What Do “Good” People Do When They Know?©

On Literacy, Inequity, Defensiveness, and What Our Conscience Requires of Us

I’ve been following a high school teacher on social media who became emotional while talking about something happening in his classroom: some of his students cannot read. His emotion was difficult to watch because you could see that he cared. I understood the weight of what he was describing. But as I listened, I found myself thinking about something we don't talk about enough when discussing educational outcomes: good people.

I believe good people are working in our schools. Teachers who genuinely love children, worry about their students long after the school day ends, spend their own money, give their time, advocate for children, and enter classrooms every morning believing they can make a difference. I don't believe every poor educational outcome is evidence of a bad teacher. But I do have a question about what goodness requires of us.

Because these students entered high school unable to read.

They didn't suddenly become nonreaders when they entered ninth grade. Their high school teacher is encountering the outcome of something that has been developing for years. These children attended elementary and middle school. They were assessed. They received report cards. They were promoted from one grade to the next. Adults encountered them year after year.

Some of those adults undoubtedly raised concerns. Some fought for interventions, contacted families, documented what they were seeing, and probably did everything within their power while encountering systems that failed to respond. Many factors affect literacy: disability, attendance, poverty, staffing, resources, curriculum, access to appropriate interventions, and circumstances outside of school. All of that deserves consideration.

But eventually, we still have to confront the outcome: A child spent eight or nine years in an educational system and arrived at high school unable to read.

There is another part of this conversation that hurts me deeply. So many of the children experiencing these outcomes look like my own.

I’d make it more intimate and less repetitive:

When I see Black children struggling in our schools, I don't experience them as abstract numbers in a data set. I recognize them. I see my children, my grandchildren, my nieces and nephews, and the children in my community. There is something deeply personal about seeing faces that look like those I love reflected in troubling statistics. It makes detachment nearly impossible, because I understand that behind every number is a child whose future is still being written.

I know that data requires objectivity, but humanity requires something else.

Behind every percentage is a child. A child who once entered kindergarten learning letters and sounds. A child who carried a backpack that may have seemed almost as big as they were. A child who raised their hand, learned their teacher's name, brought home worksheets, received report cards, and moved from one grade to the next. Somewhere along that journey, reading became difficult, then perhaps very difficult, and eventually, for some children, nearly impossible.

Still, the years passed. Until one day that child became a teenager sitting in a high school classroom, and a teacher looked across the room and realized: This child cannot read.

That hurts me. And when those children disproportionately look like children from my own community, I cannot separate the educational question from the human one.

What Happens to Them Next?

This may be the question that troubles me most: What does the future hold for a child who reaches high school unable to read?

Childhood doesn't stop while adults debate who is responsible. These children are getting older, and soon we will expect them to navigate the world independently. We will ask them to complete job applications, read workplace policies, pass licensing examinations, understand a lease, interpret medical information, read financial documents, complete college or vocational applications, understand contracts, evaluate information online, navigate government agencies, understand their rights, read a ballot, and advocate for themselves and, someday, perhaps for their own children.

We will place documents in front of them and say: Read this. Understand this. Sign here.

And then we will judge the decisions they make as adults without sufficiently confronting what they may have been denied as children. That is what makes literacy so much larger than an academic achievement measure. We aren't simply talking about whether a child can pass English. We are talking about access to adulthood: independence, opportunity, employment, higher education, economic mobility, civic participation, and self-advocacy.

A child's future is not predetermined because they struggle with reading as a teenager. Young people can learn. Appropriate intervention matters. Effective instruction matters. Resources matter. Adults refusing to give up on them matters. But time matters too.

Every year we postpone meaningful intervention is another year that child moves closer to an adulthood that will demand skills we already know they have not yet acquired.

That should create urgency. Not panic. Not blame. Urgency.

So What Do Good People Do?

The question becomes even more uncomfortable when the data reveals racial disparities in educational outcomes. Too often, when disparities affecting Black students are raised, some educators hear an accusation that was never made: Are you calling me racist? Are you saying I don't care about Black children? Are you saying I'm a bad teacher?

But perhaps those are the wrong questions. The existence of a disparity is not a judgment of your character. The data isn't calling you a bad person. The data is telling you that something is happening to children.

From a psychological standpoint, this is where defensiveness becomes important. Most of us carry beliefs about who we are: I am a good person. I care about children. I treat people fairly. I would never intentionally contribute to harming a child. When evidence appears to conflict with something central to our self-concept, it can create psychological discomfort. We are confronted with information that doesn't fit comfortably beside the person we understand ourselves to be.

We then have a choice about what we do with that discomfort. We can become curious, or we can become defensive. We can ask, What am I not seeing? Or we can immediately begin explaining why the problem has nothing to do with us. We can examine the evidence, question our assumptions, and consider what we might learn, or we can spend our energy defending our intentions and protecting what we already believe about ourselves.

Defensiveness does not prove guilt. It does not prove racism. People become defensive for many reasons. But persistent defensiveness can serve an important psychological function: it can protect our self-concept from information that threatens it. And when protecting that self-concept becomes the priority, something important can happen: the focus shifts. The conversation began with children who cannot read, children experiencing unequal outcomes, and children approaching adulthood without one of the fundamental tools they will need to navigate it. But suddenly, the children are no longer at the center. The conversation becomes about the adults: I'm not racist. I'm a good teacher. I care about all of my students. This isn't my fault. The inequity hasn't changed. The children haven't changed. Only the focus has changed.

If the naming of inequity repeatedly produces greater concern for defending one's goodness than addressing the inequity itself, perhaps the question is no longer whether the person feels accused. Perhaps the question is what their response tells us about the goodness they are so determined to defend.

