Jose Vilson's Blog, page 3

On Being Haitian and What We Teach Ourselves

Note: Thanks to the thousands of you who’ve subscribed to my newsletter thus far. I’ll be writing more regularly here, but if you’d like to support my writing, please support here. Thanks!

I have a confession to make: I went out on a school night a few months ago.

The Carib Biz Network and Little Haiti BK co-hosted Island Icons: A Haitian Heritage Celebration, an event celebrating people of Haitian descent making impact in their spheres. I witnessed the atmosphere vibrate in Kreyol and English tongues, appetizers and drinks flowing, Black people in multi-colored garbs around tightly-fit tables. It was great just to be in the room.

As a participant, I still had that nagging feeling from my youth when I couldn’t communicate with the other Vilsons because I never even learned French, much less Kreyol. But the grown-up took over and said to myself, “Actually, this moment is a gift.”

Little did I know that this event, a personified spectrum of the Haitian diaspora, would be so relevant now. As a presidential candidate and his vice-presidential nominee spew hatred about Haitians (again), it matters how we meet the moment. Some have decided to inundate our social media feeds with memes. Others have dodged the question altogether with vague calls for what democracy we have left. Yet, we should consider how building community is about belonging and the credentials, norms, and values to achieve membership within the community.

Really, as so many of our schools demonstrate, polarization looks like pushing more and more people out from a visible mainstream. People of Haitian descent know it too well. America can do better, especially from our classrooms.

On multiple occasions, I’ve advanced the idea of teachers as the vanguards of society. For better or worse, teachers are some of the first adults in a child’s life that transmit a society’s values onto present and future citizens. So, when justice organizers advocate for a culturally responsive sustaining curriculum, it isn’t just for a small set of students, but for everyone. As much as I appreciate groups learning about themselves, we need opportunities for everyone to learn about each other. The ostensibly neutral curriculum still minimizes slavery, colonization, misogyny, ableism, and a litany of injustices that students deserve to know.

After all, if we keep putting off addressing and redressing these injustices to the future, shouldn’t the future know what we’re putting off?

Of course it makes sense that schools were the first buildings that received bomb threats after Trump and Vance’s comments. In a recent article, Roxane Gay argued that the point of these attacks is to make life in Springfield, OH, and the United States, unbearable. Much of the anti-immigrant narrative from people across the political spectrum endeavors on the same goal. Campaign ads come across our screens attaching darker-skinned people to violence. Mayors and governors refer to them as a problem to solve, pointing to other politicians above and below them rather than pivoting towards a humanity-based response. Candidates and pundits drum up crises at the border without naming the numerous benefits corporations and governments receive from unpaid labor to this day. And public schools, one of our country’s most enduring social safety nets, receive immigrants regardless of their status.

This nexus of ideas makes it so immigrants, particularly “undesirable” ones, can rotate in and out of this country without assurances of any sort.

Even now, some schools and districts have opted for strategies that undermine a more inclusive vision for public schools. Some educators have lumped together any students they’ve deemed as “outsider” and diminished their expectations altogether. Some superintendents have tried to limit how many newly-arrived students they receive in their schools even as student retention in large, urban districts have dipped. Not coincidentally, the more quickly a school district diversifies, the more likely they are to pass anti-truth laws.

Some of the anti-immigrant smoke is coming from right inside our schools.

But there are educators who, through connection and/or conscience, have decided to step up to the challenge. Within that group, I would include my family. Because I didn’t grow up with my father, I hadn’t learned that three of my father’s brothers were educators until I was well within my tenure. (The fourth was a political activist.) My paternal grandmother prized education, as did the rest of the Haitian side of my family within my grandmother’s perimeter. Juliot Vilson, my father, studied abroad and spoke four languages well. My Haitian classmates at Syracuse University knew more about the history of Dominican Republic than many of my Dominican classmates.

Recently, my cousin Vanessa said, “I’ve always learned that, if I was ever lost in life and needed guidance, I needed to go back to school.” And I did.

