Jose Vilson's Blog, page 12

An Open and Extended Response (On Testing Season)

I laid my lesson plans on top of the roller tray. I pulled off my “problem of the moment” off my printer and put scissors on top of them. I turned on my Promethean board and connected the AppleTV to it. I pulled out my iPad mini and turned to the released questions from the New York State math test for both 7th and 8th grades year 2017. I flipped quickly to the extended responses as shown on my lesson plan.

The students came in. Besides a salutation, I didn’t say anything. After a few minutes, I felt like I was merely floating about the classroom, not angry or elated. Just floating. Then, a student asked me, “Mr. Vilson, are you OK?” I snapped up and said, “Yes, but I’m getting concerned that we’re taking a little while to get ready for class.”

No, I’m actually fine.

The NYS math test starts on Wednesday and I’ve done everything in my power to teach the major (and minor) topics that could potentially be covered by this exam. Because I generally don’t do multiple choice assessments, I’ve geared the vast majority of my learning through open, extended response questions. For the eighth graders, I delved into scientific notation, gave multiple renditions of linear relationships, and drew comparisons between linear and non-linear functions through multiple representations. For the seventh grade, I made the vast majority of the work about proportional reasoning through modeling, calculations, and contextual examples. I was equal parts architect, linguist, and lecturer throughout the year.

I gave lots of space, but still tightened. I stayed after school and still heavily peppered classes with questions. I read every released question I could and made my own questions even more complex and as well aligned as I could. I’d testify that my work isn’t just to prepare students for the current grade, but the next as well because math is a student’s life work. I asked colleagues in and out of school about pedagogy and strategy. I immersed myself in professional development and perused the books in my library hoping to find the set of items that would help me help them.

But to what end? What are we opting into when we exert this much effort for achievement? Also, how can we not blame ourselves?

Tomorrow, hundreds of math teachers will be reviewing topics for another 45-90 minutes in the hopes of aligning student responses to what test-makers might want to see. “I like your answer, but I don’t know who’s grading you.” “Nice response and you still need to show ALL of your work.” “If you only put an answer down, no matter how correct, you won’t get full credit. How hard is it to just take your calculations and put it on your paper?” “Circle. Your. Answers. Yes, even if there’s already a response line.”

“No, we can’t just watch movies and play basketball after the test is done.”

We plow through the doldrums now for a set of exams that still affect stakeholders’ perceptions of students, parents, and educators in so many different ways. Even opting out, which I heavily support, is fraught with complexities and projections. Are students opting out because they’re anxious, because they feel unprepared, because they’re rebelling against the over-reliance on standardized testing, or because they just don’t feel like it? The latter seems to make so many adults twinge for so many reasons. Too many reasons.

Hope and anxiety meet at these crossroads.

The test doesn’t define us. The test isn’t the target. The test shouldn’t even have this much (undue) influence on our ways and means. The test makes us contradictory as our ideals and our actions conflict in plain sight. The easy thing to do, for those not in the classroom is to definitely make a case for one “side” or the “other.” The harder thing to wrestle with is the reality that in less than 48 hours, my students have been scheduled to take this exam that supposedly reflects the learning they’ve done all year.

These leaves fall on their desks, after which we don’t see the product until months afterwards. We’ll be fine. Or something.

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Let Us March On ‘Til Victory Is Won

Even on concrete, my shoes manage to screech at me when I’m chasing down a crosstown bus at 6:45 in the morning. My robust frame belies my uncanny ability to accelerate as the neon green sign flashes from a block away. Upon entering the bus, I’m met with less eyerolls like someone who’s holding up the bus and more with incredulity that I made it. I thank the bus driver whose coffee still hasn’t kicked in while driving dozens of passengers to their respective stops. We stop at a mosque, a church, and a Dominican bodega in succession. The screeches continue as I float down the subway steps, through the turnstiles, and between the closing doors of the C train.

By the time I’ve made it to my third floor classroom desk, I’ve clocked in 3,000 steps. I have yet to start the marathon.

