Jose Vilson's Blog, page 11

Oh, Aight [Giving Them The First Word]

It always starts the same.

A little noise. A small plastic flick. A few curses. A thwop. A burst of laughter. A myriad of ways for Student X to distract themselves from the classroom activity of the moment.

I put up one finger, give myself a three-second time out and say, “I’ll be patient with you.” Student X does Action Y again. “That’s twice now and I’m asking you to please focus on the Do Now / Objective / Lesson for now.” But, but, but … “I’m not blaming you or anything like that, and if you’d like some time to discuss, we can make time for it during classwork, but not right now.” Then Student X does Action Y for the third time. “Aight, cool, let me finish what I’m doing now and I’ll deal with it then.”

The students start taking out looseleaf or get handed a sheet of problems to work on together and I look back at the student who thought I forgot. “Can we speak outside?” My firm and dulcet tone belie my sharp and directive eyes. The student usually obliges out of respect and, for a moment, we’ve suspended the routine for a quick relationship refresher.

“OK, you first. How you feeling, you good?”
[silence]
“What’s up today? How are we doing?”
[puts their head down or paces around a few tiles in the hallway looking like they just learned another pee-pee dance]
“You have nothing to say now?”
“OK, Mr. Vilson, so what happened was …”

He did. She did. They did. They shouldn’t have. I was just trying to. I don’t know, it’s just that.

“I hear you, and I don’t want to take away from your concerns. Can we address it in a better way so that all of us can learn?”
Yes, Mr. Vilson.
“Can we do better?”
“Oh, aight.”

The student goes back to their seat and attempts to return back to Action Y to which I respond: “Remember the conversation we just had and how you said you’d try?” The time spent with one student for three minutes probably saved me another 15 minutes with the whole class trying to sort through the eventual escalation. In turn, I also saved face for both students and maintained our dignity in the work we’re doing in the process.

The first few weeks of school always feel less like a honeymoon and more like a circle dance, where people are learning how to read one another. The teacher’s charge and the students’ needs tug at each other even before the dancers come into contact. The teacher has a few dozen coryphees to do this dance with 45 minutes at a time, some competing with the objectives you’ve set out, others willing to follow the choreography.

In those moments that don’t show up in the lesson plan, it’s important to pull students to the side, primarily because for us as teachers. The student is doing what they do, which is not necessarily what they had to do or need to do, but what they do. In middle school, that often means acting out in ways that don’t comply with school norms, regardless of whether the teacher believes in those. The teacher isn’t necessarily asking for compliance, but, just underneath that, the understanding. What did the student react to? Is it us? Is it something before or after us? What are we as educators missing?

We don’t know until we ask.

Then it’s about the student and helping them with their metacognition. Students, like us, need time to think in the moment. Sitting around 30-40 people trying to achieve a similar (and often individual) goal can feel daunting whereas, in the hallway, it’s just us and the one (or two depending on who threw / said what).

But the story that comes out of that conversation isn’t that Mr. Vilson was mean, disrespectful, or terse, but was kind, generous, and accommodating. As I hope they are with me. People think classroom management is about relationships, and that’s true. Being mindful of how we build the relationships and the soul we put in behind these impositions is critical.

And when the one or two students want to call me mean in front of the class, I just pull out the “Oh, you remember when …”

They’ll say, “You got it, you got it …”

Oh, aight.

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Black Teachers as Reparations: My Remarks at the Congressional Black Caucus

The Center for American Progress in collaboration with Education Reform Now invited me and a host of other citizens with opinions on education to speak about education and racial equity. I’m honored and thankful they asked me to represent current classroom teachers as so few of us – if any – get opportunities to inform policy and practice on a regular basis. Below are notes that turned into my opening remarks for the panel. The conference’s theme this year centered on the 400th anniversary of the first person enslaved arriving in the colony of Jamestown, VA.

Good morning, class. My name is Jose Luis Vilson, math teacher in Washington Heights, New York City, and this is my fifteenth year teaching students math at IS 52. In addition to writing extensively on these issues extensively, including the book This Is Not A Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education, executive director and co-founder of EduColor, I’m also a father to a second grader who also attends public schools.

For me, this is a conversation about truth, reconciliation, and reparations. Black teachers are more likely to see students as talented and gifted, push students towards visions of college, and inspire students towards effort and resilience. Informally, I’ll also say they are more likely to build better relationships first, shift narratives from the dominant culture to an inclusive story, and pave the way for every other marginalized group to see their work realized, too.

