The plans didn’t allow for the honorees to speak, however. The college said it had dropped the usual time for speeches to allow everyone to “network.” And that bothered Quinn, who had something important to say. Quinn says students and faculty in the College of Education had asked her if she’d use her moment in the spotlight to call attention to problems in the college’s pioneering Urban Education program, the four-year undergraduate major for elementary school teachers.
The Urban Education program has a primary goal of recruiting students who’ve come through city schools and preparing them to go back into those schools as highly qualified teachers and inspiring role models. In Chicago, that means more Latinx and black teachers and especially more males of color. But a UIC group calling itself the Decolonize Education Coalition says the college is doing the opposite: pushing students of color, especially black students, out of the Urban Education program.
When she (Quinn) learned that she’d be effectively gagged at the ceremony honoring her, she decided the best way to bring attention to these issues would be to decline the honor. “Accepting the award and participating in related events would be an implicit endorsement of the COE, and based on the evidence offered by current students, that validation is not warranted,” she wrote in a “thank you, but no thank you” open letter.
“The COE seems to have abandoned its commitment to the preparation of Black and other teachers of color,” Quinn noted, citing low numbers admitted and retained, a lack of institutional support to get them through licensure, and what she called a “devastating” strategy of “bait-and-switch” into a “non-certification undergraduate program with no clear employment pathway.”
The letter got attention. In an interview last week, College of Education dean Alfred Tatum told me he recently reversed himself on what Quinn called “conditional acceptance,” bowing to “pushback” from his faculty and restoring a longer time frame for students trying to meet the state requirements.
“It is dismal, the number of African-American teachers we are recruiting and graduating annually,” Tatum says. But, he adds, it’s not a problem unique to UIC. Tatum says the shrinking proportion of black teachers and especially a near absence of black men in elementary education is a national dilemma.
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