Throughout this trip and the few others since last week, Beyoncé’s hitting another riff in her latest production, Homecoming (Live). She hums, chants, harrumphs, and raps through the touchstones in her discography while an HBCU-inspired band accompanies her vocals. She positions herself squarely in her identity as a Black woman artist who prefers her audience do the work of decoding should they have questions. The images she unfolds in her music accompany the visions she lays out for us in her documentary of the same name. Throughout the country, the Beyhive (Beyoncé’s fan club) has taken up a call to dance in sync and asynchronously. Even those of us who aren’t part of the conglomerate connect to the projections. Beyoncé herself caters the whole experience from staging and dancers to release dates and products. The mastery of her art form is only rivaled by the on and offline pandemonium that ensues over her musical products.

She’s gonna keep us whole past June 26th. Praise be.

On the surface, it feels weird to treat any artist as a demigod, but people have openly pledged fealty to her because she seems so intent on giving her fans what they want, responding to their desires publicly, and moving her audiences to places they may not know they wanted. Allow my absurdity, but “Ms. Carter” has a lot to teach us about so many of our educational spaces.

Specifically, how does someone organize any set of people from customers simply receiving information from us to people who see themselves as part of a larger community with common beliefs?

Lately, I’ve been saying that every star in a sky might shine differently, but they shine best when they’re together. How do schools organize around togetherness and community? What does it look like for both adults and children alike to see themselves as people with interwoven fates and common ideas about learning and passions?

What does this mean in spaces where we’ve collected the descendants of enslaved peoples, the descendants of victims and survivors of genocide, the descendants of bigotry and homophobia? What does this mean to people who we have yet to make reparations for and people who we continue to declassify while pilfering them for their labor? What does it mean for children without places to call home in the languages they speak, for children whose walls are either iron bars or glass encasements? How do we create a sense of belonging nor just for those within our spaces, but with our kin in spaces that may not look like ours?

This conversation is especially critical as testing season is upon us. The test prep engine is in full gear. Millions of students have printouts of previous test questions in front of them while educators stress the important of their attention. Schools have organized test prep rallies, their first such gatherings for the year. Students see tightly-wounds adults insistent on giving students self-care tips they should have suggested throughout the year. States have required classroom decorations and bulletin boards be covered during this time. The pressure mutes the energy in our schools.

If schools are the hive, are we making these institutions sweet enough for students to belong?

Beyoncé seems to give every element of her presentation their space to thrive. She chose the team that saw her vision through, picked the clothes and stage details with intention, and gave everyone their space to flex. The glimpses into the backstage reveal her insistence on them matching her energy, knowing how it might translate to ardent and casual observers alike. She sets the foundation for her performance by singing a cover of what we call The Black National Anthem, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” She does this in the middle of Coachella with the big energy one musters when they sing this song without apology and all the graces and courage it brings:

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
let our rejoicing rise,
high as the list’ning skies, let it resound loud as the rolling sea
sing a song full of faith that the dark past has tought us,
sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
let us march on till victory is won.

Many of our education spaces work overtime to exclude. We need more people willing to take up enough space so our renditions and dreams make it to center stage. I tithe to this.

photo c/o

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Where We Belong

When I first attended the annual National Council of Teachers of Mathematics conference, it took place in Salt Lake City, Utah. I’d never been to SLC, but the burgers were good, the company was cool, and Malcolm Gladwell was the opening keynote speaker. I was only a few years into teaching, but the carnival of math education aficionados drew me in. The names that influenced so many of our professional development sessions and textbooks came to life in their workshops and presentations.

I also knew it was a space to attend because one of these presentations showed the value of dividing fractions directly instead of using the reciprocal, a concept I use to this day.

Fast-forward to 2019, and I’ve been asked to speak as the first ever current classroom teacher to keynote in this space. I took this responsibility very seriously, so much so that I had a hard time telling anyone until the announcements came in their mailboxes. Even then, I didn’t know exactly what I’d say until a few minutes before I got on stage. I needed to use my platform, once again, to both elevate our profession and challenge us to dream for better. I understood that I have been in a unique position for a good while now. I had already been the first current classroom teacher to be a featured speaker at any number of prestigious conferences and universities. I did my best to embody how we allow educators to move the profession forward in ways that hadn’t been done before. I assured anyone who would listen that shortly after I spoke, I’d be grading papers and preparing for lessons only a few hours later, too.

But even with my resume, it felt pertinent to use the self as a conduit. This educator might be the first current classroom teacher to keynote, but I would certainly not be the only. What does it feel like to belong?

