Two weeks ago was the 60th anniversary of the integration of the first black student in New Orleans Public Schools and that brave little girl was Ruby Bridges. (I wonder her thoughts on the now more segregated and non-public schools of New Orleans today...but anywhoo.) She is also the infamous subject of the famous 1964 Norman Rockwell painting, “The Problem we all live with'' which so eloquently captures the essence of the hate and racism of this country’s legacy all wrapped up in a 6 year old little girl just trying to go to school. Recently, this classic portrait was also just adapted by t-shirt artist, Breia Goeller, to include Ruby’s shadow overcast by a more emboldened adult Black woman, Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris, whose figure is on the move, paying homage to the women who paved the way for Kamala’s victory to be possible. However, this adaptation, while aspirational and inspiring, mis-represents the state of our country on issues of race, class, and how opportunity is accessed for marginalized communities, as if to suggest, “We have arrived”. But this is the same premature excitement Black America had when President Obama, the first Black president, was elected to office in 2008 when Black America mistook an election of a Black president for Black political, racial and economic power that never materialized. We can’t make the same mistake again. Racial representation does not equivocate to shared ideals, objectives and goals where when one of us wins, we ALL win. But it sure nuff’ feels good seeing that Black melanin represented in one of the highest offices in the land and wanting to celebrate this monumental accomplishment for what it is and not what it purports to represent. This Thanksgiving, I am most thankful for the progress that we have achieved as my own Black daughter can witness a Black woman in that seat. Yes , Lord! However, representative victories are not the same as actual victories and Black America can not continue to be content with a fraction of our people “making it” when it is vital that we ALL make it. I am not saying we cannot turn up for this major WIN, but my challenge is that we also take a more critical lens in this moment at the real problem we all live with THEN as we STILL do NOW and really evaluate our next steps so we don’t get lost in a pyrrhic victory, where we lose more than we gain. Let’s face facts: Racial segregation in schools has not improved in the 60 years since Ruby Bridges brave steps and maybe even worse now because it is orchestrated through more subversive de facto housing discrimination and persistent income inequality in Black areas. Sadly, even in New Orleans, where they restructured the schools away from automatic neighborhood assignments toward choice Charter schools, which have still largely remained segregated with white families opting out of them into more selective private schools. Also, schools are not just more segregated but they are also still underperforming their white counterparts. Like right here in the Black mecca, Civil Rights capital of the world, Atlanta, ONLY 1 in 5 Black students read on grade level in comparison to 4 in 5 White students respectively. The reality is racial integration was not the promised land that Black folks were sold to believe and in schools it was even more so a gross failure in southern Black communities where their entire neighborhoods were ravaged by white flight and less systemic economic investment. The truth is systemic racism is the “problem we all live with”, as Norman Rockwell coined in 1964. By- in-large, this problem stays alive and well, because of our own collective investment in the meritocracy narrative that this country has sold bait and line. The narrative sounds a little like the three little pigs where there's a big bad wolf who will eat you up if you don’t work hard and be strong. Thus, justifying why only a few Black folks, like Vice President Elect Kamala Harris, make it because of their own personal responsibility and hard work while diminishing the role of this country’s systemic barriers and traps, that are the true wolves, that have set the masses of Black folks up to be consumed from the outset. The primary issue with this narrative is everyone celebrates the lone pig that survived the wolf, yet blatantly chastises the pig's siblings for their poor choices that condemns them for their own demise by the wolf. Sadly, this narrative is most detrimental and pervasive in our schools, even 60 years later, where America's meritocracy myth has thrived the most under education’s ruse as the great equalizer. But as Ta-Nehisi Coates shares in his novel Between the World and Me, “...No one directly proclaimed that schools were designed to sanctify failure and destruction, but a great number of educators spoke a great deal of personal responsibility in a country authored and sustained by criminal irresponsibility.” Nowhere is this more true than in segregated Black schools across this country that largely justify the failure of millions with “oh, they just didn’t work hard enough” to explain away the centuries of structural racism and barriers that held them in their clinches long before they even walked the planet. Unfortunately, this framework of personal responsibility, as a solution to Rockwell’s “problem”, has helped to garner societal acceptance, not just from Whites, but of Blacks even more so, to justify mass incarceration of Black bodies, deplorable living conditions for poor Black families and exploited low-wage and dangerous jobs disproportionately helmed by Black bodies because “they did not work hard enough so this is what they get”. This narrative is a disservice to our Black children and very much dangerous when weaponized in the hands of influential people ( I am looking at President Obama, Bill Cosby, and Tyler Perry and others who espouse the tenants of meritocracy and personal responsibility to explain away the successes and failures in Black communities without regard to the systems that shape the context in which they live). Either way, right now history is taking note, yet again, at where we are and how we solve this problem in each generation. While it feels good to see some progress to this problem in over 400 years, with the election of a Black woman as the U.S.V.P., we can’t be content with the pyrrhic victory of an election that does not yield tangible results in the lives of Black children and their families. We can no longer accept tokenism representation as Black political and economic power. We can no longer cherry pick a talented tenth of Black children to succeed as we wholesale fail the rest of the ninety ( this is how integration in America’s schools was started by the NAACP and we just keep doing it even though it doesn’t work). We can no longer believe and sell the toxic spoils of the meritocracy myth to our children as truth. We must demand more of our leaders and systems, even our Black ones, who no longer signify a WIN for all of us when THEY MAKE IT, but when their WORK shows up for all of us ( Black folks), Kamala included, so we ALL CAN MAKE IT. #Period