This also comes with important caveats because none of this is perfect. Those of us who are Black educators need an orientation towards justice. We don’t “leave;” we’re more often forced out through any number of policies. Some like to use the “death by 1000 cuts,” but in this case, I like to call it death by 1000 mandates.

Really, Black teachers are a key part to re-envisioning the collective aspirations of what we call America. We are part and parcel of what reparations should look like here.

After a few more introductions, the moderator, Curtis Valentine, had asked about obstacles to fully realizing students’ potential:

To follow what my fellow panelists said, I’d like to echo the words of Rudine Sims Bishop’s work (shout-outs to Black women scholars!) on mirrors, windows, and sliding doors. For each, we need teachers of color to reflect the majority of public school students, we need teachers of color to show our white students who they can learn from and shake up their boring curriculum, too. We need teachers of color to help push the narratives in our curriculum, our pedagogy, and our systems about who deserves, who has a right to learn, what they learn and why they learn.

But there’s plenty of obstacles. Black teachers find themselves too often in our schools replicating the same roles they undertook during slavery times. We’re asked to be the overseers, to take on the more difficult students when it’s the entire school’s responsibility to assure every student is learning. The one Black teacher, custodian, social worker, or staff member has to control the kid instead of stepping into the nurturer role.

That gets us further away from what people purport is this American vision.

There was some stuff in the Q&A, too, but I’ll post it when the video comes out. In the meantime, hope you enjoyed what I’ve scribbled in my notebook.

Jose

p.s. – My newsletter is coming out every other work. I know you got soul.

photo c/o

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Come As You Are (Part 1)

I couldn’t help it. I checked my work e-mail. A list of names with offers I’ll never accept with things I’d never buy from them. A few security checks from central offices. Oh, and an automated e-mail from our teacher rating system that calculated our rating for last year. I skipped the paragraphs and went directly to the table.

Effective. Effective. Effective. This is no brag. I’m on my own rubric. And a few years ago, the algorithms didn’t bestow their blessings so readily.

I eschewed common sense for the sixth year in a row to fix my classroom the week before we’re actively getting paid to work. It’s also the first year in those six that I’ve gotten to keep the same classroom. Every year, I’m entrusted with discarded the old, the misused, the dusty, and the murky from a given classroom and turn it into a learning space for middle schoolers. Every year with varying degrees of success, I accomplish this. Every year, it had been decided that I need to do so for the next class. Every classroom strengthens my spacial and ancestral knowledge in this work.

Oh, and every year, most of my colleagues are already 10 steps ahead of me on Day 1 even with all the pre-work I get done the week before.

That’s why it’s important for people to understand what I’m saying when I accept this as my new-ish mantra: come as you are. Whether you just narrowly escaped the hurricanes in the South, spent the summer accumulating knowledge from any number of professional development sessions, or worked on that new project that you can’t share until it’s Instagram ready, come as you are. Your room isn’t ready. Your furniture is moved about. Your floors may not look to your specifications. You’re nervous about changes in curriculum, in administration, in the children you’re expected to serve this year. You’re mad that August changed to September so quickly.

You’re not ready. You’ll never be ready. Come as you are.

All I’m interested in whether you’re willing and able to put in the work on behalf of and with students. In no way am I advocating for us not to get paid for the work we’ve put in as professionals. I am very much pushing us to consider our orientations, though. The ways we initiate students, the rules we have our students engage in, the pedagogy we assign to our classrooms, and the conversations we have about the students and their parents matter in the way of this work. The empathy is as critical as the data we use to determine the moves we make in our open theaters.

As with any learner, I much rather work with people who may not fall along the same sociopolitical spectrum but want to build students academically and relationally than someone who thinks they have it all figured out. After fourteen years in the classroom, eight different classrooms, and a dozen or so keys around my neck to prove it, I know to never take for granted the knowledge I’ve acquired from the hundreds of students I’ve taught. It takes humility to recognize our expertise in the work we do while telling ourselves “We wish to learn more.”

