Aaron Thompson talked with Chad Lampe on Sounds Good about his upbringing during integration and struggles schools and teachers face today. Listen to the full interview below.
Aaron Thompson is an outlier. The eastern Kentucky native is the son of an illiterate coal miner father who, he says, signed his name with an X. Thompson's mother held the highest level education in his family. She graduated from the eighth grade. But now, Thompson has risen through the academic ranks to be the chief academic officer for Kentucky's Council on Post-Secondary Education.
Thompson went to an all African American school for several years before being integrated and grew up poor in Appalachia. During integration he says he dealt with racism on a fairly strong level.
“Kids would run me home after school,” he said. “I was called very negative and racial names. But what it taught me was that if I really, truly valued education I would figure out how to use those items—as many people call obstacles—to actually help me to understand the opportunities that I could have by escaping that level of racism."
At the all African American school Thompson attended there were fewer kids and they all spent their time in the same classroom. That meant if you wanted out of that situation you needed education to do that, which taught him to value education highly.
Although lacking the schooling he has had, Thompson’s family encouraged him to pursue his education. During integration, Thompson once was so scared he told his father, who was a pacifist, that he wanted to quit school. His father’s response: “There’s two things worth fighting for, education and family.”
Thompson said today race shouldn’t matter when it comes to academic or professional development, but he added it often does matter, especially with achievement gaps. Acknowledging that one aspect to students’ success is their home life, Thompson said schools and teachers need to reach out as far as they can to help the students that don’t have family helping and encouraging them to learn.
“We’ve become strongly dependent on the school system to help those kids to feel that value,” he said. “What has happened is that the more disenfranchised a person’s background is, based on socioeconomic status or race in some cases, then the more the school has to perform in order to get those all those items to those children that will help them to be able to maneuver in many cases a foreign environment.
“That’s an odd way of thinking about it, but many of these kids are experiencing an immigrant experience when they come to campus even though they’re very much a part of America.”
To reach out to these students Thompson said schools and teachers need resources like funding for teacher training and counselors. He also focused on keeping expectations high for all students. He said students need rigor and expectations—just like the push his family gave him to keep moving forward and achieving academically—to rise to the occasion and succeed.