On my late father’s birthday (September 17), I got a note from Columbia University certifying my doctorate in philosophy. While it was cause for celebration among my people, I noted so few of us had achieved this title. I also recognized how my newfound title continues to flabbergast too many others. At the aforementioned event, the hosts (shout-outs to Nicole Grimes and Stephanie Delia!) asked us to introduce ourselves. Each person stood up and only proffered one of their jobs and titles. Yet, after a few cheers and laughs, it was self-evident that participants couldn’t help themselves. These people who fulfilled important societal roles also happened to be proudly Haitian. They didn’t see themselves as elite or special, but people who were offered opportunities to represent their people.

More than anything, we were grateful for a space where we understood our achievements as only a subset of our possibilities. No one was surprised or suspicious that we could do what we do. We had a space where we didn’t have to explain ourselves for a few hours.

In a country so openly hostile to our ancestors’ existence, these reminders were gifts I still unwrap.

The post On Being Haitian and What We Teach Ourselves appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

The Haitian Community and What We Teach Ourselves

Note: Thanks to the thousands of you who’ve subscribed to my newsletter thus far. I’ll be writing more regularly here, but if you’d like to support my writing, please support here. Thanks!

I have a confession to make: I went out on a school night a few months ago.

The Carib Biz Network and Little Haiti BK co-hosted Island Icons: A Haitian Heritage Celebration, an event celebrating people of Haitian descent making impact in their spheres. I witnessed the atmosphere vibrate in Kreyol and English tongues, appetizers and drinks flowing, Black people in multi-colored garbs around tightly-fit tables. It was great just to be in the room.

As a participant, I still had that nagging feeling from my youth when I couldn’t communicate with the other Vilsons because I never even learned French, much less Kreyol. But the grown-up took over and said to myself, “Actually, this moment is a gift.”

Little did I know that this event, a personified spectrum of the Haitian diaspora, would be so relevant now. As a presidential candidate and his vice-presidential nominee spew hatred about Haitians (again), it matters how we meet the moment. Some have decided to inundate our social media feeds with memes. Others have dodged the question altogether with vague calls for what democracy we have left. Yet, we should consider how building community is about belonging and the credentials, norms, and values to achieve membership within the community.

Really, as so many of our schools demonstrate, polarization looks like pushing more and more people out from a visible mainstream. People of Haitian descent know it too well. America can do better, especially from our classrooms.

On multiple occasions, I’ve advanced the idea of teachers as the vanguards of society. For better or worse, teachers are some of the first adults in a child’s life that transmit a society’s values onto present and future citizens. So, when justice organizers advocate for a culturally responsive sustaining curriculum, it isn’t just for a small set of students, but for everyone. As much as I appreciate groups learning about themselves, we need opportunities for everyone to learn about each other. The ostensibly neutral curriculum still minimizes slavery, colonization, misogyny, ableism, and a litany of injustices that students deserve to know.

After all, if we keep putting off addressing and redressing these injustices to the future, shouldn’t the future know what we’re putting off?

Of course it makes sense that schools were the first buildings that received bomb threats after Trump and Vance’s comments. In a recent article, Roxane Gay argued that the point of these attacks is to make life in Springfield, OH, and the United States, unbearable. Much of the anti-immigrant narrative from people across the political spectrum endeavors on the same goal. Campaign ads come across our screens attaching darker-skinned people to violence. Mayors and governors refer to them as a problem to solve, pointing to other politicians above and below them rather than pivoting towards a humanity-based response. Candidates and pundits drum up crises at the border without naming the numerous benefits corporations and governments receive from unpaid labor to this day. And public schools, one of our country’s most enduring social safety nets, receive immigrants regardless of their status.

This nexus of ideas makes it so immigrants, particularly “undesirable” ones, can rotate in and out of this country without assurances of any sort.

Even now, some schools and districts have opted for strategies that undermine a more inclusive vision for public schools. Some educators have lumped together any students they’ve deemed as “outsider” and diminished their expectations altogether. Some superintendents have tried to limit how many newly-arrived students they receive in their schools even as student retention in large, urban districts have dipped. Not coincidentally, the more quickly a school district diversifies, the more likely they are to pass anti-truth laws.

Some of the anti-immigrant smoke is coming from right inside our schools.