So many of our spaces we designate for math feel exclusive. What feels like a math community to some has been more of a math clubhouse to others. Whereas a community has a set of well-defined, open, and transparent set of guidelines, a clubhouse has trees, ladders, and secret codes that bar and deter outsiders from entering. What’s more, a community feels like a space where we don’t have to explain ourselves too much in the space where a clubhouse constantly creates airs and arbitrary rules in the service of rectitude. The latter confuses itself for the former because both consist of people, many of whom mean well.

But the latter keeps punching down because this protects the clubhouse. Professors and academics have dictated to standards creators that students have not been adequately prepared for the rigors of college-level math, so it must be the high school teachers’ fault. High school teachers, in turn, say that their schools implicitly filter students who don’t have the adequate work ethic and / or intellect for their higher-level courses, but it’s the middle school teachers’ fault for students not preparing students with algebra and pre-algebra content. In working with higher-level standards, middle school teachers look at elementary school teachers, the grand generalists of the profession, and determine without much inquiry that it’s their fault that students don’t know their basic operations. Elementary school teachers then turn to parents and society. Who gets to be mathy matters as much as the math itself.

All of this is troubling because our children start looking like blazing potatoes thrown in a spiral at the next grade with astonishing inaccuracy.

As I got deeper into the work, I encountered math-affinity spaces that did not tend to the stories that got the mathematicians and math educators there. Math was neutral, or so they’d say. Everyone had their places. People who gave professional development couldn’t also be a current classroom teacher, especially not one that works in environments like mine. People who attended math conferences regularly as featured speakers and panelists could not possibly speak to great effects about systems of inequity and our complicity and still teach. At some point, our education zeitgeist had made it so the people most affected by any number of reforms, policies, and practices could not themselves have voice over their own work.

And students don’t really get to talk about why they’re learning what they’re learning. We should be sick of it.

This gets even worse across race, class, gender, and other identity lines where assumptions about our math attitudes and aptitudes precede us. Clubhouses get created on a regular basis, whether they be the people who have the privilege of working on curriculum guides in their math departments or people who get to attend the large and small conferences to turnkey it to their staff or even the people whose proposals get accepted and on what grounds. Even now, when equity feels like it’s moving into a more central tenet of organizational work, people would much rather not hear the word “equity” uttered from the people most affected by inequitable practices.

Because, if people of color, especially black people, bring up equity, it becomes a gateway drug to truth, reconciliation, and reparations for the harm caused by communities that ostracized so many of us.

Which brings me back to NCTM. What would it mean to imagine a space where we all belonged? Who’s going to create the space where we don’t just want the phenotypes to change, but we also appreciate the agency and energies of the participants involved? Instead of waiting for us to understand the codes, when do we rewrite the rules so we give ample opportunity to create a community of mutual cares?

So, after several rewrites, I used my platform to discuss belonging, to say definitively that NCTM is a place where educators like me belonged. NCTM may not have felt like a space where we belonged, but I will work to make NCTM a space to love and make sure it loves us back. May our stories be inextricable from the histories taught in our classrooms and may we always see ourselves reflected in community.

photo c/o

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Teaching Intolerance

You’re not even supposed to be this public.

You stood out in a space that was 80% people of color. Your scruff and leather coat belied your notoriety. The managers and custodians stopped mopping to whisper to their co-workers as you passed by with the tacky cell phone pose. New York natives know not to gawk at people we’ve seen on TV, regardless of our perception about them. “Famous people” generally stroll through our city with little interruption from those of us who’ve been here before gentrification. They can buy their groceries, watch their movies, and dine at the local restaurant with little interruption. Perhaps you knew this about us and thought shopping with us on this quiet Sunday morning wouldn’t arouse much attention.

But I’m surprised lasers didn’t stream out of my eyes like Cyclops, burning your groceries and your scalp with equal force.

Even as you perused the produce, I couldn’t shake the images of you across the news, the braggart shaken off his pedestal. You’d spent years representing the worst of us only to have SWAT teams appear in your offices. Then, you re-emerged, ready to tell the country how you partook in sins. You helped foist a burgeoning dictator to the pinnacle of our executive branch and willingly provided white supremacy another level of prominence in a society already rife with suppression and disenfranchisement.

For years, you hid behind your profession, as if to say the suffering you’ve brought to millions across the world, including the policies and practices that have yet to come to fruition, were merely side effects of defending your client.