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The past 2 weeks has been a true roller coaster as we all have held our breath to find out who our next President will be. Whew, I was/am biting all the nails over here. But I am back now, tired and worn out, but I am back. I know everybody is ready for the world to change now, but nope, we all still got work to do. Now is the time that we plan how we truly “build back better” as Biden promised on the campaign trail. In the heat of a surging pandemic, millions of Americans unemployed and half the nation's children in some form of virtual learning, we have our work cut out for us. However, the reality is “the Harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few”. We were able to get a record turn out to vote (which was EPIC) but for more sustained action at school board meetings, local neighborhood meetings and PTAs we are coming up short to mobilize all of this momentum. But I am here to share voting is not the end of political power, it is only the beginning. However, partly due to human apathy and partly due to systemic oppression, civic action has been trivialized into meaningless hashtags and a vote every 4 years ( not much fanfare for local elections frfr). But the sad reality is there has not been dedicated education to civic activism in schools beyond voting and the three branches of government, but then we wonder why parents and community members don’t understand what’s happening at local school board meetings. BUT I ASK, WHO IS TEACHING THEM WHAT IT ALL MEANS AND HOW THEY CAN ENGAGE WITH IT? NO ONE. I sit on my neighborhood’s executive governance board and my local high school’s executive governance board. However, no one has shown me how it all works and what I should be doing to serve my constituents and fellow neighbor’s better. I mean we can complain all day that only 20% of the people are doing 80% of the work but that dismisses that there could be people who want to help but just have no clue where to even start. I have a Masters degree in Public Administration and Policy, but I still don’t understand all of the tools and structures that are being used against or for the school and community I serve. So, I imagine that the “laborers are few”, in part, because no one has reached out to them to explain how all of this stuff works that can help and benefit their kids and families. But this is how the system is designed to disenfranchise and marginalize poorer and blacker communities, who disproportionately have less time and resources than their wealthier and whiter counterparts, from learning HOW the system works in order to leverage it to their advantage. Sadly, even for me, as a black kid in a black school, I only learned about the three branches of government and what my President or Congress did ( which was all about a bunch of white guys that did not seem relevant to my life). I really never learned about how change works on County Commissioner boards, Boards of Assessors ( that determine home values which could explain low homeownership rates among blacks urggh), or State School boards. I never understood or learned how to lobby or petition to make change in my own schools or neighborhoods. But now that I am on these boards and see the blatant lack of training and tools given to them, I see why we do not have laborers showing up to work as well as the cumbersome processes that exist to even get people in the work. So what do we do? If we want more laborers, then it is imperative that we start by:
Yes, lots of work for us to do. So as a great deal of us just celebrated a big presidential victory, we now must ask ourselves where are the laborers and WHO will teach them what we need to do next. How do we fight and win for our kids in local school boards and city councils across this country? How do we get them to show up beyond the voting booth, but to the everyday meetings in our neighborhoods? How do we make that work matter too? Do we need to change the time or format of the meetings? Do we need to make the meetings more accessible for diverse groups and audiences? No matter the answer to these questions, let’s not wait another minute. Let’s start today. If you just voted in this election and want change at your local school or in your community, focus on DOING THE NEXT BEST STEP FORWARD to get active in your community. For some the next best step is finding out when is the next neighborhood meeting, reaching out to your local school board representative or checking on your local Senior facility to see how you can help. But whatever you do next make sure you find a way to bring other laborers along with you because this work requires all the laborers we can get. So, I was a little sick. Sorry I missed you. But I came back to share that despite President #45 declaring victory over Covid, it ain’t going nowhere no time soon. No vaccine or cure is coming to save any of us in the near future. So with that being said, what do the regular folks living on planet earth do in the meantime about our lives? I think, while I was ill, this was the singular most daunting question that I pondered the most. While I did not have Covid and lost my mind trying to find my daughter a local testing site for her age ( because apparently toddlers do not have droplets or are perceived non-transmitters I guess with almost no testing sites urgghh), this question captured my mind. What do we do in the meantime? As an educator, thankfully, local Atlanta schools decided to keep schools closed due to recent spikes and fear of further community spread. But closing doors does not mean we have answered the true challenges our kids and their families are facing in this moment. No amount of Zoom video chats will fix what is broken in our educational system during remote learning and that is the anachronistic industrial design of American learning systems. At the start of compulsory public schools in the 1920s, they were built to prepare kids for industrial and standardized jobs that did repetitive and simple tasks ( and to keep kids from competing in the labor market), not to grow and nurture individuals. So in this season, whole classes are not aggregated together as the sum parts of basic and average kids depending on each other to learn or not. Kids are by and large, individually learning at home and have never experienced this level of independence to finally explore themselves as an individual and discover what works best for them. What’s more parents have mostly never had the luxury of this individual learning experience for themselves so they definitely have no reference point to help their own children through this new modality of learning as well. Even this week, as I tried to help one of my students figure out what supports she needed to improve in class, she said, “Those Youtube Videos are too long for me to watch and teach myself. I just want to know where the answer is so I can be done with it.”