But there are educators who, through connection and/or conscience, have decided to step up to the challenge. Within that group, I would include my family. Because I didn’t grow up with my father, I hadn’t learned that three of my father’s brothers were educators until I was well within my tenure. (The fourth was a political activist.) My paternal grandmother prized education, as did the rest of the Haitian side of my family within my grandmother’s perimeter. Juliot Vilson, my father, studied abroad and spoke four languages well. My Haitian classmates at Syracuse University knew more about the history of Dominican Republic than many of my Dominican classmates.

Recently, my cousin Vanessa said, “I’ve always learned that, if I was ever lost in life and needed guidance, I needed to go back to school.” And I did.

On my late father’s birthday (September 17), I got a note from Columbia University certifying my doctorate in philosophy. While it was cause for celebration among my people, I noted so few of us had achieved this title. I also recognized how my newfound title continues to flabbergast too many others. At the aforementioned event, the hosts (shout-outs to Nicole Grimes and Stephanie Delia!) asked us to introduce ourselves. Each person stood up and only proffered one of their jobs and titles. Yet, after a few cheers and laughs, it was self-evident that participants couldn’t help themselves. These people who fulfilled important societal roles also happened to be proudly Haitian. They didn’t see themselves as elite or special, but people who were offered opportunities to represent their people.

More than anything, we were grateful for a space where we understood our achievements as only a subset of our possibilities. No one was surprised or suspicious that we could do what we do. We had a space where we didn’t have to explain ourselves for a few hours.

In a country so openly hostile to our ancestors’ existence, these reminders were gifts I still unwrap.

The post The Haitian Community and What We Teach Ourselves appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

Middle School Prepares Us For Social Science Thinking, Too

I got a story to tell.

Yesterday, I was running errands when one of my former students stopped me at the local supermarket. She’s a manager there and she told me, “Mr. Vilson, did you do something recently that I should be congratulating you for?”

Me: “I think so? I just passed my doctoral dissertation defense.”
Her: “Oh yeah! My sister showed me something about it, so congratulations!”
Me: “Thank you! And really, I couldn’t have gotten it without you, your sister, or my other former students, so thank you! Also, I’m proud of you!”

She did a cutesy back-kick and hands-to-chin pose and said, “Thanks!”

Moments like the one are when I’m grateful that I never lost sight of my higher purpose for my work. Up to that point, I had spent weeks stressing whether I’d even have the chance to defend my doctoral work. These signs from the universe keep moving me forward as I build this work in the university.

My son got to witness all of this as we perused the local market. Fresh off a second round of edits, I needed reminders of why I embarked on the journey to begin with. Back in 2019, I applied because I felt called to study the teaching profession with race and policy in mind. In 2020, a global pandemic put these societal troubles front and center. In August, I endeavored on sociology, a field that pulls together a myriad of factors to theorize how the world works.

Teaching middle schoolers, by comparison, is more aligned to that task than folks imagine.

A Little About Middle School

When I tell people I taught middle school, they’d say “You’re brave; I was an awkward person in middle school!” Cool. Yet, when I told other educators that I taught middle school, they’d say “Oh, I could NEVER! I like where I am, and it takes a special kind of person to want to teach there.” Thanks for the vote of confidence.

Some of it is because middle school, almost by definition, is awkward.

Thinking more socially, middle school usually represents students’ transition into a new level of learning. Middle school means that most students go from having one teacher for most subjects to having several specialized teachers. Meanwhile, children’s bodies and minds are changing rapidly in ways they don’t fully understand. We call it adolescence. This includes puberty, but also a myriad of other adjustments and quirks in children’s lives that don’t have predestined formulas.

But the middle school experience taught me a lot. Yes, it taught me a plethora of patience and perseverance. It also showed me how I could have 30 students in front of me, and it still felt like 60 students depending on which personalities they came with.

As schedules and student appointments changed the entire vibe of a class, I learned adaptability and flexibility. A gift, I swear. I saw how my relationships with the students mattered more than my preconceived notions of them based on their labels. I also learned how, depending on the current events or school episode (yes, in middle school, it was usually an episode), students felt like they couldn’t move forward until some adults sought to address it with empathy and care. On multiple occasions, I took a step back from all of this and asked “What factors allowed for this?”