For a minute, I contemplated all the insults I had for you. This was a futile exercise for a man hated by so many across multiple ideologies. I looked at my wife, equally enraged that a person like you would share any space on this Earth with us, much less a space whose workers and shoppers mirror all of your former clients’ vitriol. (In truth, she had a bag of limes in her hand. I thought she might hurl them you. Consider yourself saved.)

Contrition is not justice. Testimonial is not justice. Embarrassment is not justice.

Philosopher Karl Popper once said that, in order for us to have a tolerant society, we necessarily need to be intolerant of the intolerant. I became the former intolerant.

As an educator with critical understandings of our country, I recognize that you – or whatever you believe you are now – are a symptom of a country unwilling to reckon with its own illnesses and actions. You wouldn’t have flourished in a country with principles and accountability, with many excesses and lack of regulation, with this much rancor against humans they treat so inhumanely. You might argue that our professions have us make difficult choices that stand in stark contrary to our personal beliefs about the people we serve. You might stymie the uninitiated, invite them to reconcile with their own wickedness, empathize with you as a man who ran into unlimited power, wealth, and grift.

But then the moment of honesty lies with yours.

Which authority made you change course? Was it your moral authority or the people with the handcuffs and the military training? When did the cost of treachery become too high? It wasn’t when your client, his cronies, and his party derided hundreds, if not millions, of people on social media, in rally speeches, his properties, or the House built by the enslaved on stolen lands. Your former client openly promotes “holding sites” for select immigrants. Your former client is openly hostile to people with religions he refuses to understand, including Muslims and Sikhs if he could ever differentiate. Your former client believes women’s bodies to be property akin to his other sources of emolument.

Most of your fellow shoppers don’t have the luxury of walking away from disasters even when we’re innocent.

I must have made a face because you changed lanes a few times after seeing me come in your direction. The store itself was telling you more than I ever could. You went to the cashier. You couldn’t pay our stories away. You are no hero. You will be remembered as a villain, if not vile.

Now, the disenfranchised have to – again – serve as custodians to a mess we did not create. We begrudge this of you. You – and so many of the people who once adored you – have created a mess beyond the pale.

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What You’re Not Gonna Do [Vox]

This weekend, I’ve spent the majority of my Internet time swatting detractors of my latest piece on Vox about the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT). Here, an excerpt:

Essentially, these schools enshrined into law the right to ignore school performance, grades, interviews, standardized state exams, or any other qualification in favor of a test that rarely aligns with the standards they learn in school, tacitly keeping these schools out of reach for under-resourced students and schools. The specialized high schools continue to exemplify why New York City has the most segregated school system in the country.

As I sifted through the books in my collection and the articles I had laid out in my browser, I stopped and asked if it was all worth it. The last time I stated my opinion on the SHSAT, eugenists plowed through my pieces with conjecture and made-up statistics. It’s been years. The voters voted for sweeping change. The same issues persist.

Except now there’s people who decided to look up my school and point out that our schools has “no 4s” and don’t generate the type of kids that would necessarily apply for the SHSAT. Said another way, this SHSAT-passing private-public school graduate went to teach at a school in need.

Right.

None of these qualifiers undermine my argument as a “winner” of these tests but it’s worth restating the dedication it takes to do the classroom work in a neighborhood with less resources in a school that’s open to all comers. I ask for us to think about the ways we can make sure everyone has successful educational experiences and these sets of folks prefer to infer that Black and Latinx kids just don’t work hard. Dog whistles abound.

You rather fight me than fight inequity. OK.

The point that probably hurts the most to read is that poor Asians have a sizable set of students in specialized high schools, seemingly discrediting my claims about poverty. As a long-time resident of the Lower East Side, I would look to my neighbors living in the tenement buildings in Chinatown and consider us kin in this struggle for educational attainment. By some accounts (see Tested), it would seem that we have a set of students who have been oppressed by the idea that this three-hour test means everything to them and their families. They see the eight specialized high schools as a means of breaking out of poverty and entering a direct stream toward the middle to upper class.

Said another way, we need to liberate the “winners” and “losers” of these special / magnet type programs from the thousands of dollars spent on test prep, the weeks and months of stress spent on these exams, and the mindset that we must punch down on other oppressed groups in order to disrupt poverty both individually and collectively.

Liberation means not having to choose between test prep and meals to get into a school that loves you back.

This is a history that Black people in this country have fought long and hard to achieve. None of the seats our students occupy are built the same. What you’re not gonna do is use my brethren as a wedge for maintaining inequitable school conditions.