. This mindset is pervasive with most kids that just want an answer so they can just be done and fit in with everyone else. But what if kids understood their individual passions, strengths and weaknesses and didn’t just want to go with the crowd? What kind of world would that be? Harvard Professor Todd Rose, Ed.D, coins this focus on individuality in students as their “jagged profile” because he believes that their is no such thing as an average student but students who have jagged edges and don’t fit any singular mold. Yet, while schools are fretting over the average kid in this pandemic will lose 20% of their skills because of this disruption to traditional learning, Rose counters this with group level statics that were not designed to serve and reach individual students. Education has been playing to group averages so long with the same assignments and standardized assessments and oversized classrooms that in this moment we don’t know how to reach individual students and meet their needs. So parents are screaming to let their kids come back in massive school buildings with thousands of kids and no safety protections when we really need to simply be creative and innovate on our design with our individual students in mind. As always, what does that even look like: Sadly, Rose does not give us a picture of how this works for everybody involved. But I will take a stab at it and invite others to help me imagine this new space as well. So let me first say kudos to Atlanta’s Mayor for heeding the call for more citywide support with the city’s learning pods. While this was a great first step, the learning pods were full within days of announcement and were not a part of a larger more comprehensive strategy put forth in tandem with other community partners, districts and even corporate employers. When I think about serving EACH INDIVIDUAL CHILD in Atlanta, I think about the overwhelming undertaking this would be for a school alone. But with an entire ecosystem of support what could really happen? We could
The reality is Covid is not going nowhere for a while but neither will our kids if we don’t get darn creative in how we get them through this season. We have to use every tool at our disposal to go beyond the average and toward meeting the needs of each individual. Zoom can’t save us and neither will reopening the same ol school that’s failing 80% of our students. Other industries have gotten really creative, now it is the schoolhouses turn or the result could be more deadly than the Covid virus for our most vulnerable kids. I don’t know about you but I know I was furious to watch another black woman talked over and not heard during the Vice Presidential debate last week. I mean it was embarrassing how many times Senator Kamala Harris had to say, “I am talking” to hush the incessant interruptions by Pence. I mean she played nice and smiled and respected him. What’s so hard about her getting the same in return? But sadly, I know the answer to this question is that this runs deeper than just one debate. It’s systemic within all of our institutions where the voices of Black women are counted last and go unheard and even one of the future highest ranking bi-racial woman in the land can’t get a break. So as a Black woman and mother myself, that’s the all too familiar reality of what happened on stage and in so many Zoom calls and meetings across this country. Black women are seldom heard or respected in this country.
Just need to sit with that for a second. Now that that can resonate for the people in the back to hear it. We can now talk about why this matters for kids in the middle of a pandemic. Right now, over half the country’s 56 million students are in some form of virtual or remote learning which means kids are mostly with parents learning. But more importantly, in metro Atlanta where over 56% of the population is Black and there are over 600,000 students and 60% are from low-income communities, who is most likely to be at the helm of educating our kids during remote learning? I would venture to say Black women and Black mamas are leading over 300,000 kids through their learning everyday right now. So we probably should listen to them ya know. The facts are almost half of Black households with children are headed by single women, and so must face issues of child care and virtual schooling on their own while they are also more likely to work outside of the home as essential workers.. So if they are leading homes and the workforce by themselves, do they have a chance to talk? Secondly, if they do speak up for their kids, who is listening to their struggles and challenges in this season? Sadly, I bet the answer is probably no one or MAYBE a part-time, under-resourced Parent Liaison who serves hundreds (so again no one). But the answer has to be school and district leaders must listen now more than ever before. With only 27% of black students reading at grade level by 3rd grade o and 27% proficient at math by 8th grade in Metro Atlanta, we must talk to and truly listen to their parents who are integral component to improving all of our students’ outcomes, if only we include them in authentic and meaningful ways. To some, this data may suggest something is wrong with the parents, especially Black parents ( which as I said are mostly single Black mamas). But this deficit mindset is the wrong approach and instead the answer is in all the times black parents have said what they need but those pleas were unheard. So no this does not mean another mandated Title 1 parent night with a dump of information onto parents nor does it mean schools have to do this work alone. In these Covid times, this means a continuous and open forum and dialogue surrounding student needs, family needs and relevant resources that support meeting these needs with the school and community. One such radical model is from Minneapolis called the Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ coined after the Harlem Children’s Zone). NAZ is a collectivist approach that frfr places students and (Black) parents at the center of all of their work through leveraging a collaborative ecosystem, streamlined technology and continuous communication FOR and WITH parents. Intractable problems like poverty and racist systems need more than a parent night, they need an entire integrated response from a well-organized ecosystem of support that is setup to listen and prepared to respond. I am not saying you have to make a NAZ but hey if we could, let’s go to work. So what can a school or district do to champion black parents and their voice in this season?