In other words, I was a practicing sociologist without even knowing it. In fact, much of my epistemological thinking took hold when I named how interwoven factors of policy, practice, and capital kept informing our relationships to our work and each other. Sociology.

A Little About Research

When I become a researcher, I noticed two dualing concepts about the work of the academy and schools. For one, the research ethos encourages us to lean away so that our presence within a phenomena doesn’t cloud our judgment. Or something like that. Of course, and unlike other fields, sociology is harder to study because we’re part of society and all its apparatuses. Secondly, when our interests reflect our personal study, people would say that the research is “me-search.” This suggests that researchers, even ones studying sociology, should find work that feels disconnected enough from the researcher to maintain a level of objectivity. (By the way, that “me-search” has derogatory undertones for some.)

Yet, my experiences in the classroom helped me navigate much of the ambiguity in understanding not just what questions I need to ask of the literature (How did No Child Left Behind open the door to market-based reforms? Why did teachers act so viscerally to the many changes to the profession? What does race and class have to do with this?), but also how I interpreted participants’ interviews, especially the folks who didn’t know me or my work as well. When you’re only given an hour to talk to someone, you need to pick up the nuances and quickly. It matters that the researcher has a deep understanding about subtexts and common parlance.

In other words, my research wasn’t me-search but we-search.

What The Students Do

To their credit, my former students informed how I navigated the research, too. In his AERA Presidential Speech, Dr. Rich Milner discussed the idea of consequentialism in education i.e. the extent to which research or anything else actually has an impact on the subjects being studied. Luckily, I didn’t have to look much further than the students. I spent years listening to students telling me which teachers they didn’t like (sometimes, myself included) and why, or how their education conflicted with their aspirations in their lives. I let their ideas change me and humble as a person and as a teacher. At times, I threw away a lesson plan or two so I could truly hear out students in their voices.

So, when it came to this work, I was asking teachers of color about professionalism, but many times, I had their voices in my head asking me to ask adults about themselves and whether they cared deeply enough about students. I had a few moments where I would have been fine settling for what I had, I recalled how often I insisted that my students push themselves to do well for their present and future learning. In return, I also pushed myself to teach better so they could learn better.

Because if I had to ask myself these questions that students asked me, so did the teachers I would interview.

And that’s ultimately why middle school prepared me for social science work. There’s been much said about the way that education researchers don’t have substantative experience in the things they’re researching. The idealized model researcher, coming from on high, develops solutions without authentic roots to the schools they study because they need to have that intellectual distance to have validity. Researchers who know good teaching see educators as their intellectual equal, theories and all. Too many don’t.

Teaching middle school has a distinct advantage, too. Where people see elementary schoolers as “babies” and higher schoolers as “pre-adults,” middle schoolers require the deep listening, concentration, and kind candor in the midst of individual, collective, and societal turbulence all at once. Yes, I can point to the number of former students who’ve become teachers in their own right (and thank me in part for it).

But I like to think I became a doctor of philosophy thanks to them, whether they became teachers or not. I was learning from them all along the way.

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A Brief Reflection on My Dissertation and Teachers’ Labor

A few weeks ago, after skimming through the formatting of my dissertation one last time, I said a little prayer. The last call was, “God, I leave it in your hands now.”

Before I said those words, I had done everything possible to ensure my success. I selected committee members who would push me to think deeply about my work without the dismissal of my personhood. I wrote, rewrote, and accepted/rejected changes from my advisor. I talked to multiple data analysts. I did 27 interviews, including four in a day and another six over a week. I collected over 100 survey responses from across the city. I got through the Institutional Review Board process, luckily without many hiccups. I defended my dissertation proposal, different than the actual dissertation defense. I wrote that proposal over six weeks. I completed my coursework in two and a half years. I accepted the challenge of taking on sociology and education.

I left teaching to become a full-time student again. And kept all the other titles, too.

