Long odds, and doing morel
By Allen A. Raymond, Publisher

It was 40 years ago when I joined Crowell-Collier & Macmillan (later to be called Macmillan, Inc.) as president of its newly-purchased subsidiary, Teachers Publishing Corporation.

My new company was publisher of about 250 supplementary handbooks and duplicating workbooks for teachers. It also published Grade Teacher, at that time America's oldest continuously published magazine for elementary school teachers.

Even though I was an engineer, my career, up to that point, had not been in engineering, but in consumer magazine publishing.

In hiring me, Macmillan had taken a major gamble. I was not an educator, and while I knew something about magazine publishing, I knew absolutely nothing about educational publishing.

Fortunately, there were people around – like Patricia Broderick – who could take me by the hand. And, thank goodness, they did.

One of my first moves was to ask my new co-workers questions about the readers of Grade Teacher. That's when I learned we didn't have many subscribers in the big cities.

The explanation - not from Pat Broderick, but from others – was usually rather vague, having to do with something like, "It's another world" or "It's different," whatever that meant. "Maybe," I suggested, "we should publish more information to help those teachers and kids?"

"Can't do it," some said. "If we publish pictures of the kids in ‘those places' – or of the teachers in 'those places' – we'll lose subscribers in the south."

What they were telling me, of course – and today I find it incredible – was that no magazine for teachers had ever published pictures of people of color. Not even once.

That changed, of course, and over the years we published lots of pictures in our magazine that people had told us not to publish. But how awful to think it was ever an issue.

Today, however, some say – with perhaps a slight note of criticism in their voices – that many of us in educational publishing have fallen into the bad habit of taking racial diversity as a "given."

That attitude is reflected in a comment I made in late 2001 to Patricia Broderick, as we left a school in Montana.

"I can't remember, Pat – were there any kids of color in that school? Or teachers?"

I really meant it – I hadn't noticed the racial composition of the school.

That's not good. As publishers of a magazine for elementary school teachers, we should not only be aware of the racial composition – the diversity, if you will – of any school's student body (and of its teachers, too), but we should strive, and I hope that we do, to matter-of-factly present that diversity, using all of the tools available to us.

The Educational Testing Service, summarizing a report it released in late 2003, said that "Poor, minority kids face long odds in education."

And, let's face it: for the most part that's what we're talking about. Poor, minority kids. Long odds. Mostly in the cities.

Over the years we at Teaching K-8 have visited schools in some horrible city neighborhoods, and some of the best teaching we've witnessed was in those schools.

We've got to do more of that. We will.

Allen Raymond is the Editor/Publisher for Teaching Pre K-8.

February, 2004, Vol.34, No.5