But no matter what we do, the most important thing that we all WILL have to do is begin to listen more to black mamas (and grandmamas) who carry the lion share of this load. We have to make space for them to be heard with every decision we make and truly allow it to drive our decisions about the best way to move forward. I will say that I am sure most think this work is already happening, especially if you have a black woman leader. But, I disagree. I mean as an educator and advocate, I have even been muzzled from speaking by even black leaders to protect the status quo. But to get to the other side of this pandemic, better than where we were ( not back to normal) we will need to uplift and champion the voices of black mamas more and even at times hold black women and all women accountable to do the same. As a black mama myself, I am committed to listening more and using whatever privilege I have to champion other black mama voices in this season. If you are too or are a black mama in metro Atlanta, please sign up for our newsletter to learn more about our work and how we are disrupting educational inequity in Atlanta (and not black women speaking). We are under assault everyday with a new trauma in front of us, but the world expects us to keep moving as usual. From blatant police murders of black bodies, to a Global Pandemic that has taken millions of lives globally in less than a year, we are constantly pushed to just keep on grinding. I mean the POTUS would not even denounce white supremacy on the global stage but we supposed to just be good and keep on pressing on. Sadly, this has been coined as “Grind Culture” where no matter your trauma, pain or emotional well-being, society pushes you to continue to keep grinding no matter what. We see evidence of this as the President of the United States (POTUS #45), recently took severely ill with Covid-19 and shared that he had no plans to hand over power and rest during his “recovery/quarantine”. Yet yesterday morning, we had mixed reports of his condition and health. Like why couldn’t he just rest? More importantly, do we as a society see weakness in pausing for rest and healing?
So this is my dilemma/question for our elected officials, school leaders, other influential decision makers and even parents, why don’t we care more for the emotional and mental well-being of our kids to provide space for rest and healing? I mean the assault on adults has been catastrophic with over 13 million jobs lost ( of which most will never return or don't pay a living wage), 200,000 deaths from Covid-19 nationally, the rate of food insecurity doubled for households with children, one in five families were behind on rent in July, surge in more domestic violence and abuse and the litany of trauma just keeps on coming. Let me add, if you are black or a minority/marginalized racial group or LGBTQ+ or a woman or a combination of all of these then times all this trauma by 5. Now let’s look at all of this hot mess from the lens of a child. Schools track record supporting the mental and emotional well-being of kids before the pandemic was SUS. The counselor-to-student ratio nationally is 482:1 and in Georgia 490:1 and social workers are normally a shared resource for multiple schools or are part-time serving thousands. After working this week with therapists to host a Virtual workshop on healing for my students, it was no surprise that one of the therapists even shared that she left school counseling because she truly had no time to work “with kids” only “for” them as she managed clerical and administrative tasks like scheduling. Then the next question is who is talking to our kids about everything that is going on in the world and helping them process their emotions if it's not a counselor? If we are lucky an amazing, yet overworked teacher or an intentional parent or mentor but still we need more help. Now that our kids and emerging young adults are grappling with issues that adults can barely wrap our minds around like rent, hunger, job loss, missing key milestone events and even, illness and death ( more now without any health insurance to get care and coping tools), what are we doing for them? Are we sending them the same “Grind Culture” message to keep it moving and business as usual? Sadly, the answer is yes as Georgia’s Board of Education voted against Superintendent Wood's recommendation to not have the Georgia Milestone Assessment Test for high school students not count toward their final grade in the midst of a GLOBAL PANDEMIC, In an 8-4 decision, the state board chose "accountability" over healing and restoration for kids. This is a lot to digest in this moment but in the words of Georgia's State School Board Member Mike Royal, “ I am not ready to give up on this year…”., demonstrating that our leaders don't think so. But this sentiment is what is hurting our students more, that somehow we are giving up if we don’t value a standardized test instead of valuing the mental and emotional well-being of children more. This “accountability” culture and “Grind” culture is toxic and has set us up to fail our kids when we can’t create space for them to simply heal in this unprecedented moment in history. So what can we do to change? As schools prepare to reopen for hybrid or in-person instruction, yes it is vital for us to make sure everyone is tested, wearing a mask and sanitizing but we also must create space for authentic ways to truly check on our students’ emotional well-being. We also must prioritize and value our children’s emotional well-being in this season above all else. What does this look like? Having school leaders engage with partners like Chris 180, ChopArt and PlayWorks that fosters embedded mental wellness support for children into the school schedule. Right now, teachers are charged with this work in morning meetings or worse for a quick warm-up/pulse check. But we really have to commit now to doing more and committing more time to this work at every level of school. Also, it requires us to divest from Grind Culture and stop overworking