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Take All The Space You Need (For Now)

It was a humid summer afternoon. I ventured with my son to a few stores along East 86th Street, enjoying parts of the city we don’t normally venture. I wore a black and orange Free Minds Free People shirt, my young one a white t-shirt and shorts. The sidewalks felt like people were walking shoulder to shoulder, two steps slower than their normal pace.

As we made our way up 3rd Avenue to Harlem, an elder white woman in a walker came to a stop and said “Excuse me.” My native New Yorker face belies my tendency towards hospitality and grace. “Do you need help?”

She says in , “You know the problem with you people is …” I already observed how she had already made a few snap judgments and my body already tightened up in anger. “… you really need to talk to your people about health and weight.” A handful of reactions ran through my mind as I clenched my fist. In the few seconds that felt like a few minutes, her voice had become a monotonous whistle waiting for me to break it. The faces around me had gone from minding their business to minding mine. NYC has any number of racial and intergenerational incidents daily, occurrences for people to film and cast judgments upon.

In that moment, I also recognized that my fist was holding my son’s hand. I mustered with furious eyes and bellicose tone: “THANK YOU! THANK YOU VERY MUCH!” My words rang out across the sidewalk as I rushed past the crowds. I took a seat in an emptier block just underneath a few trees next to an apartment building. It could have been uglier, and the fact that it wasn’t meant I’d have to, for a minute, sit there and gather myself while my son was none the wiser.

I was surprised my shirt hadn’t torn at the pits with the anger I felt at the moment.

I had already grown accustomed to the label XXL. I knew I’d have to pay extra for comfortable clothes and shoes. I knew I have to contort myself in airplanes and subways that once accommodated for wider shoulders. I already had a few comebacks for people who commented on my girth, and I ignored scales as long as my mood felt right. I wear this watch that tells me I average about 12,000 steps a day, a byproduct of teaching in a hundred-year-old building. In front of people, eating for pleasure was perceived as gluttony and eating for health was perceived as a pretense.

I’ve never not been large, even at my slimmest. My size 42 pants never let me forget from whence I came. I was called “slim” for a summer after I lost 22 pounds in camp. It was the last time I saw 40 on a measurement tape.

In a previous life, I would rue the times when I would sift through photos and videos in any number of events and I wouldn’t show up in the final curations. The message, perhaps unintentionally, looked like, “Your weight makes it easier for us to forget you.” I was selectively vulnerable because I perceived my body to be getting in the way of my goals. I tried too hard at job interviews because I knew my size would not give me the space I needed to shine.

We deflect fat jokes as “part of growing up” as children. The joke kept getting told on us as adults and our aesthetic norms.

Tangential to this conversation is the ways that our spaces try to belittle us, no matter how large. We’re asked to fold into frameworks, to blend into models that make us easy to dismiss. They ask us to follow when we don’t know where we’re going. They ask us to speak only when the time is right, the place is right, the raised hand is perfect for being called upon. Plenty of people has advice for changing the space, yet only want to change the space from afar, without us.

I fought all of these perceptions by promising myself I’d make myself undeniable, uninterruptible. I had to work past my insecurity through my works, my teaching, my writing.

This vessel has taught me how I must believe in the space my vessel has taken. I can’t apologize for this body that’s refused to conform to the narrow and linear. I can’t pain over the plethora of images these screens serve me when I perceive my work to be bigger than me. When I occupy this seat, I might twist and turn in it, but I know once I’m settled, I’ll bring my full being into this work of mine. I need for this body to be larger for the people I now carry with me wherever I go, the responsibilities I’ve been bestowed, and the visions I’ve embraced.

When people say that there’s more of me to love, I take it seriously. They’re gonna have to love me.

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For New York City To Love Us Back [Teaching and Living Here]

Question of the century: how do we create a profession that we can love and can love us back?

These ideas aren’t diametrically opposed, but they’re worth considering in the largest school district in the nation. The New York City I grew up in has changed in trajectory and culture, but not in its uncanny ability to amplify one’s aspirations. It’s cool to make fun of New York culture now that gentrification and social media have diluted our symbols, but Timberlands and a baseball fitted cap are appropriate uniform for four fierce seasons. And our tongues fire warning shots as barometers for trust.

