department of Education data from the 2020-21 school year provides a stark illustration: Black boys, who represented only 9 percent of preschool enrollment, accounted for 23 percent of those receiving one or more out-of-school suspensions. Moreover, in higher grades, Black students are disproportionately referred to law enforcement and report higher incidents of bullying and harassment.
Tennessee’s history is steeped in such bias. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the state strongly enforced Jim Crow laws and stark divisions in schooling for Black and white children. Though Tennessee was the first state to initiate school desegregation, Black students in Tennessee still experience disparate educational outcomes.
The remnants of Tennessee’s past continue to influence societal attitudes and interactions within the state, creating a landscape where implicit and explicit racial biases are not just relics of history, but active elements of everyday life.
Failing to confront and address these enduring cultural habits of mind — specifically within the education system — sets the stage for potential tragedy. Given Tennessee’s fraught history with race, the likelihood of misunderstandings or snap judgments based on ingrained stereotypes is alarmingly high.
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Cultural humility offers a vital alternative. It emphasizes understanding your own cultural identity and biases, and encourages educators to commit to ongoing self-evaluation and self-critique to address power imbalances and enhance teachers’ interactions with students from different backgrounds. In doing so, it seeks to promote a learning environment that respects and integrates the cultural perspectives of all students.
If we consider that in a majority of documented cases of school violence the perpetrators were current or former students of the schools, fostering environments of understanding and respect could potentially prevent tragedies.
The intention behind Tennessee’s new law might be to protect students, but the real protection lies in preparing teachers to understand and bridge cultural divides.
Cultural humility training offers a path forward. For Black children, it’s not just a matter of educational equity — it’s a matter of safety and justice, life and death.
In a society that truly values the safety of all its children, the answer isn’t more guns — it’s humility.
June Cara Christian is Public Voices fellow on Racial Justice in Early Childhood with the OpEd Project in partnership with the National Black Child Development Institute.
This story about teachers and concealed weapons was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up forHechinger’s newsletter.
Letting teachers carry guns is crazy. Look up the data on police force accuracy, when shooting at someone, who has gun. Police accuracy at a distance of 10-20 feet is pitiful and these are trained personnel. You sure don’t want a teacher blazing away, hitting everyone but the attacker.