columnist for The Boston Globe, Pappano has written about education for The New York Times, The Hechinger Report, Harvard Education Letter, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor, among other publications. She is the author or co-author of three books, The Connection Gap: Why Americans Feel So Alone, Playing with the Boys: Why Separate is Not Equal in Sports, and Inside School Turnarounds.
Pappano applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education, and reported the following:
Page 99 of School Moms puts us right in Peggy McIntosh’s home overlooking the Charles River in Waltham and captures what made her famous: Examples of the “unearned assets” she described in her well-known and regarded essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” That essay — and McIntosh’s use of “white privilege” — has years after she framed it, been misunderstood and weaponized by the far-right.Visit Laura Pappano's website.
McIntosh describes that just as she noticed that some people faced disadvantages because of skin color, she saw advantages that she observed were the result of being white (like: if she is pulled over by a police officer it is not because of her skin color). She also on page 99 delves into how classrooms operate, including that, “a class ‘is a mix of students;’ if the teacher has good relationship skills, it enables discussions ‘in which different students say different things about what they think and feel—and nobody wins. A teacher who is companionable to the students often says, ‘Let’s toss some ideas around…’ which, she says, “is part of the aim of education.”
That sense of comfort and trust that educators create is essential to learning. The Page 99 Test is not perfect, but it does reveal a key point of the book: That attacks on public education are coming from people who don’t understand how schools and classrooms actually work. In School Moms, I connect the dots and get underneath the outrage by breaking down, for example, what Social Emotional Learning is, and how and why it came to be. (No, it does not replace math, it makes students able to focus on the math instead of who stole the glitter pen).
McIntosh and the dive into “white privilege” are at the heart of the chapter “How Weaponizing CRT Disrupts Learning.” It details the time I spent with Matthew Hawn in Sullivan County, TN who was fired for teaching about “white privilege” in his 11th grade Contemporary Issues class. It digs into how a popular Black principal in Texas was fired for no reason other than someone accusing him in a public meeting of “the implementation of critical race theory.”
It also details how the far-right activist Christopher Rufo turned “Critical Race Theory” from a graduate school framework to analyze complexities and contradictions within the law, to “a brand category.” On Twitter, Rufo explained: “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in a newspaper and immediately think ‘Critical Race Theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” Which he did — much to our collective detriment.
--Marshal Zeringue
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