Student teaching is supposed to be a time of learning. You grow, you stumble, you watch master teachers and try to become one yourself. But at MLK Middle School, I wasn’t just learning to teach. I was learning to survive in a system designed to make students like mine feel less than.

I was placed in a self-contained classroom. Eleven students, all with IEPs. Our own little island. No bells, no locker drama, no cafeteria noise. Just us—and a system that was all too comfortable with keeping our classroom doors shut.

There was a quiet but obvious hierarchy in the special education world at MLK. ADHD students sat at the top. Teachers joked they were just “too energetic.” They were the ones you’d see pushed into inclusion classrooms, expected to “keep up” with general ed as long as they took their meds.

At the bottom of that invisible pyramid? My students were labeled as retarded and autistic. Self-stim behaviors. Sensory needs. Social disconnects. Their brilliance came in different forms, but it was rarely recognized. In meetings, they were described as “severe” or “too low.” The doors to high-quality learning were not only closed—they were locked from the outside.

But here’s where the story gets complicated.

I had access to greatness.

Mrs. Joyner—graceful, firm, and brilliant in English and language arts. Mr. Cherry—innovative, warm, and the kind of teacher who made every student believe they mattered. They both took me under their wing. Let me watch, ask questions, stumble. In them, I saw what education could be. We were in our own little world.

Then came the “inclusion wave.”

What started as a buzzword quickly became a tidal wave crashing through our halls. Suddenly, we were told to prepare our students for gen ed environments. No extra training. No support. Just a new set of expectations, and no clear plan on how to meet them.

The staff was split. Some were excited. I was angry.

Not because I didn’t want my students included—I did. I do. But “inclusion” without support is just another word for “sink or swim.” And when students with disabilities sink, it’s always the teacher’s fault. Always the student’s fault. Never the system’s.

Saint Katherine Drexel is my hero. A woman who believed that every child—Black, Native American, poor—deserved access to the same education as White upper-class kids. That idea changed everything for me. It made me want to be a teacher. It made me want to fight.

But what they don’t tell you is that fighting for equal access comes with a cost.

You get labeled. Difficult. Overly emotional. Unrealistic. You walk into meetings and people shift in their chairs. You ask for resources, and suddenly your emails don’t get replies. You speak out, and your mentor gives you a sad look, as if to say, “That’s not how it works here.”

But Psalm 91:11 kept me going.

“For He will command His angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways.”

I held onto that verse like a life raft. Because some days I felt like I was drowning—in paperwork, in doubt, in heartbreak for kids who didn’t even know what they were being denied.

Still, there were glimmers.

The day Jeremiah read a full paragraph out loud. The way Tangina lit up when she used a computer independently for the first time. The time our whole class made presentations about their favorite blacks of the 1930s and actually got excited about reading.

They were small wins, but they were ours.

Student teaching at MLK showed me what’s possible—and what’s broken. I saw the best of teaching and the worst of educational inequity. I got to learn from gifted educators. I got to fight for students who were never supposed to be seen as gifted.

Inclusion without preparation is a setup. But exclusion? That’s a sentence.

I’m not done fighting. I’ll keep opening doors. And when I can’t, I’ll build new ones.

Because my students deserve nothing less.

Watch “They Schools” by dead prez to learn what life is like in Black schools of today. (Adult Language) 

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