kids, especially in this season of trauma, so more out doors time or personal conversations and less screen time. Ask your child do they feel comfortable sharing how they feel with you or other adults. Most I have spoken with, in middle and high school, say they do not. Let's talk about why. Something, I do with my little one also is I do sensory boxes to create space for us to unwind and focus on being present with an activity with all of our senses and practices. This is super helpful with smaller kids. No matter the age, this work is not easy, but we have to go deeper and do this work well. Lastly, it will require us to please write to the state of Georgia’s School Board for the next 30 days and submit our heartfelt public comment that we VALUE OUR KIDS WELL BEING MORE THAN A ACCOUNTABILITY WITH A MEANINGLESS HIGH STAKES TEST. OH YEAH, AND TWEET THE POTUS TO REST AND GET WELL. HOPEFULLY, WE ALL WILL FIND HEALING IN THE PROCESS. ACTION: Please CLICK HERE for Public Comment to the Georgia Board of Education TODAY!! So who’s concerned about TikTok giving away your teen’s home videos to the Chinese government today? Welp never fear, the Tik Tok Ban is here and ready to protect your data from being in the hands of nefarious actors. Not really but this is the storyline weaponized for political theater and to scare parents who already have no clue what’s going on with their children’s data in the nebulous internet world. But sadly, while the country is paying attention to big tech and demanding more transparency around their child’s data, K-12 schools are begrudgingly compliant, yet silent on how they access, share and disseminate student data to parents. Yes, parents may sign some type of form or something at the beginning of the year, with boilerplate notification that student data is protected and blah- blah-blah. However, what happens to the mounds of it that is collected everyday beyond just protecting it? I mean I am a teacher and in modern teaching everything we do from taking attendance, a class warmup, to formative assessments we are collecting data. Yet, in highly transient populations ( poorer communities especially) this data stays with the teacher and rarely is disseminated or transferred to parents, students or even new schools in meaningful ways outside of a report card, or if you are lucky, a parent-teacher conference. So I am more concerned about what schools are doing with all this information for 13 years of my child’s life than with the newest social media tech platform’s data uses. IJS.
So what happens? Specifically in Georgia, along with 36 other states, the state invested millions since 2003 to develop the State Longitudinal Data System (SLDS) to connect district-level student information systems to the statewide system, ensuring that student records, state and local testing records, and achievement data goes with them when they change districts and all stakeholders have immediate access to this important data. In theory, this is brilliant because kids change a lot over 13 years and move a lot too so it makes sense to have systems talking to each other and tracking their growth for policy makers and parents to make data-informed decisions. However, over the past 3 months I have engaged several different stakeholders, parents, teachers, school and district leaders and the answer is clear, in our urban district most have no clue or have no interest in using the SLDS system but instead focus on their local data platforms. What’s wrong with this strategy? Well, these local data platforms that districts invest millions to maintain leaves the information siloed and far-removed from the very people who need it. Unfortunately, the information gets stuck in a system and really does not reach stakeholders (including students and parents) in meaningful and relevant ways that show them how it impacts their lives and their children. This is terrible. Who needs data stuck in a computer? No one. Everyone wants to use the buzzwords “data-driven decisions” but WHO has the data to drive decisions is a crucial question our schools need to truly reflect on in this season where we are remote learning at home. If schools have the data about kids and parents don’t as they help them navigate the online learning then what good is this data protected and stored in a fancy data platform. Lots of schools have fancy data platforms and data dives, but I say it all doesn’t matter if it is not integrated into a larger context ( like a SLDS) and disseminated to parents and students in relevant and meaningful ways. Like Georgia’s SLDS has a parent portal for parents to review important domain-specific growth areas, but most data platforms that district- level Chief Information Officers (CIO) purchase are teacher-centered, clunky and hard to understand for parents and students. It’s like we invest in data tools to benefit schools when the end user should be students and parents to build more autonomy and agency with them. This practice is backwards. So what should we do instead? I understand every district has different needs and should definitely invest in technology that supports your students and teachers. However, there must be more coordination and integration of this local data with the more comprehensive SLDS tool as well. Students grow a lot and this fuller picture of student growth and learning is vital. Also, schools must design student data systems and strategies with clear training for parents and students to understand, and engage all stakeholders to build awareness around data tools and how they are relevant for our student’s lives. I do understand that even teachers have apprehension about data. But we have to do the hard work to empower our kids and parents to understand too. Of course, this is a pretty heavy lift, but as we see in Covid, a very necessary one. But I would be remiss if I did not say that the state also has to continue to engage local districts with how they use their platform and ways to make their platform more user-friendly to integrate with local systems