I want to learn more. NYC teachers, I hope you’ll want to learn more with me as well. That’s what we beg of our students. What better models than the people who set them up for their learning, anyways?

photo c/o

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Transforming Schools Into Vehicles for Decarceration [On Morris’ Sing a Rhythm, Dance a Blues]

Recently, Gloria Ladson-Billings was asked whether the interpretation of her works has changed, to which she quipped: “I think that people don’t actually read the work.” In the last few years, people have interpreted culturally responsive education through mostly singular dimensions: implicit bias, diversity trainings, or recruitment and retention of staff and curriculum, all valid. Where people get lost, as Ladson-Billings states, is that there are three pillars of her praxis: student learning, cultural competence, and sociopolitical consciousness. She adds later on:

A hallmark for me of a culturally relevant teacher is someone who understands that we’re operating in a fundamentally inequitable system — they take that as a given. And that the teacher’s role is not merely to help kids fit into an unfair system, but rather to give them the skills, the knowledge and the dispositions to change the inequity. The idea is not to get more people at the top of an unfair pyramid; the idea is to say the pyramid is the wrong structure. How can we really create a circle, if you will, that includes everybody?

People need more cogent examples of this “circling up.” Insert Monique Morris. Best known for her best-selling book Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, Morris takes a deeper, metaphysical dive into the work to liberate, unapologetically, Black and Brown girls in our schools in her latest book Sing a Rhythm, Dance a Blues: Education for the Liberation of Black and Brown Girls. Couching the work in “blues women,” Morris provides a plethora of examples that schools can start implementing on Day 1. Check her ‘graph on the ideas of restorative justice:

… While most children may not be of actual royal lineage, when they believe they’re “fit to wear a crown,” they’re likely to feel worthy of redemption. Even when they make a mistake, they understand that the response is not intended to derail their learning or their lives, but rather to reconnect them to their true purpose. The neglect – or erasure – of this identity can lead to girls internalizing harmful historical narrative about their inferiority, and could even leave them feeling as if no one cares about them.

The easy thing to do with texts like Morris’ is to say that, because it applies to Black and Brown girls explicitly, it can implicitly apply to everyone. While there are arguments to be made on either side, I appreciate the specificity. From the operations of the school to the attitudes we as adults display towards them, Morris’ voice projects authenticity, resolve, and urgency about our girls’ needs in our work at school. Consider this verse about schools and how Black and Brown girls perceive their own participation in it:

“[In schools] you are not here,” [Brittany Brathwaite] continued. “We are going to teach you about other people, about other people’s history, other people’s experiences. You don’t exist.” Many youth of color are like, ‘We go to school, but we’re not in school’ – meaning, we’re not in any part of the school outside of our mere presence there.”

Sing a Rhythm, Dance a Blues: Education for the Liberation of Black and Brown Girls is not a research review; it implores researchers to look at the intersections of race and gender to better serve all of our children and incorporates stories from multiple voices for multiple perspectives. It actually explores liberation in essence, and how we as adults have a crucial role to play in this abolition work. On Day 1, schools must have their minds set – yes, I know, but not that kind of “mindset” – on how our students truly build relationships with our students with a deeply contextual understanding of our students as people. Morris argues convincingly for our girls through an educational, relational, and sociopolitical lens, all three no more important than the other:

To be free of criminalization, they need a place to be the leaders, to repurpose their pain, and to apply the lessons they learn in life to the theories and concepts they learn in the classroom. They need school to be a place where they can tap into the source of their healing.

Yes, it’s worth your time spending a few professional development sessions reading this work. As reflective practitioners, we should always look for systemic and tangible approaches to helping our most vulnerable and traumatized students. This can apply to any number of students across gender, race, class, sexual orientation, religion, and other identity markers. Morris’ book feels like an invitation for researchers and practitioners to love the people they’re writing narratives about the way Morris loves the girls she works with. And it’s also a marker flag that tells the world, “Should you forget my girls, I won’t.”

The book is so fierce and written with clarity that prison-like conditions for schools are not the pathway to justice. Actionable love is.

photo c/o

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The Great I Am

The essential question: how can we reflect the changes we want to see in the world?

Because I don’t have students in front of me during the summer, I have time to ask myself existential questions that offer space for self-congratulations and self-flagellation. In Dominican culture, we laugh with friends and relatives about the accuracy of household weaponry like belts and sandals. It also taught me to be overly suspicious of where kudos come from and what vulnerability looks like. The crack and the slap call to ancestors in percussion and oppression, and my genes remember and remind, curdling my blood yet fortify my bones.

No more was this truer than two days ago at the NYC Panel for Education Policy meeting on July 31st, where dozens of attendees came to either support the Department of Education’s definition for culturally responsive / sustaining education or denounce Chancellor Richard Carranza’s very existence. Many of the supporters included an amalgam of citizens led by the Coalition for Educational Justice who proposed the definition as a first step towards interrogating our education system through the lens of our most marginalized and ignored citizens in our city.