That is the moment that concerns me. Because I am not particularly interested in proving that someone is a bad person. I am interested in what good people do when they know something is wrong.

“A Hit Dog Will Holler”

There is an old saying in the Black community: “A hit dog will holler.”

I think about that sometimes when conversations about racial disparities produce an immediate defensive response. Not because defensiveness proves guilt. It doesn't. But because it raises a worthwhile question: What, exactly, did you hear that made you feel personally accused?

If I say, “Black children are experiencing disproportionately poor educational outcomes,” and your immediate response is, “I'm not racist,” we have made an interesting psychological leap.

I made a statement about an outcome. You heard a statement about your character.

That space between what was said and what was heard deserves examination.

And perhaps that examination requires something increasingly difficult in conversations about inequity: humility.

Humility Before Defensiveness

Humility does not mean accepting blame for something you did not do. It does not require shame or self-condemnation, nor does it require us to accept a characterization of ourselves that we don't believe is true. Humility leaves room for the possibility that we may not know everything.

There may be something here that I don't understand. There may be something I haven't seen. Something I believe is fair may not be producing fair outcomes. My intentions may be good while my impact, or the impact of a system in which I participate, may not align with those intentions. And perhaps most importantly: I can examine myself without condemning myself. That is self-reflection.

• Can I examine my own practices without experiencing the examination itself as an attack?

• Can I ask whether something I have always considered fair is actually producing fair outcomes?

• Can I acknowledge that my intentions may be good while remaining open to the possibility that my impact may be different?

• Can I listen to an experience that contradicts my own without immediately searching for a reason to dismiss it?

• Can I say, I don't know. Let me look more closely.

There is strength in that kind of humility. Self-reflection is not self-indictment.

You can examine yourself without declaring yourself a bad person. You can discover a blind spot without deciding that everything you have ever done was wrong. You can acknowledge an inequity without accepting personal responsibility for creating it.

And humility also requires knowing when our own experience is insufficient. When you are not the person experiencing the inequity, humility requires recognizing that your distance from the harm does not make you the authority on whether the harm exists.

This is especially important when we talk about race. If you are not a member of the demographic most affected by a disparity, there are things you may simply not see or experience. That is when listening becomes essential: listening to the people most affected, listening to those with expertise, and allowing their knowledge to inform your understanding rather than assuming your own experience is the universal one.

But you have to be willing to look.

Because if our first instinct when confronted with inequity is to protect our identity as “good people,” rather than become curious about the inequity itself, perhaps the most important question isn't why someone raised the issue. Perhaps the question is why it hits so hard.

What Does “Good” Actually Require?

• Good people get curious before they get defensive.

• Good people examine the evidence, even when it makes them uncomfortable.

• Good people have the humility to question themselves and the courage to confront their blind spots.

• When it comes to race, good people listen to the people most affected and to those with expertise, especially when they themselves are not members of the demographic experiencing the disparity.

• Good people understand that good intentions do not guarantee equitable outcomes.

• Good people don't need to have caused the harm to accept responsibility for helping change what is causing it.

• And once they know, good people respond.

  
  

That is where goodness becomes more than an identity. It becomes a practice.

Because goodness cannot be measured by intention alone. I didn't mean for this to happen. I didn't create this. I treat every child the same. Those things may all be true. But eventually, intention is no longer the most important question.

The children are still sitting in the classroom. The disparity still exists. The teenager still cannot read.

And tomorrow, that teenager will be one day closer to adulthood. There is a profound difference between saying, I did not create this, and saying, Therefore, I have no responsibility for what happens next. Good people don't have to accept blame for everything that came before them. But once we are made aware, we have a choice: decide what we will do with what we know, or decide to do nothing.

• Do we advocate?

• Do we ask questions?

• Do we examine our practices?

• Do we demand resources?

• Do we challenge ineffective policies?

• Do we listen to what children and families are telling us?

• Do we insist that promotion cannot become a substitute for education?

• Do we refuse to normalize outcomes that should disturb us?

• Do we remain curious enough to consider that something we have always done may need to change? Or do we protect ourselves from the discomfort of knowing?

Because once an inequity becomes visible, we cannot make it invisible again simply because acknowledging it makes us uncomfortable. And perhaps that is where conscience enters the conversation.

What do we owe other human beings once their unequal experience is no longer invisible to us? For me, that question becomes particularly difficult when the children experiencing those outcomes so often look like my own. I cannot look away from them. And I don't want our conversations about education to become so consumed with proving that adults are good people that we forget to ask whether children are receiving a good education. Those are not the same question.

Maybe what conscience requires is actually quite simple: enough humility to question ourselves, enough courage to examine what we find, and enough humanity to change when change is necessary.

I don't need every educator to accept blame for every child who arrived in their classroom already struggling. I don't need every conversation about racial disparities to end with someone being declared racist. I don't believe shame is an educational strategy.

But I do believe awareness creates responsibility. Inherently good people do not need to be convinced that another person's suffering matters simply because they did not cause it. When inequity is brought to their attention, they don't make the conversation primarily about themselves. They listen. They reflect. They ask questions. And when something is within their power to change, they rise to the occasion.

Perhaps that is the distinction. Goodness is not revealed by never being confronted with an uncomfortable truth. It is revealed by what happens after the truth is named.

It asks them to respond.

Being “good” isn't something we get to declare about ourselves once and never examine again. Goodness requires humility. Goodness requires self-reflection. Goodness requires curiosity. And sometimes goodness requires the courage to discover that something needs to change and then participate in changing it.

So I am left with one question.

Once you know, what does your goodness require of you?