You can walk 20 blocks in any direction and the empire uncovers a new facet of the body. The same hood glorified in our rap music changes into the architecture that poke its heads to create the preeminent skyline. Citizens discarded the stars for the artificial lights, and the concrete we walk on weathers weather and the economies.

New York City teaches us power lessons at an early age. When I walk through the Upper West Side and Chelsea, I expect their denizens to hold their bags tightly and move swiftly past me. When their sons and daughters run through the Lower East Side and Harlem, I expected rents and condos to rise as well. When I was a teen, I could walk down 14th Street and could see the Twin Towers, the Empire State Building, and Times Square all before heading to school, a scene so normal that I never considered what would happen if any of them fell.

Before the advent of blogs and cell phone cameras, native New Yorkers didn’t gawk much at celebrities. The culture taught us that just being from here put us on par with the another person’s lot. Outsiders would not outdo our hubris.

At the Schomburg, Brian Jones threw softball questions that I hit to the upper deck. As a 14-year venerated veteran, I felt it necessary to both represent the best of us as educators in NYC, but also shine light on the city as a whole. I remember watching one of our chancellors losing his job flanked by NYC parents and not knowing what to make of it. After college, I remember another chancellor standing in a privatized school and telling the schools under his stewardship that he wants his schools to be more like that one. I remember another chancellor lasting just shy of 100 days, rebuked for her inability to smell the smoke all around her.

I remember all of the bosses afterward while speaking to teachers new and old, who had only felt the material conditions of their schools worsen. Many of us literally voted high stakes testing and accountability out of our schools only to find similar approaches to schooling coated in words like “equity” and “access.”

When I first came to my school, the 100+ member teaching staff would tell stories of gang lockdowns and students both lost and found in their ways. The new chancellor had sought to shake the stories and anchors of our public institutions through school closures, breakups, turnaround models, and eventually turnover. No matter how hard the adults in the school worked, the neighborhood saw our school as the dumping ground for students who couldn’t get into the surrounding middle schools, a view that still persists. The difference is that now, instead of a handful of middle schools, there are multiple. The difference is also that, instead of 2000+ students in our care, our school now has one middle school with 250 students and two high schools on the upper floors.

The teachers and the students in our building get the blame for “flat” scores, even as the cast of characters has changed. Goals like “raising scores” assure that the institutions thrust its full force upon the most vulnerable and easily displaced, similar to the weight of economic policy. Educational gentrification.

People from outside of here will say “Why don’t you just leave?” Upending one’s entire homestead (and schoolstead) has proven harder than I could have imagined. People have this odd impression that a teacher like me is heralded by my principal / superintendent / chancellor (and his offices), as if I didn’t have to do much of what I’ve done against previous administrations’ wishes. For the last decade, I fought an array of different labels, all perceived differently by people with supposedly more important things to do than worry about my opinion. Anyone can name an initiative, an accolade, a speaking engagement, and I can name an equal amount of folks and events that tried to imperil that success and then some. The name tags continue to have both my name and my employers’ name at times when my employers both near and far refuse to hear me (and us) out.

But what does it say about a school system that works so hard to represent its students, its teachers, its city can so readily pretend to ignore … us?

The NYC me has always known wins and losses with no compromise. In any given hour, my students can both remind me of my purpose and assess my deep well of patience. I live for the sparks in their eyes when they understood ideas without me, the dopamine of our profession. I stretch my wishes for forgiveness when I take wayward behaviors too personally. I embody both the professional educator and the troubled adult, and thank God whenever the first identity beats out the second daily. I want people to visit me, but only come to my classroom to help me become better, not to belittle my way of being. I’m not concerned with being better than my colleagues as I am at being better than the previous me.

The NYC I grew up in fortified my resolve. Gunshots don’t ring outside of my Harlem window quite as often as my Lower East Side window heard. I still step on dime bags and the occasional dog feces on the sidewalk. I still see social and economic stratification as I cross Central Park both West to East and North to South. I still get my morning café from the bodega in my only Dominican accent, nod at the passersby, and still run up (not walk) the stairs to my room. I still poke at my kids who blame the train for tardiness when I was on the same one only a few minutes before.

I still know what teachers of color in NYC have gone through as a matter of legacy. The ways might have changed, but the means have not. No one discovers this, but some of us foist these truths to light. It just takes a little longer because of the burgeoning structures directly in the sun’s path.

