The following article appeared in the Grio and was co-authored by Dr. Andre Perry, Jitu Brown, Keron Blair, Richard Fowler, Stacy Davis Gates and Tiffany Dena Loftin.
George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and now Rayshard Brooks — all Black people whose lives and purposes were snuffed out by White Supremacy. These four slain Americans were fathers, brothers, mothers, sisters, and one-time students of our nation’s public education system.
If we acknowledge the truth about the systemic racism in our country, we must also acknowledge the impact that racism has on our children and their classrooms. For us, #BlackLivesMatter is more than just a hashtag or social media post. #BlackLivesMatter is a policy doctrine that should govern how we think about safety, health care, the economy and certainly our nation’s public schools.
For Black lives to matter, we must reconstitute our nation’s classrooms and ensure that they are places that push back against the epidemic of racism and anti-Blackness. Its symptoms include under-resourced school buildings, oversized classrooms, over-policing, less access to necessary protections, lack of opportunity, and disinvestment.
Together, we — parents, students, community, educators and our local unions — believe we can cure anti-Blackness in our children’s classrooms
Here are the 10 things we can do today to combat anti-Blackness and racism for the sake of our babies and their neighborhood public schools:
1. Our school curricula must be culturally relevant, responsive and designed to prepare Black students for a future as global citizens. We must move away from rote memorization for standardized testing to teaching and critical thinking. Forget Columbus and talk about the role colonialism and capitalism played in structuring our nation and the modern world. Incorporating ethnic studies, with an emphasis on the Black experience as a conduit to addressing other marginalized groups, is critical. That way, more people will be familiar with key concepts — such as the building of our economy on exploitation and extraction (through slavery, Jim Crow, labor suppression, mass incarceration and criminalization). This will allow future generations to see the power dynamic created by policing and how it evolved by protecting wealthy business interests and oppressing Black bodies, enslaved and as they exist today.
2. We need smaller class sizes. Black parents have been demanding this for decades. Smaller class sizes allow for more individualized attention to each student. As we return to schools in an ongoing pandemic, small classes will be critical to keeping students physically and mentally healthy while they academically progress.
3. School safety can no longer mean school police and security staff. We know by now that most Black children are justifiably terrified by the police. Research affirms that police presence in schools leads to harsher punishment disproportionately affecting Black students — regardless of the severity or frequency of the behavior. For far too long, misguided leaders have depended on police in our public schools as a form of discipline. It is time for that to change. Our students deserve to learn in safe, loving and welcoming environments. Law enforcement officials walking the hallways of America’s schools only stoke fear.
4. We must recruit and support Black educators. When schools undergo major changes, Black educators are deliberately shut out. Disregarding their institutional, classroom and community knowledge has crippled generations of students and harmed our community. Everyone, from cafeteria workers to bus drivers, should have the tools to support our students, especially those experiencing disproportionate levels of trauma. By supporting our most vulnerable kids and families, school staff can improve the climate for the entire community. Salaries, working conditions and the protected right to organize must reflect the high level of commitment required to be an anti-racist educator.
5. It’s time for serious investment in school infrastructure and technology. Too many Black children attend schools where the walls are crumbling, there is lead in the water and heating and cooling are in disrepair. We want playgrounds, libraries and digital devices for every child. We want broadband internet to be a public utility, free or subsidized for families that can’t afford it.
6. Our schools and communities can no longer be turned over to private interests through vouchers, charters, education savings accounts, commercial tech platforms and other schemes used to syphon off public monies for private profit. Privatization hurts Black students and communities by excluding the neediest students, stealing funds that would otherwise support the 90+ % of kids enrolled in neighborhood public schools, and requiring those schools to further cut budgets and services for the vast majority of students. Black communities are tired of false and destructive choices of others. Our tax dollars are controlled by somebody else who’s eager to make a profit, escape our communities, and starve our people as they push an anti-Black agenda.
7. Schools serving Black students need more resources, not less. COVID-19 has laid bare the disproportionate health vulnerabilities facing Black people. The same vulnerabilities exist in public education. For decades, Black students, parents and educators have suffered from educational neglect and discrimination in public schooling. This suffering must end today. It starts by building bigger budgets for our neighborhood public schools. In order to learn at the same level as their white counterparts, our kids need more nurses, guidance counselors, paraeducators, social workers, mentors, and enrichment opportunities. These critical supports cost money. Equity demands that more public school dollars should flow to our most vulnerable students and their classrooms.
8. We need sustainable community schools. Many of these elements (greater community control, parental engagement and support, wraparound services, challenging and culturally relevant academics and enrichment) come together in the sustainable community school model. The Journey for Justice Alliance has suggested following Maryland’s lead by turning any school receiving Title I funds into a sustainable community school — neighborhood public schools that bring together many partners to provide a range of supports and opportunities to children, youth, families and communities.
