A sincere lack of belief in students of color and students who are linguistically diverse is often the most salient factor in perpetuating the opportunity gaps the same, aforementioned students suffer. That’s a hard pill to swallow when often we want to blame every other factor under the sun for schools’ low accountability scores.  These factors that educators usually hide behind range from blaming parents for not providing the same amount of time reading to their kids as their higher income counterparts to using their Emergent Bilingual status as a straw man to assuming that students of color all have trauma that prevent them from learning. However, according to Hammond (2015), the most salient reasons we do not close the opportunity gap for students who are culturally and linguistically diverse are because we often over-scaffold, provide low-levels of rigor, and take away opportunities from students to experience productive struggle (Oakes, 2005). 

Zaretta Hammond (2015) divides students into two groups whom she calls independent and dependent learners.  Independent learners know how to learn.  They use a variety of strategies when they encounter new challenges or hit roadblocks.  They do not need to use scaffolds every time they have a new task.  They also have the ability to create their own supports such as outlines and graphic organizers.  On the other hand, dependent learners have a sense of learned helplessness.  They may ask the teacher to “simplify the text” instead of grappling with complex texts on their own, or they may quickly give into frustration.  They are unable to complete tasks without teacher-provided supports and scaffolds. And they do not understand the concept of productive struggle. 

Productive struggle is the challenge students face when the work is slightly difficult but with effort, achievable. Productive struggle has been proven to increase both brainpower and learning (Ritchhart, 2002).  By giving away answers, as is often done for students of color and for Emergent Bilingual students, teachers are ensuring that their students do not grow cognitively.  By keeping the rigor low, teachers are ensuring that their students do not learn how to synthesize and analyze information or learn how to work at higher levels of depths of knowledge without teacher support.  This in turn reduces future economic opportunities for our students because by not teaching our students to think, we are producing factory workers instead of the deep thinkers the digital world requires.

According to Zaretta Hammond (2015), students enter the system as dependent learners, and our job as educators is to turn them into independent learners.  Unfortunately, according to Hammond, students who are Emergent Bilinguals, low income, and/or of color tend to receive less challenging, redundant instruction supported with an over abundance of scaffolds. This type of instruction prevents students from becoming the independent learners we want them to be.

I, however, question this assumption that students begin their educational careers as dependent learners.  When students enter school, I believe that they are already independent learners.  Just take a look at babies, regardless of race, language, or socioeconomic status, as they learn to walk and talk.  They are ready to grapple with the challenges required.  They fall and get back up.  They make mistakes in their speech, self-correct, and develop language. They do not easily give up. Somehow, however, by not pushing our students cognitively, I would argue that we turn our students into dependent learners.  We teach them how to engage in learned helplessness. In my own experience, I can think of one multilingual, middle school student in particular whom I personally taught who was reading on her own several years above grade level.  A year with the next grade-level teachers, and the child began asking for scaffolds and supports that she had never needed. Water always follows the path of least resistance and so do humans. By teaching the child to depend upon supports that she did not need, the child found an easier path and effectively went from being an independent learner to becoming a dependent learner.  

To clarify, of course, this is not to say that students should never be given scaffolds or supports to access grade-level texts and standards. For instance, Emergent Bilinguals often need scaffolds to be able to access grade-level, English instruction; however, the scaffolds must be just enough so that students are still engaged in productive struggle.  Even when students are using teacher-given scaffolds, they must still be grappling with cognitive challenges.  If all students are receiving a Goldilocks-approved amount of scaffolding, students who are of foundational proficiency in the language of instruction will not be receiving the same supports as those who are transitional or proficient, and scaffolds will be removed as students cognitively and/or linguistically grow so that all students are always engaged in productive struggle, however that may look at the moment. 

So if indeed we want to promote anti-racist classrooms and close the opportunity gap for our students of color and for our Emergent Bilingual students, we need to provide students opportunities to productively struggle.  We need to push them cognitively, ask higher order questions, provide novel challenges, and believe that they can make it.  We need to offer them grade-level instruction with just enough scaffolding that they are still grappling with the material, and we need to take away the scaffolds when they no longer need them.  And we need to differentiate the scaffolds we provide for the students who are in front of us.  

Anything short of this, and we are not living up to what our students rightfully deserve from us.