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Writing as Threat

On the Saturday after I spoke on a panel at the Schomburg, I attended the Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators conference here in NYC. I supported my friends Julia Torres and Cornelius Minor as they gave a framework for authors and artists to ingratiate themselves to PK – 12 educators. After the spot-on workshop, Elizabeth Acevedo graced the ballroom stage. The voluminous curls on the gracious Dominicana can be seen a bodega away (in NYC, we have them on every block or two, right?). I carried de lo mío’s book The Poet X in my bookbag for the last couple of weeks. I am both exhilarated and infuriated that only now can such a young adult novel with a core identity of a poetry anthology.

The poet in me, who once read at the now defunct Cornelia Street Cafe and still yearns to do so at the Nuyorican, dedicated what little free time I have to this tome.

Somewhere in her speech, she speaks to her insecurities and how she eventually came to the conclusion that she would write for her very specific audience. The shift from “trying to write for everyone” to “putting the onus on audiences to move to her” is underrated. In a room full of white people, many of whom influence the bookshelves for major publishers and partnering districts, this was a queen telling the court that the food she decides to serve will be the main course. She wrested this power from the gatekeepers much to their amazement. For Julia, Dulce-Marie Flecha, and I, it’s the story of our survival in predominantly white spaces.

Then, she prophesied, “It didn’t matter how many stickers were on my book because, no matter how many awards and accolades I got if I didn’t believe that I was a writer.”

That jabs so many of our sides, too. I have the uncanny ability to believe exponentially in other people’s power even when I don’t believe in myself. I remember asking Luz (my wife) to write me a piece as part of a series on here. She had ideas swimming in her mind, but didn’t think of herself as a writer and kept pointing at me. I said, “Well, OK, but I believe you can bring a much-needed perspective for some educators.” When we published it, the piece was one of the more popular pieces on this site ever. She’s a writer. Because of the way writing works, much of what we know about the ethos of writing is baked in greatness, and our seeming ineptitude to reach the mystical apex.

Maybe we’re afraid that, once published, the piece will receive hateful and inauthentic commentary about our work. Sometimes we’re afraid that, if people love our work, we’ll drastically exceed our own expectations.

Insecurities are tricky. As fate would have it, I mingled with some of my favorite writers on the planet as well on the same Saturday. A few years ago, the idea that I could even share space with this set tightened my chest. Now, after a best-selling education book, over a thousand blog posts, dozens of speaking engagements at some of the largest conferences in America, and a website that until very recently was blocked from some of the largest school districts in the nation, I still have a hard time using “writer” as an identifier. Writing is reserved for people with strong first drafts and national acclaim from influential circles.

Meanwhile, I live in Harlem. I could aspire to the greats. I, a reader, have been exposed to them profoundly. I, like so many of us, refrain from calling myself a “writer” because of great writing. Perhaps.

For years, I’ve also had the fortune of playing editor for a few education writers and speakers, each time reading for voice and approach. Grammar is fine, but I prefer big ideas and stories told differently and thoroughly. I don’t shape others’ words so they look like mine. I give comments in hopes of eliciting more of what’s already there. I offer this as part of my mentorship suite to those willing to take the leap of vulnerability in this education work.

More recently, I and a few others get to preview Dulce’s work. Educators who aren’t subscribed to her Medium do themselves a disservice. My favorite writing happens when the margins throw pinchos at the hot-air balloon that is the zeitgeist. This piece approaches a conclusion with us watching Acevedo wax poetic about believing in herself as a writer. It continues with me telling my fellow Dominicana that, despite her best objections, she communicates new ideas that pulls people into a new understanding about her and us, too. She doesn’t have to aspire to Acevedo, Reynolds, Gay, Coates, or any number of contemporary flame throwers. She got this; she totally does.

Imitation sounds sincere but our biggest competition looks back at us in the mirror. I tell Flecha she’s a writer. My own writing threatens to call me out.

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You Don’t Have To Lie (Hire More Black Teachers, Maybe)

On Friday, I had the honor and pleasure of speaking at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, NYC with student activists Xoya David and Joshua Brown and writer-friend-luminary Nikole Hannah-Jones. When I got the invite from Brian Jones, I was in the midst of finishing one of my more triumphant performances in service of the profession. I was also shaking off the uncertainties of having a teacher improvement plan the prior school year. I’m holding the tensions of being a “national education leader” with the constant disappointment in my school district and negation of my professional decisions. Even a week before this event, I had no idea what I’d have to say. I struggle with systemic issues outwardly and battle with personal issues inwardly. But I was given the opportunity to tell New York City about itself in a week dedicated to liberation of the African diaspora in a space dedicated to that effort.