While I won’t speak negatively about the detractors here, I felt it critical for me to be there. I sat with supporters in front of me, and with detractors filling up the rows behind me. As they began their “Fire Carranza” chants, I turned towards them and said, “We want textbooks in Cantonese, too! We want books in Mandarin, too! Don’t you think we should have characters that look like your children in the books you’re learning from?” A few sat to rethink their participation in this event, but others laughed in my face, and not for lack of understanding. When some parents and educators began to chant “Si se puede!” another white agitator led the chants to depose Carranza again. The eruptions made children and adults cry for various reasons. None of us who supported this policy knew this would be an easy policy to pass.

One man in particular took it upon himself to sit front and center to abruptly voice his concern with Carranza. As I moved up a few rows to quell his assumed power over the proceedings, I asked myself “Why me?” Baked into this question brought a self-consciousness I couldn’t escape. While it’s true that my activism was critical as a graduate of the very district we were holding this meeting in, as a teacher in NYC public schools, and as a parent of a public school second grader, my enthusiasm has also been a source of antagonism, envy, and hate. Could I use my voice in this moment as a means of support and love or, in my zeal, would I open up the doors to more hate mail, Trumpisms in my social media, and images of bodies of color in my notifications? Can I both be problematic and privileged while vocalizing the needs of students and citizens who grew up in a similar lot?

What’s liberation look like to me? To me, to me, to me, to me? Am I a fully realized human being to everyone around me or a canvas upon which we can project our worst insecurities? Am I patient enough? Am I enough? Am I supposed to be sure forever or just sure at this moment?

My name and number were called up to the mic. I barely remembered what I said. I asked to speak from the moral imperative this policy would instill, and the ripple effects of the largest and most segregated school district in the country to set us on a different path. I never sought to be captain of this ship, but I’m honored to have served. I simply asked, against the backdrop of confusion and consternation that we ask ourselves where we’d be positioned in moments. I said, “If you’ve ever wondered where you would be during slavery, during Reconstruction, during the Civil Rights movement, this vote would be evidence to this,” and sincerely hoped they’d join me.

Testimony after enthralling testimony came through the speakers, but I was relieved and shook. The chancellor implored the panel to not make this movement about him as a person, but about the merits of our collective. I couldn’t have imagined that the full panel would vote unanimously for this beautiful work to move forward. After a few celebratory embraces and daps late into the night, my mind was in Los Angeles, where I’d catch the first flight out the next morning to tell my part of our story about the work NYC is doing to move us into true inclusion for all of our children. This isn’t just a win; it’s the first of hopefully many.

Future generations would never have to ask where our hearts were when the moment came to move our system forward. A policy written by fully realized human beings.

What’s more, my skin, my body, my being too often allow for the systems and spirits to claim unearned space. I had to relearn how to step into my power shortly after my wife gave birth to my son. Some might have more caution stepping into danger after becoming a father, but I find myself stepping two feet into it. I’ve learned that I don’t have large institutions backing me financially nor spiritually. I don’t have a large family on which I can rely. I don’t demand loyalty of my friends and associates and learned never to have that expectation from anyone except those who live in my house. I don’t have a prestigious title I can boomerang at my critics and I’ve moved away from the lack of nuance that would disconnect me from the parents and students I interact with. I’m too impeninent about justice to receive mainstream recognition, too righteous to dilute my speech.

My spiritual advisor told me to work on my greatness. Ashé. She’s among my favorite critics. My paths have already been ordered and, at points, I didn’t even know I was walking. I’m going to walk.

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They May Not “Know” Math, But They Can Tell They’re Divided

In 2012, I had the pleasure of reading a poem dedicated to NYC public schools at a Save Our Schools rally in City Park Hall. In the midst of the rally, a handful of Black elders approached me and said, “Hey, before people came here, we had a rally about Black education and we’d hope you can join us.” I simply nodded and understood the gravity of what he’d been asking. For a generation of Black and Latinx folx, ethnic studies in schools was an extension of asking our school systems to see them as people, citizens deserving of an education as a whole. This solution spotlights racism and all its extensions into our students’ lives. The elders in front of me had seen how the ethnic students movement was borne of the larger civil rights movement and made its way through institutions of higher education.