9. We must eliminate standardized testing. Based in racist ideology, these tests are biased against Black students and contribute to the evil myth of anti-Blackness mentioned above. They are used to rank, sort and deprive Black children of everything, from access to advanced coursework to a chance to study with the best teachers. Standardized tests are the excuse decision-makers use to stigmatize Black neighborhood schools with misleading grades before targeting them for closure, privatization and disinvestment — despite obvious student need. Meanwhile, schools serving children with the privilege these tests measure are rewarded. The children’s privilege, and that of the school, also gets compounded.
These ideas are not new. Folks have been waging campaigns to gain these wins for a long time. They are worth restating at this moment, and they are certainly worth fighting for. Let us take to the streets with these demands in hand to make a new world possible
Authors:
Dr. Andre Perry – fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings
Jitu Brown – National Director of Journey for Justice
Keron Blair – Executive Director for the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools
Richard Fowler – Fox News Contributor/National Syndicated Radio Host
Stacy Davis Gates – Executive Vice President for the Chicago Teachers Union
Tiffany Dena Loftin – Director of the NAACP Youth and College Division
A clear blueprint for truly improving our public schools for all of our students and teachers.
Here is an eight-lesson reading and writing unit on the Wiley College (a historically black college in Marshall, Texas) Debate Team as captured by Denzel Washington in his film “The Great Debaters” :https://markstextterminal.com/?s=the+great+debaters
And thank you again Diane, for your permission to post such material in these fora.
The Christiansen Institute (founded by the guy who promoted “disruption” to spur corporate innovation) reported on a Cristo Rey prototype school in Calf. – 60 students per class.
Bill Gates and the Waltons provided money to the Cristo Rey school chain, which is in 17 states. Students are required to work one week a month for outside interests and, some reportedly return their pay to help cover school costs. in Ohio, taxpayers provide vouchers of $6.000 per student to the chain’s schools.
To learn more about the chain, Catholic bishops in cities where they operate can provide info..
These are great suggestions for all students. My diverse district actively sought teachers and administrators of color because administration supported the value of diversity, and they did not lower standards. They simply had an implied affirmative action policy because the district understood the value of diversity in a diverse community.
the VALUE factor: when actual education is the goal
Grateful to the authors—and you, Diane—for not just pointing out the unkept promises but providing solutions too. Very validating to read scholars’ support of neighborhood/community schools and other requirements for the 90%.
P.S. Am reflecting on how my teaching Latin figures in. Typically I get support because it’s a course offered in high-flying, competitive schools. Access—but I’ll keep reflecting.
You are teaching a vitally important subject, Latin.
My partner was principal of a Manhattan public school that was almost completely Black and Hispanic.
Kids signed up in droves to take Latin, the language of power.
This is an excellent article, however, we have been fighting for smaller class size for ALL students. It is educationally better for learning & is not racially exclusive. That was just one point that stood out to me as educationally beneficial for all kids. They all need more attention.
Framing the terrible deaths of George Floyd and others as simply an issue of racism is incomplete. These deaths are not the result of White Supremacy, but of capitalism. They were murdered by cops who are armed to the teeth with 1033 military gear, backed by an army of prison personnel and a regime moving towards dictatorship. The only real alternative to racism, police violence, growing unemployment and poverty, and the destruction of public education is not segregation and racial exclusivity, but genuine social equality. The endless trillions being funneled to Wall Street must instead be used for real social needs. Students across the US, of all ethnicities, have crumbling, unsafe buildings–and now are being told they must learn in schools with poor or no HVAC, risking the lives of themselves, their families and communities. The attempts to parlay these terrible deaths into business deals by ethnic advisors, “white fragility” counselors, Black studies curricula authors, etc. is not the way forward. It is divisive precisely when we need to emphasize that the entire working class is facing an existential threat. It’s time to unite the working class as a class.
Unite against the richest 400 families who run America.
Linda, yes, As nearly 140,000 die, the wealth of US billionaires has increased by 20 percent, or $484 billion, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. Between March 18 and June 17, the total net worth of the 640-plus US billionaires jumped from $2.948 trillion to $3.531 trillion.
As a result of the stock market rally, the wealth of the five richest men in America—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett and Larry Ellison—grew by a total of $101.7 billion, or 26 percent.
While I agree in principle, that does not change the fact that the black community experiences far more documented abuse at the hands of the police than the white community irrespective of socio-economic status. While the ultimate goal should be to address the inequities related to socio-economic class, we cannot and should not subordinate the role racism (and bigotry) have played.
Neither of the two should be subordinate. If moneyed families act like racist colonialists, it causes harm to those people of color who aren’t targeted for discrimination by the judicial and police systems.
The choices are not binary.
The core problem is historical, structural racism and segregation. Until all schools offer similar quality of education (labs for example) to a diverse student body, nothing will change. For example, the differences between schools in Benton Harbor Michigan and St. Joseph (across the river) are just staggering. Privatization has increased segregation. As Rothstein argues in The Color of Law, this segregation didn’t just happen. It was caused by and reinforced by our government. It still is until all kids get an equal opportunity to succeed.