as well. This is a two-way street, but meaningful data sharing to better understand our children’s needs between all stakeholders is vital to our future success. I mean if big tech has not shown us already, data is not on sheets of paper any more. It is in a big digital world now. We need to know what’s happening with our data, who has it AND how it is or CAN be used for better or worse.This is not only the essential question for big tech companies like TikTok and Facebook but also for K-12 education if we really want to be better on the other side of this pandemic. Yo, this week I finally got the memo or the press release that Georgia finally joined other states in reducing the inordinate amount of standardized tests our kids take in school. Let’s pop out the confetti and the balloons for less high-stakes tests for kids in Georgia! But while I got this incredible news this week, I also was walking two disparate journeys for two of my students and coming to understand that simply removing one barrier can really mean that more will grow in its place if we are not intentional in this moment of reckoning. After months of preparing one of my recent grads for college, I got a message that said “ Ms. Nunnally, I guess I just won’t go to college now. It’s Ok.” After helping her navigate every obstacle you can think of that an orphan faces to get into college, this Zell Miller Scholar was ready to call it quits. She’d passed all the tests. She’d been acclaimed as one of the highest performers in her graduating class. But there were simply too many barriers for her alone to get into college. I mean her local school had all the programs ( she did all of them) like Dual Enrollment, College Advising, One Goal, Upward Bound, Achieve Atlanta and then some but somehow she was falling by the wayside. (This by no means is an indictment of these amazing programs that provide vital tools to our kids yet a space for exploration and deeper introspection of them collectively.) So with this text message in my phone and a lunch break coming up from my own class of students, I texted her back to get up and we were going to the campus in the middle of the “Rona”. I figured all the online communications and no one answering phones was just too much. We need someone to talk to us face to face or she would give up for good. So apparently, we were having problems with her FASFA verification and needed an IRS form to verify her information but due to the “Corona” the school created a make-shift form in its place and we did not know it. Thankfully, we went up there and she was able to enroll but we were one IRS form away from losing out on the opportunity of a lifetime. Free College Education. After she was enrolled, we reflected on how simple it was once she understood the system and how to navigate it but the problem was we never really exposed her to the real “SYSTEM”. I don’t mean the one on paper, but the one with holes in it that requires constant questions, several phone calls and the runaround. Even now, we are still trying to navigate the various college platforms for her assignments because orientation was a video and not a personalized human being to help answer her questions. But this all taught me a lesson that removing high stake tests like GMAS or even the SAT is only a small chunk of the battle. We need to set up more equitable systems that are student centered and speak to their personal needs. However, on the other side of town, where my private school students have access to resources and understand these systems, I found myself asking where is the infrastructure for them to be autonomous in experiential learning environments. I had students asking to work in Fashion, NPR news and animation with Cartoon Network but these systems weren’t yet set up to even receive these bright and critical thinkers. I mean I would have to mold several emails to speak to these stakeholders only to find nothing was ready for them. And even more sad to ponder was if nothing was made for the most elite students, my other babies were not even on the radar. It made me think why doesn’t K-12 have widespread corporate internship partners like colleges and universities. We say we want kids to be prepared for the workforce but we don’t already have these systems set up for them. WHY NOT? WIth the influence of traditional colleges waning among a larger swath of Americans, we have to use this moment to speak to this new reality where K-12 is also a real and VIABLE channel for America’s workforce and economic engine. One such thought leader, Cartoon Network answered one of those long emails I sent. It was one employee from my community, but he saw this gap, not just for my private school students, but more importantly for my other public school babies as well. He understood that the time is now to begin to create more equitable systems for all and not just give lip service to what we believe should happen. So, while I am truly celebrating a tremendous milestone to break our children free from these daunting and needless tests. (And also praying they are cancelled this year due to Corona) I am also challenging more companies and thought leaders to step up and chart a new course forward for ALL our students to have opportunities. It is not enough for us to have less tests, while students still are falling in the gaps to get into college AND they are unable to learn in real-world environments to prepare for life beyond school. We preach we want all kids "College and Career Ready" but how will we know when they are there yet. We know tests don’t teach this, so it’s time for us to invest in things that do. It is now time for us to be thoughtful and intentional as we reimagine how to fill this new vacancy of possibility. What can we do instead of testing? How can we make sure our kids don’t fall in the gaps and are really ready for College? Who can we get to help us build more equitable learning spaces for ALL kids in K-12? This is the work in front of us. I am rolling up my sleeves to do this work more deeply and intentionally. I