Sadly, our school systems in PK-12 never addressed this on a substantial level, so while the anti-high stakes testing movement was at a peak in the years of the Obama administration, we still had a centuries-old question as to whether our Black students (and others) felt like full human beings in these spaces. More often, they didn’t, and still don’t.

To many, the basic pillars of education are reading, writing, and arithmetic. Generally, anyone with an opinion on education uses the conversation about these tenets as a touchstone for whether students are learning what they ought to learn. From there, the lines get blurry. Some believe students should learn from rote memorization and basic concepts that they too mastered in their academic careers. Others believe students should learn through so-called “progressive” means: ideation, inquiry, and intentional facilitation. Other still have solid questions about the necessity of these knowledges in a world replete with technologies that facilitate these subjects more readily.

Threading all of these visions for education is a sense that students should learn their subject areas the way their parents did, even as initiatives like the Common Core State Standards has prompted states to reconsider an adjustment. Yet, cognitive dissonance also settles in when we also want our students to do and be better than the generation who came before them. We’re asking students to aim at moving targets: jobs that don’t exist, tech that hasn’t been imagined, sciences that have yet to reveal themselves.

Oh, and that we’d like for this to happen in a country utterly deliberate in its subjugation of our most marginalized and oppressed youth, from our students in our early childhood education programs to the most important classroom in the world: The White House.

While this alliance is by no means perfect, we’re finally at a point where a chancellor would like to address systemic racism in the nation’s largest public school, a mayor that’s gotten out of the way, and a coalition of the mightiest students, parents, educators, and other deeply impassioned citizens who want to see things done a new way. At the next Panel for Educational Policy meeting (please click on July 31st, 2019), this broad coalition intends on moving forward with a definition of equity that doesn’t just amount to curriculum alignment and management realignment. We expect and have experienced a slew of derision for simply believing that everyone deserves a fair share of the opportunities our city proffers. (#WeDidThatWork on the way). Some columnists and policymakers would like to pretend that this coalition wants to divide the city than unite it.

Yet, the divisions are already there and have always been. We can no longer pretend that the most segregated school system in the country wasn’t already divided by plans, schemes, and laws that explicitly call for the various divisions of the rich and the poor. We can’t keep crying “identity politics” when citizens under pseudonyms use our Asian colleagues as wedges to continue subjugating our Black and Latinx youth. We can’t say “There has to be a better way” when these words often get used to dilute and subvert the direct intentions of the people most impacted by the lack of resources and opportunity. We can’t say that “everyone just needs to have good teachers” when so many Black and Brown teachers who our students connected with were harassed, harangued, dismissed, and pushed out of the profession through bastardized rubrics and wayward test scores.

Perhaps the claim is that students are “struggling with basic English and math,” an argument inconsistent with the thrust of the last three decades of the accountability movement. But we must know this and we must know this well.

Maybe our students can’t do math, but they can tell when they’re divided.

They can tell which schools love them for them. They can generally tell which adults care about them no matter how tough they present themselves. They can tell when another set of students is getting better or worse treatment based on social cues they’ve received since they were in their diapers. They can tell when the characters in their textbooks don’t look like them, or how people are more receptive to their struggles when a furry animal stands in their place. They can tell when the co-located schools with more resources and less students in the same building also have to stand in straight lines and get suspended at disproportionate rates.

To wit, culturally responsive and sustaining education isn’t just for Black and Brown students. It’s for everyone.

Asking our school system to honor everyone’s contributions to society and not just an elite few means everyone learns better. Prompting our policymakers to interrogate practices and laws that implicitly and explicitly bake bias and racism into our works means everyone can do better. Building relationships with students beyond a grade and a greeting at the door means everyone, especially our rich folks, can start to see how this isn’t just one person’s problem, but our city and country’s collective issue.

So, in a sense, that infamous yellow rag was correct: our city has been “readin’ and whitin’” for a long time because it’s evident that the experience of so many others have been ignored if not erased. Now, let’s continue to push the work so future generations never have to ask what we did when we were presented with these challenges.

We can’t wait to solve these problem sets; this is our task.

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The Breaststroke (A Reflection on the 2019-2020 School Year)

The last time I went into a swimming pool, I did my usual routine. I’d put my full right foot in, slowly lean with my left foot, and draft full body into the water. I’d wait a few minutes before doing an accelerated vertical drop so as to wet my shoulders and head. I wasn’t afraid, but the thought of the few seconds of instantaneous chill running through my neck gave me pause. The second thought of not actually immersing myself in the water was worse, and so I dove.

