Poverty in the suburbs

Hamline's program has an urban focus, which is great, it is incontestable that there is great need for great teachers in the urban environments, but some of what I've been hearing has seemed to me a little bit extremist.  Maybe it's because most of my experience in the classroom has been in a suburban environment and in that environment I met so many children with so many needs.  I think all children deserve a great education whether urban or suburban or rural, whether poor or rich.

This morning I've had TPT on while I've been milling about my flat cleaning up after a fun weekend.  In one of the programs - either Almanac, To The Contrary, or Religion and Ethics - I heard a statistic that has stuck.  The statistic was that now 30% of children in poverty live in the suburbs.  70% still live in urban or rural areas, but the growing number of impoverished children living in the suburbs reflects what I've witnessed in schools I've been in.

As a student learning to be a teacher, I'm learning about how harmful it is to stereotype students based on demographics in an urban environment, but I'm not hearing a lot about how harmful it is to stereotype students based on environments (urban, rural, suburban).  I'm learning a lot about classrooms made up of diverse ethnicity but equally poor students, I haven't yet heard a lot about how to manage a classroom with students from families in both the top and lowest income brackets. 

I think it's great that some of my classmates have such great passion for urban teaching - I'm not challenging the statistics, we need a lot of great teachers there - but I am challenging some of the animosity I've felt against suburban students and the idea that they are over-privileged.  To stereotype a student based on where he/she lives is still a stereotype and as teachers, we should know better.