invite you to join me so we can really celebrate like never before. I had a completely different blog planned for today but because of these little pings on my phone that popup news alerts without any warning that ANOTHER BLACK (SUPER) HERO has DIED, I am here. For all intensive purposes the Black Panther has just died as we mourn the death of his human form in Chadwick Boseman the actor. This comes on the larger-than-life tragic death of Kobe Bryant and of course woven into this trauma is the countless deaths of young black lives shot at or murdered by law enforcement. Lives like Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbury, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Tamir Rice, Oscar Grant, Michael Brown and Jacob Blake just add to the larger than life tapestry of black trauma in America and it is frankly too much. So yesterday, when I heard the news that our Black Panther died, I was triggered back into a space of more black trauma, not just for me, but now for our children. With limited affirming on-screen representation for black children, Black Panther was more than another Marvel character. He was/is the longed for super hero that rooted our blackness beyond chains and slavery but into a new infinite space of possibility that the world has never seen (or wanted to). He countered the history book narrative of Africa (and its people) as a vast bastion of emptiness and brought to life a world where blackness is thriving and an ever-evolving force to be reckoned with as a global leader. This narrative is what all the black kids ( and black adults) needed in a time where the trauma load had been and continues to be simply overwhelming. So on Friday, when I got the innocuous ping alert on my phone, it knocked me off my feet and I mourned ( ugly cried) for the loss to millions of black children across the WORLD that found relief, love and a true hero in King T’Challa. I cried because I knew the significance of this moment only added to their tapestry of black trauma that few may even be able to understand. Recently, I met one of these kids during the first week of school. During our icebreaker, I asked the simple question “What is something you love?” and he quickly replied, “ All things Black Panther” as he beamed with pride from ear-to-ear. I can’t say I can think of another person that a black child can reference in this same regard right now. Sadly, this is what makes this loss that much harder as I prepare to go “back to school” and mourn alongside him (virtually) through this. Yet, while this trauma is not new to black children, as I’ve already shared black trauma is almost a birth story for every child, but this triggers a collective trauma felt when we lose our leaders the most. For all the times blacks have been accused of being the villain in everybody’s story, in this story WE WERE THE HERO. What’s more, as an English teacher, it is not lost on me that in the Black Panther story both antagonist and protagonist were black but as Chadwick shared they really BOTH were HEROs in their own story. We just have to choose to believe it. So in this spirit, I challenge us to all acknowledge this profound grief and trauma of black children in this moment as they just lost a hero in their story. Don’t discount their pain, provide space for them to share their thoughts and feelings, their tears and their pain for the loss of their (ONLY) super hero. Yes, Black Panther can be recast but we can never get the spirit of what Chadwick Boseman brought to this character in the indelible minds of our children, teens and even adults. Also understand that this experience may have created triggers for our children of other loss that they have experienced especially during this pandemic. Let’s make room to discuss what triggers are and how we can support children in being self aware of their feelings and how they experience trauma especially in black schools and communities. (Yes, we still segregated guys) Let’s remove the stigma so we can begin to tear down our tapestry of trauma, unpack it and heal from it. If not for us, definitely for our black kids who need us to help them be their own hero in their own story to conquer all this trauma. (Now, let's make Wakanda real frfr) #WakandaForever It’s the “First Day of School Eve”for me and as I prepare to meet my new students in a little box on Zoom, I find myself in a space of anxiousness for so many kids on the other side of this little box. In this little box, across Atlanta and America, students are gathering to learn and to start their own journey of “distance learning”. But I am anxious for the little faces I will not see in my little box. For far too many of Atlanta’s kids, there's so many barriers already for them to learn and now in the continuous saga of this Pandemic, now there are entire boulders. From internet connectivity, lack of devices, and limited parent supervision, teaching in this climate just got a whole lot harder than ever before. That’s why when I got a text yesterday to help give kids lunch because Atlanta Public Schools (APS) added another barrier to the list for kids to get food, I grew even more frustrated. APS required families to preorder lunch a week in advance ONLINE. Did they miss the memo that families already are struggling with internet access? Did they not consider how their lunch request process would adversely impact the very community of students they sought to help? How did they not understand that families with so many odds against them would find it more than difficult to request food online a week in advance? Why didn't they provide a call-in option or other alternatives for ordering food?These were the million and one questions in my mind because I knew kids would go hungry if we do not find alternative solutions. Now more than ever, we must be more intentional about how we create solutions in this season. Yes, we are all under a great deal of pressure and must meet a ton of ever evolving needs but we must stay intentional about how we design solutions during and after