That’s how my school year went.

I never once doubted I could swim, um, teach, but depending on the day, people confused me dipping before the eventual pull-up for me drowning. Oh, I’m gonna get an “ineffective” on planning lessons? Cool. I’m gonna get a developing on a few other dimensions? Cool. Oh, people are secretly trying to humble someone who’s already humble? Cool. People are mad because kids swear by my pedagogy in times when no one else is visible? OK. Got a follow-up observation the day after Christmas break when all the kids weren’t even back yet? Alright. I’m still not that professional even as I’m moving students to their classes in my free time, spending after-school hours with students, and supporting colleagues who otherwise don’t feel supported? Cool.

Lessons cycle back into my circumference. I already went through a teacher improvement plan and thought I’d be emancipated from that treachery. In moments of reflection during the snowy afternoons, my room would lose natural light from the windows. My serious demeanor, hefty exterior, and dark skin made me an easy target for villainy. All black everything and in abundance.

I never lost my form, though. I still believe most of my students learned a lot, even my more difficult class. I still took every opportunity in and out of class to get better for and on behalf of them. I still kept at it even when it got rough. I still called parents and assured them that their child would come out of my class better for having had me. I had to signal to everyone that the real me would poke my head out of water through the ebb and flow of the year.

On the Friday before the end of the school year, I conducted a band, announced an award, and called out the names for the eighth grade graduates. After saying I wouldn’t get involved with graduation. That evening, I was on a flight to Dallas, TX to speak to future educators at the Educators Rising National Conference. After saying that I didn’t see my own future in teaching. I flew back to NYC, ended the school year on a relaxed note, and shut off the lights of my classroom until next year. That afternoon, I celebrated a colleague’s retirement with the rest of my school. That evening, I was on another plane to speak to policymakers about this work with students. After I said I’d only focus on my own classroom.

I touched the wall of the swimming pool with my hands, gasped for air, flipped over, and pushed off the wall with my feet. I’m taking the summer to strengthen my core and my core values, to rub cocoa butter on the beautiful and robust skin that I’m in, to use sun as disinfectant, to move this message of peace, justice, and equity forward for all of us.

Let’s thank my Higher Source that I learned to swim when I was young. None of these situations were deep enough to keep me down.

photo c/o

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When Were We Ever Indivisible? [A Reflection on NYC Schools Chancellor Carranza]

A newspaper in the city recently reported that nine New York City councilmembers have called for NYC schools chancellor Richard Carranza’s firing, saying he’s more focused on “ethnicity instead of efficacy” and prefers to pound the pavement with his “rhetoric.” Since stepping into the role of chancellor, Carranza has intrigued observers of education reform with a bevy of questions, a series of managerial realignments, and a ramp-up of equity and cultural competence talk. He’s even poked the multi-headed hydra we call “gifted and talented,” shaking the rafters of our specialized high schools.

As a 14-year classroom teacher, I struggle with the moment we’re in with respect to our schools. For most – if not all – of my career, education reformers who considered themselves leftist would tout market-based solutions as the revolution necessary to assure our kids an adequate education. They too would use rhetoric that felt inflammatory, but the press coverage often kneeled because the mayor at the time was a billionaire media magnate and supporters felt comforted with shifting the blame towards communities in need of reinforcements for this centuries-long battle for a quality education. Discussing equity is in vogue in education and I perhaps played a part in this movement. Yet, I see how anyone can post the word “equity” to mean anything they want it to mean.

I believe Carranza can actually explain in depth what equity means to him, and that’s turned the usual skeptics into fans.

For a small window of time, we have a chancellor willing to speak directly to the elephants in the halls around him, a mayor who gives him the space to forcefully move forward with an equity agenda, and a wide array of students, parents, educators, and other concerned citizens who see the products of their work come to fruition in their representatives. The lies our city tells itself about wanting change without changing itself have frustrated even the strongest of us. Our city, the diverse colossus, cannot muster the courage to see its own institutions as splintered, underresourced, and racist in its functions.

Also, this city has a few people angry at a chancellor willing to point out what’s been evident to observers both near and far. That is to say, we’ve been divided, and there’s no clearer sign of that divide than in our schools.

