by Erika Gonzalez

Carrie Olson can size them up pretty quickly. The teachers who will last just a few weeks. Those who will struggle for years, frustrated by why their well-crafted lesson plans aren’t making a difference.

Olson, a teacher at Denver’s Kepner Middle School, was once one of them.

She remembers walking into her first urban classroom more than two decades ago, astonished that none of her impoverished students had a library card. Why not take advantage of a free service located just three blocks away, she thought.

Today, she says, many of her colleagues seem just as puzzled about how students come to school sporting trendy tennis shoes, yet don’t have enough money for pencils.

The problem, Olson learned, is that many educators teaching in poor, urban schools don’t understand what’s important to the population they’re serving. In other words, Olson’s Midwestern, middle-class upbringing wasn’t the best training ground for learning how to teach inner city kids living in poverty.

“I was perplexed by the mismatch,” says Olson. “I had these amazing kids, but they weren’t learning in my classroom. I cried every day.”

Read the entire KEEP article in EducationNews Colorado