this pandemic or we risk deepening the hole of inequity that we seek to solve. So, tonight I answered the text of course ready to help and advocate for families that could not. I made lunches for the local nonprofit who is standing in the gap for working parents, frustrated with broken systems and continued inequity but resolved to be apart of the solution. Yes, I pray that my little bit of help removed some of the barriers that some of our kids are facing so that more kids in Atlanta can be ready to learn from their little box on the screen. But it still reminds me that we have so much work to do as we begin to reimagine rebuilding education better than before. We don't want to ever go back to "normal" or where we were because that did nothing for poor black and brown children. We must use this space to retool ourselves, introspectively root out inequity, build new systems and processes that are rooted in community and people, and most importantly include those very people every step of the way. We no longer can build solutions without the people we are building for and just show them a fancy presentation at the end. In the words of Dr. Amber Johnson, we have to radically include them at the beginning. Solutions must speak to the human experience and not a business and efficiency one. Yes, that may take longer and may feel uncomfortable but if we don't we risk more generations of families stuck in poverty, low income communities with poor health and poor education. If I have learned nothing else from this pandemic, is we must be willing to do something radical in this moment to get to where we are going. I mean the FDA has a projected vaccine in 1 year when it normally takes a decade. So yes, we have to be willing and ready to be radical. On this "First day of school eve", I am challenging every teacher, community leader, parent and elected official to be radical as we rebuild for our future so we can remove these boulders that stand in our kids way and so those little faces in those little boxes have a fighting chance. As we’ve just celebrated the life of the civil rights icon, John Lewis, who began his activism at the tender age of 16, I ask myself why don’t we celebrate the same revolutionary power in our youth. Why don’t we lift up their voice more? Just as Lewis’ consciousness was shook at the death of Emmett Till at 15, so too have our young black children at the similar lynching of George Floyd and so many others. Our children understand all too well what is happening, yet are constantly not provided a seat at decision making tables or asked for their input. However, the reality is the collective consciousness of black children has always had to mature faster and learn the harsh realities faster than their white counterparts. I think of my own childhood where I learned at 8 that I was a “nigger” and my new “friend” Mandy could not be friends with a black gir because her grandfather told her so. At 8, I had to sit with a new consciousness and grapple with the existentialism of racism instead of innocently just play with dolls and sell lemonade. So nobody can tell me that our kids don’t know or have a wealth of experiences to pull from to weigh in on this pivotal moment in our history. Yet, we still relegate our kids to the ephemeral “kids table” to go play when they have invaluable insight to share about their world view and how they can contribute to change too. Heck, I have to ask my 1 year old all the time for her input or her daily dinner will be all over the floor because she will show me better than she can tell me that she doesn't like it. With the emergence of a global pandemic attacking the already vulnerable lives of black children and their families and their continuous battle with systemic racism embedded in every facet of their lives, they too have an opinion. Yet, every important decision, coalition, task force and advisory council leaves them entirely out of the loop. For instance, Mayor Bottoms, created an Advisory Council on Entrepreneurship YOUTH programs to seek out alternative solutions for unsafe street solicitation of water and even with YOUTH in the name and the target group is Black kids, no black child was appointed to the council. Again, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms created a Use of Force Task Force to grapple with humane policing policies in communities of color. Yet, black children are the MOST over surveilled children in the country with police over represented in their communities AND schools, but there was limited black youth engagement represented in this task force.(While there were 2 collegiate black youth on the task force, black elite groups tend to cherry pick black elite youth that present as polished and fit the trope of the “respectable black child” as a facade for true youth engagement and feedback). Sadly, the people who do get to sit at the table are mostly white elite corporations, agency and organization heads that are far removed from black youth experiences and have little insight to speak to the unique experience of a black child in 2020. We proclaim to the hilltops that black lives matter but that must include the voices of black children who will grow to be our next generation’s revolutionaries. We cannot wait for our children to grow up, be polished and presentable for mainstream consumption and then parade them around as a talented tenth or that is all we will ever have is a fraction of all the potential we will need to fight the oncoming battle for our humanity. We must uplift, champion and deeply listen to all our black children ( not just the elite and “respectable” ones). We must create space for their voices in every decision and radically include their voices, as we not only create solutions for them, but alongside them as well. This is how we harness their strengths, talents and gifts to nurture the next revolutionary iconic John Lewis or Angela Davis. |
AuthorEducator, student advocate and community activists. Archives
October 2021
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