It’s not just the Specialized High Schools in need of transformation, either. We’re divided when some of our schools have balanced numbers of students across demographic lines, but the gifted and talented programs have all the white students and all of the special education and slower-tracked corridors have mostly people of color, especially black kids. We’re divided when our false options lead frustrated Black and Brown parents to stand in 100° weather for a lottery and when they don’t get in, they feel like they’ve failed twice by going to their local public schools. We’re divided when white parents merely shrug when they don’t get into schools of their choice and pay thousands of dollars to get their children into the private schools of their choice all while divesting from their schools.

We’re divided when our public schools still allow for some folks to get their individual child personalized attention based on the whims of a parent’s influence and finances. We’re divided when we pretend racial attitudes don’t influence our students’ experiences in the classroom based on the color of their skin, their phenotypes, and the neighborhoods in which they reside. We’re divided when white students still rarely see teachers of color in their core classes and when children of color know their teachers will probably leave in a couple of years for any number of reasons. We’re divided when we’ve ingested so much of the poverty narrative that we don’t make way for the brilliance of our Black and Brown children that don’t conform to the hegemonic demonstrations of said brilliance.

We’re divided as we have been for decades. Kumbaya never really made it to the hood.

My years of experience with Chancellors Klein, Black, Walcott, and Fariña tell me that it’s important to remain critical of folks in power, even if folks we agree with wield said power. Folks who’ve read this blog know I don’t shy away even as I know they employ me. For one, there’s still hundreds of us who wished the equity and culturally-relevant pedagogy had reached our superintendents and administrators. There’s still an overemphasis on outdated and debunked visions that our higher-ups still tout. Awful interpretations of the Danielson framework and favoritism still persist in our schools as well. In other words, one man alone, or even a cabinet full of Black and Brown folks won’t solve all of our city’s problems in a couple of years.

However, the pushback to Carranza’s insistence on naming what’s visible strikes me as a moment of awakening for his critics. He called himself a man of color and people clutched their imaginary pearls. He makes the leadership reflect the racial diversity of the city and people want to sue. He plays music with the kids and people confuse him with a clown. This all says that they’re not actually listening to the people they purport to serve or have digested too many of the infomercials disguised as TV shows and movies advertising the strength of NYC. Our strong, wrong, and fragile critics prefer the system that works as intended, not the way that might actually look unified.

How can anyone aspire to structural change and not speak to the roots underneath the foundation? Without bringing up massacres, when was NYC ever indivisible? When?

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Thanks For Coming To My TED Talk (For The Culture)

I’m so proud to share my most recent TED talk about teacher voice with the world for various reasons:

I talked about my family (shouts to Luz and Alejandro!)I talked about my own classroom and students (shouts to last year’s 801-803 in the video)I shouted out #EduColor (We really outchea!)I concretized the definition of teacher voice (Please share it widely)I shared screen shots of my teacher evaluations with the world (“No weapon formed against me shall prosper,”)I did this in front of NYC Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza!

Imagine my shock when I found out that Carranza and I would appear as bookends to this event at TED HQ on the day of. I had prepared this talk for a month, mulling over every word, every slide, every GIF, and every salient point that I wanted to fit into this 10-minute talk. I had already given a TED talk that still gets watched in professional development sessions, but this felt different. The stakes were higher. I had more data points, including my own son in school.

When I finally had a product I liked, I asked a few friends and family to join me. Then it happened. “By the way, here’s the list of who’s in attendance.”

After I took a few seconds to inspect the list: “You sure this isn’t going to be awkward?” I told the organizer.

“Oh, you’ll be fine. You got this, right?”

“Right.”

As you can see in the video, the chancellor and his guests, including many of his cabinet members, attended my talk. It’s one thing to critique your boss after everything is all said and done and quite another to do it live and in person. “Yooooo, Jose, that was ballsy …” was the gist of what Luz said about my talk.

Needless to say, I refreshed my e-mail about a thousand times expecting any number of notices and call-ins. I never got one.

But even if it had come, I knew that this moment was too important to let pass with mediocrity and platitudes. These moments where we have a specific audience and communities we must represent are the ones made for us. The moment for teachers, especially those in marginalized spaces, was here and I’d be the one to bring it.

In my case, I don’t know how many Black / Latinx educators from the hood get the opportunity to represent the profession and the movement forward, but I take that responsibility seriously. I hope this gets shared far and wide, especially in the spaces most likely to doubt our capacity for movement building. I hope my message resonates for the veterans who keep having to burn from both sides of their well-lit candles to the future educators who deserve to know a profession that can be fully theirs. I did this also for the children in our care and the parents who trust us with their gifts to the world.

