Dr. Jeffrey Michael Reies Duncan-Andrade gestured to a full room in Longfellow Hall at the Graduate School of Education last Friday, February 26, as he spoke on the topic of hope in urban classrooms

In each of his 18 years teaching at East Oakland public schools, at least one of Jeffrey M. R. Duncan-Andrade’s students had died, he revealed during a conference held at the Graduate School of Education on Friday.

Less than two hours earlier, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne S. Duncan ’86 had finished speaking about his Race to the Top initiative­­, which seeks to address disparities in access to quality education across the nation.

But in Duncan-Andrade’s view, consistently low test scores in poor communities are merely one symptom of a deeper problem.

Drawing on rapper Tupac Shakur’s trademark analogy of “the rose that grows from concrete,” keynote speaker Duncan-Andrade told a full house of GSE affiliates during the annual Alumni Of Color Conference about his path from East Oakland to Berkeley—and why he returned to “reinsert” himself “in the concrete” of his old neighborhood.

Duncan-Andrade, an assistant professor of education administration at San Francisco State University, said he has driven students home so that they would not have to cross gang lines. He has also offered his lunch and bus fares to students, he said.

In a criticism pointed directly at Secretary Duncan’s earlier speech, Duncan-Andrade said that until basic human needs are met in underprivileged neighborhoods, the achievement gap will never be closed.

“We have to be committed to understanding the level of suffering our students have experienced before they enter our classrooms,” Duncan-Andrade said.

He called for teachers to be “healers” in the classroom. Instead of “punching kids out” when they misbehave, educators should instead focus on providing a nurturing environment for students who live in the midst of gunfire, Duncan said.

Ashley Moore, the president of the GSE student government, said that listening to Duncan and Duncan-Andrade’s speeches in the same day reiterated the importance of identifying educational challenges on the ground and addressing those obstacles through national policy reforms.

“I think their hearts are in the same place, but realizing the struggle we are in and need to be in is the only way to change education,” Moore said.

—Staff writer Laura G. Mirviss can be reached at lmirviss@fas.harvard.edu.