When someone asks me whether only Black teachers should teach Black children, I said, “It depends.” The person seemed to mock my response and ran out of the event. I didn’t lie.

The pros are plentiful. There’s more research showing the positive effects of Black teachers on all children, but especially Black children. Of course, white teachers (and others) may feel agitated by inference, but Black teachers are one antidote to the proliferation of white supremacy in our classrooms through pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment. Having a teacher who wholeheartedly empathizes with students who look like them, a teacher who adjusts their relationships in accordance to social norms they (we) already recognize, and a teacher who more readily observes intelligence in Black children matters in a big way. It’s deeper than implicit bias when so much of what we consider “normal” casts so many of our children to the side.

Adults who already come with a set of experiences that align with the children in front of them and can help them expand those experiences are critical to all this work. But it’s not enough.

For one, I’m increasingly concerned with internalized respectability and white supremacy with some of my colleagues. Never mind the number of people calling themselves educators who have rarely been to classrooms as adults. Too many of my colleagues stick lean on blaming parents for their plight and demean our children for mimicking the unhealthy elements of their own environments. The tropes about rap music, drugs, and sexual expression still get perpetuated across the “color” spectrum. Social media videos spark thousands of comments demanding for the imprisonment of children, with educators of color usually the recipients of the abuse and often the escalators of the conflict.

For too many of my colleagues, black students’ lives don’t matter. Some of my skinfolk don’t always have skin in the game, so that’s why they’re not my kinfolk.

But for the majority of teachers of color who leave at a quicker rate than their white colleagues, I more readily see how the system is designed to dispose of us. Our policies and practices have made it so educators of color across the country work in less-resourced schools where children of color are more likely to attend. These are the spaces more susceptible to inspection in the form of high-stakes testing, resources in the form of more adults with deceptive checklists, and the eventual take-over / shutdown / privatization with the dismissal of its staff. So many of us come into the profession with the optimism of righting wrongs that have been done upon us, our families, our friends, our communities, our people.

They come into a profession that reminds them that their lives don’t matter, either.

This is not a “don’t come to this profession” piece. This is a “we need a set of people that truly love our kids, and a profession that loves these people back” piece. I prefer to tell truths in the hopes of systemic change. I’m encouraged by the work so many of my Black colleagues (and others) do in the service of working with our most marginalized children, whether in public schools, alternative education spaces, or prison spaces. Without changing the critical consciousness within the education field and the people who run it, our uses of the words equity, access, and liberation are vacuous at best, regardless of who they come from. I remain hopeful because, without that hope, I have no reason to be in front of students daily.

Changing the color of the faces staffing the boat does not automatically change the boat’s course, but we probably need a whole new boat for the course we’re on.

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MLK’s Work Precedes Us And, With Resilience, Lives After [Medium]

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to sit live at Riverside Church to watch a spirited conversation between writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and newly minted congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. For a little less than an hour, TNC and AOC spoke up and around the current state of affairs, rarely mentioning the person working from 1600 Pennsylvania. Ocasio-Cortez has seemingly busted open the Overton window for progressives, deftly maneuvering conservative talking points and offering no apologies. Coates, no stranger to heavy critiques from across the board, asked the questions the audience wanted to know from this Latinx supernova.

On the same platform that MLK Jr. gave us his “Beyond Vietnam” speech in 1967, we were asked to consider what “Beyond 2019” looked like for all of us. After the event, I offered the following:

In other words, we need to keep building an education movement that, at its heart, is responsive and adjacent to the anti-racism movements, the pro-immigration movements, the economic movements, and the anti-capitalism movements. Black Lives Matter at our schools and elsewhere. Our students have led us to DREAM better. We need to assure that corporations pay their workers decent wages, which often includes so many of our students. Teachers shouldn’t have to spend thousands of dollars to create affirming learning environments for our students to make up for society’s lack of will.

If there’s enough money to spend for the United States’ war on terrorism, there’s enough money to make sure our students can close the generational education gap.

To continue reading, click here. As educators, it’s incumbent upon us to sit in our power and rectify our country’s wrongs in whatever capacity we can.

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