Mostly, I did it for you. Please watch and show love. It’s our way.

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A Note About the Fifth Year Anniversary of This Is Not A Test

I wrote this book for you.

For some of you, it means I wrote this in love. There’s always that first visit to the local bookstore when we scan the education section and don’t see a book that tangentially relates to your qualms and visions. Most of the narrative-based books are written by professors, ex-educators, celebrities, and wunderkinds with a connection to a highly visible outlet for their story. The ones written by actual classroom teachers – the very few there are – are relegated to instructional books that publishers can sell en masse to districts flinging their arms for a life raft.

At the time, there were plenty of people implicitly competing for the “best” teacher blogger, teacher writer, or education writer. Some publishers forced teachers with narratives to follow the instructional template even when the educator had an actual set of stories to tell. Other publishers just threw as many books out as possible in hopes that perhaps one would stick. Some people write books in hopes of raising their platforms, knowing they’ll have plenty of opportunities (and connections) to write more. Some even wrote books as a “teacher” even when they left the classroom and schools a long while ago. I went into this process knowing that this one book would have to both convey the urgency of now and last forever because teachers like me rarely get opportunities for more than one.

Haymarket Books offered me the opportunity to be a legit author and not just because they’re a well-respected publishing house. Julie Fain and Anthony Arnove took a huge chance on me. Liliana Segura printed out my manuscript and marked more than half of it in red at our first meeting. That, too, made me write well and write more. Sarah Grey did her set of nips and tucks on my book, and heard me when I said, “You know this has to be immaculate because it’s my first and because I’m Black, right?” She was an accomplice in my writing. Their whole team blessed me until and after the publishing date. Truly.

They helped me pursue my vision. I didn’t have to change my voice to sound like what I thought my favorite writers would like to read. I only had to outwrite myself. In the process of editing the script, I lost my math coaching position. My father died. So did Nelson Mandela. I almost didn’t birth this book. You didn’t let me not write it.

A few hours after my book release, I was on my way to the White House, carrying all the aspirations of New York City and all that we deserved with me. This book is for you.

This book is for the rest of you, too. There’s a handful of you who hate the idea of people who directly work with kids actually writing their own narratives. It cuts the money you make from hustling through school systems with solutions recycled from different eras in education reform. It stops you from doing speaking engagements about how the humans in certain communities are horrible for not espousing white middle-to-upper class values. It hurts when educators actually have better and more people-oriented solutions than your venture-philanthropy-funded policy paper did. It irks you that your notions of what’s “too” radical or not radical enough get challenged into non-linear spectra.

It allows you to disregard us since we can’t really attend your 9-5 policy meetings, briefs, panels, conversations, luncheons, and then won’t get invited to your after-hours galas and celebrations because we couldn’t attend the former, either. It insulates your power to designate who gets the title of favorite teacher, teacher of the year, award winner, best representative of this school / district / state / country / world, teacher who deserves this set-aside cash, teacher on our promotional materials, teacher who gets to travel, teacher you said could do that prestigious thing.

It gives you permission to say “You’re just a teacher. Of course you don’t have the time to write for yourself.” And the temerity to speak on behalf of folks who can talk for ourselves.

There’s something all of you need to know. We need more books by people currently working in front of and with students, especially from marginalized spaces. We need books from our underresourced schools with Black and brown children that don’t suggest they need saviors to dismantle their oppression. We need books from our prisons, shelters, and other alternative spaces where we get to interact with human beings in the text, not the stereotypes of their being. We need books from a variety of people of color from across gender and socioeconomic spectra. Books that don’t pay attention to craft, message, and audience dilute our purpose, even those that have sell thousands of copies. Too many recent “teacher” books weren’t written by folks in spaces where they regularly work with school-aged children.

Our society hasn’t made space for educators to write as fully human. I wrote this book as a Black / Latino cis-male who grew up on the Lower East Side in the projects and went back to teach in Washington Heights for the culture. What’s it like for those of us who write a book that would probably get us fired, yet we stay?

I encourage those of you wanting to occupy this narrow and uncongested lane to consider how our words converge with our pedagogy and experiences. I would love for you to disavow the idea that we don’t belong on the same platforms as our favorite celebrities, professors, writers, politicians, and gurus of the moment. I urge you to write the book that feels best aligned to the individual and collective works you’d like to do for the time allotted to you on this Earth. I want you to ground it in the craft of writing along with the stories that need telling.

I wrote this book as the book for us. This book is for us.

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