The Black Lives Matter movement and a wave of racial reckoning have swept the nation. Since the brutal murder of George Floyd in May, there have been many calls to defund the police along with protests to reform the criminal justice system and end mass incarceration. This movement has pushed the people of our country to face important conversations about what must be done to reform the institutions that perpetuate racism in America. One such institution that is currently in the spotlight is our education system.
Over the past couple years, many schools have been working to implement reforms that better address race and ethnicity in the classroom as well as increase the focus on equity and inclusion. In August 2019, the New York Times released the 1619 Project, an initiative to reframe history around the role of slavery in the creation of the country. After the events of this past spring and summer, there was a jolting effect on schools to expand these efforts and take greater action in the classroom. Although the definition of what achieving equity looks like in the classroom is disputed, 81% of teachers support the BLM movement and agree that the curriculum needs to change in order to be more representative. Although more than half of American public school students are non-White, much of the current curriculum still omits any discussion of present-day racism in America, reinforces racist ideas in textbooks and glorifies Confederate heroes.
Many educators have joined the fight for racial justice at school, and the National Education Association in particular has called for an intense re-examination of the policies and structures within schools. Danielle Alli, current executive director of Boston Public Schools and former director of cultural proficiency, is one of the many educators who have taken initiative as a leader in education to confront the issue of inequity within schools. She began working toward equity in the Boston Public School system in 2016, when the school board found that there was not enough being done for their students of color. Alli told the HPR that she defines equity in schools as “making sure that equitable instruction is put in front of students” and making sure students are getting instruction that will help them reach their full academic potential. When any administrative decisions are being made, she helps to figure out “how to center equity in those conversations” — whether they be about budget, teacher training or the language used in curriculum.
Although in the spring there was a call for reevaluation of schooling, many schools were urgently focused on transitioning to an online format in response to COVID-19. “A lot of the work we were doing in the spring was making sure that students are helped because it was such an abrupt decision to close schools,” said Alli. However, while they were transitioning to the online format, they also were able to “focus curriculum on being social[ly] just because there was an opportunity to build on what was out there, but also to make changes to material that has been problematic for students of color” and ensure that “in the district there is a through line of equity, which hasn’t happened before in terms of all our teams working together.” Alli also mentioned the formation of “equity tables,” or places where parents, students and other community members can come together to voice any concerns or make suggestions about the way the school is handling equity.
Alli also discussed BPSD’s 33 transformation schools, which are specifically focused on serving students with the highest needs. She said that these schools have moved toward an equity focused plan using the Culturally Responsive Instruction Observation Protocol — a research tool used to measure culturally responsive instruction. The school adopted this from the University of Kentucky, which used the protocol and showed incredible student outcomes.
Some schools, such as the Boston Latin School, have also taken a new approach to their curriculum in order to promote conversations about racial equity. While working with barriers such as unsatisfactory Zoom capacity and the inability to support students in person, Rachel Skerritt, head of Boston Latin School, said “addressing the entire school about the new curriculum was really difficult,” and that it was the “first major national event that you really felt the pain of being remote.”
Aside from the difficulties of transitioning to remote learning over the summer, schools such as Boston Latin still turned their attention toward making important curriculum changes. Skerritt told the HPR that over the summer, faculty put together summer reading and videos for their students oriented toward building “a container of common understanding going into the school year.” Skerritt also mentioned that the readings and videos were pulled together and examined beforehand by student leaders. Once the school year did begin, Skerritt wanted to “make sure their efforts addressing racial equity was not a one and done.” The school committed to having frequent conversations about race and ethnicity, to implementing new professional development work shaped by student needs, and starting quarterly school-wide dialogues centred around a topic or reading during a new extended homeroom.
In the Stockton Unified School District in California, the response to the BLM movement went beyond curriculum changes such as the ethnic studies programs that were implemented in 2017 by Lange Luntao, president of the SUSD School Board. This summer, community members have driven forward the conversation to take the School Resource Officers out of the school district. School Resource Officers are police officers with the ability to make arrests who are responsible for preventing crime in an assigned school. In an interview with the HPR, Luntao said, “This has become a pattern, a pattern of over-policing rather than behavioral intervention which really can help young people thrive.” This summer, Luntao “saw a broader opportunity for more investment in restorative practices, ethnic studies, and counseling.”
The conversation surrounding culturally responsive curriculum within schools is especially important because of how impressionable young children are while they are being taught lessons, directly or indirectly, about race. Implicit biases form as early as kindergarten, and such biases influence the way students of historically marginalized backgrounds perceive their own ability to succeed as well as racial attitudes more generally. As a result, requests for assistance in the curation of culturally conscious curricula have more than doubled this summer compared to last.
Kweku Demetrious Hobson, founder of Liberate History, an organization focused on helping to equip schools and businesses by providing curriculum on African American history and critical race theory, says that he has seen a tremendous increase in business and that this summer was definitely a driving factor. However, he added that he surprisingly lost business at the school level due to the chaos of the transition to online learning and that most of his increase was from businesses and other organizations.
“I applaud the schools that have taken initiative. With the transition online, it is something they could have overlooked,” Hobson said. Discussing the new AP course that the College Board recently released on the African Diaspora, Hobson said that although it is up to student demand for this course to be taught in schools, he does “believe there is demand for it after seeing College Board present at the Teach Black History Conference at the University of Missouri in 2019.”
However, there has been some pushback against the reevaluation of American history — with Donald J. Trump, for instance, promoting the 1776 Project, a push toward a “patriotic education” centered around the framers of the constitution and their values. Aside from this, there has been mostly widespread support for implementing a new, racially conscious curriculum in schools. In response to this movement, many teachers want to learn more about what needs to be done to become more equitable and outwardly anti-racist in the classroom, and many schools have prompted their communities to have more open discussions about racism and equity. There is much more work to be done to achieve racial justice within education; however, schools have started to undergo a necessary shift in order to do so.
Image by Element5 Digital is licensed under the Unsplash License.
