One day, Dr. Anne Gregory saw a line of African-American students sitting outside the principal’s office at a school where she worked. She took note of this evident racial trend and questioned the principal about it. The principal then chastised her and discouraged her from pursuing the issue, afraid that such comments would bring charges of racism against the school.
Today, about a decade later, Gregory is teaching psychology at Rutgers University and conducting research about the racial trend she had observed. She is dedicating her life’s work to confronting and defeating a long-standing belief that “The racial and gender discipline gap has persisted for decades and is worsening.” Gregory insisted that she will never stop pursuing the issue and that she intends to bring attention to the racial achievement gap and do everything she can to stop it. She spoke about her efforts and her research at Elizabethtown College’s Bowers Writers House on Monday, March 18.
Gregory often does in-depth research at schools to confront the persistent trend that African-Americans are more likely to be issued suspensions and expulsions than students of other racial groups.
Gregory stated that teachers and administrators are not always happy to be confronted about this; they can become offended when they hear that a racial achievement gap exists within their schools. However, according to Gregory, this is a confrontation that needs to be made. If nothing is said about it, nothing will be done.
Gregory said of a school she previously worked with, “The whole school was operating in a way that accepted the patterns of racial inequality. The system was perpetuating for decades and no one was doing anything.” Her passion for her continued research was evident in her later comment, “We really need to keep a critical lens. We can’t just get used to it.”
Gregory spoke on the normalization of failure— the concept in which a particular subset of students should be expected to become academic failures and troublemakers. In order to overcome this, Gregory conducts studies and interventions within schools in an attempt to make them better learning environments for students of all racial groups. “We’re working to make schools more engaging for all,” she said.
Gregory has found much success in her intervention; she developed a scoring system to be instituted within the classrooms she worked in, which rates emotional support, classroom organization and instructional support. Teachers were coached on how to score higher. In the end, her intervention was found to significantly impact the racial gap.
Contrary to what she would like, Gregory cannot begin implementing these interventions in every school that has a racial achievement gap; she is now dealing with the obstacle of school budgets. “Program coaches are paired with teachers for two years,” she said of her intervention model. “[The model is] expensive for schools, so now we’re creating a model without a coach.” She worries, however, that the impact will be lessened if she removes a piece of the intervention package. Still, she is pleased that she has created an intervention model that has worked in action.
In addition to sharing the details of her research, Gregory also discussed the process of sharing research with the public. She gave students a handout in which there was a practitioner, a first-person and a scholarly textbook-style perspective of the racial gap. “Which voice is most compelling to you as a reader?” she asked her audience.
Students were to decide which voice they preferred and why; this was her method of demonstrating that there are many different ways of sharing research results with the public and that some ways are much more interesting and digestible than others. “No matter what job you get into, writing compellingly is key,” Gregory said.
She later spoke of the different methods that can be used in collecting data: participatory action research and randomized control trials. After explaining these two concepts, she asked students which method they preferred as readers. She stressed the variations that can be found within scientific research and listed pros and cons associated with the different methods.
The lessons Gregory has learned from her life’s work can pertain to all of Etown’s students; Gregory was educated in a specific discipline and is currently utilizing her knowledge to create a better world. She entered her field with the desire to “affect change at a systems level,” and that is exactly what she is doing.