At the heart of the study were the lived experiences and embodied histories of New York City public school teachers. On a few occasions, I’ve hinted at the core of my study (and have even before I started this doctoral work), but let me be clear: many of the ways people think about “professionalism” are inadequate and elitist. Attending to the fidelity and integrity of one’s work often gets conflated with subjective, narrow forms of how teachers work. This seems especially true for teachers in schools that are underresourced and over-scrutinized since the No Child Left Behind Act.

But to get that understanding, you would have had to deeply and intentionally listen to teachers. More power to you if you’ve taught in the same era alongside them.

Really, my doctoral study started after my fourth year of teaching, around when I thought I might make a career out of this work. With all the precarity I felt about my situation, that makes sense. The school constantly felt like it was on the verge of shutting down. The school went through five principal changes in five years at that point. I had my worst teaching year and best teaching year in consecutive years. The nature of teaching was rapidly changing from “testing is one tool for assessing student knowledge” to “standardized testing is teaching, full stop”

The conversations I was having with teachers across the city and the country told me I was onto something.

Around year six, I began inquiring about doctoral studies because I didn’t know enough about how New York got here. People whose work I admired over the years seemed to have clearer answers and sharper responses from multiple angles about the work we needed to do. I spent my tiny windows of free time reading voraciously and writing in hopes I’d get some answers. (I probably annoyed a few initially until they saw my work, but it’s all love).

So, it took me four years to finish my doctoral studies. But really, it’s been more than a decade working intently on these issues.

I didn’t think it was just me. As I read the extant body of research on professionalism, the voices I heard from outside of the research community kept saying something different. Those voices weren’t making it into publication, either. How can society re-envision this idea of professionalism to think more broadly about the work teachers do? The things I heard over the last year alone would make anyone reconsider whether teaching is viable labor for anyone.

But society has a hard time holding two important ideas. First, teachers can be critiqued and held to a high standard. Second, teachers hold a higher standard for themselves than society does for supporting them.

While this feels true for the teaching profession overall, this mattered even more for racially marginalized teachers. People can’t account for the generative ways that curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment get interpolated, sometimes in an instant, in service of students. They can’t imagine how teachers of color find themselves at the brunt end of adverse interpersonal relationships among peers, administrators, and school policies. Even among people who should know better. Race and culture matter not as a checkbox, but as a way of organizing their work for students.

I, as the researcher, had to sit there, listen without interruption, and process and analyze this deluge of stories into a clarion call for transformational change. That is different.

As New York City teachers get back to work for the 2024-25 school year again tomorrow (yes, we’re usually the last ones), it’s important to keep a few things in mind. Some pundits have made “solutions” to teaching that were never really solutions at all. Splitting off a teacher’s job into separate parts doesn’t help teachers see the continuum of their work. Using AI to write lessons and tests doesn’t account for the hours before and after the school day preparing ways to help children think for themselves. Lowering class sizes by one or two students without giving teachers more than one preparation period (prep) and lunch (if that!) is a tiny bandage from a thousand papercuts. Pay raises below the rate of inflation are no pay raises at all. Hiring administrators who don’t have a clear, humane vision for their schools exacerbates the problems, too.

But I had to step away from teaching work to learn that. I hope my hands can help craft a profession deserving of the people working it. Our students deserve no less.

part II, coming soon

The post A Brief Reflection on My Dissertation and Teachers’ Labor appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

They’re Still Not Like Us (Math and Our Values)

In 2015, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal invited me to discuss education reform and my book, This Is Not A Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education. I was still a classroom teacher then, imbued in the idea that teachers, particularly those doing STEM-related topics, should continuously seek professional development and stay curious about the math they didn’t know. Of course, I hadn’t taken into account that people would call into the show because a gentleman called in to proclaim the virtues of rudimentary math. In critiquing the Common Core State Standards, he said, “Can’t we just get back to basics?”

In my mind, I said “Hell no!” What I ended up saying was perhaps more eloquent.

Fast forward to now and it seems as if a coalition of back-to-basics folks and anti-intellectuals backed by billions of conservative monies have captured the narrative about how students should learn. For example, while I believe some advocates have great intentions in their advocacy for the science of reading, I also think the Venn diagram of people who support back-to-basics, want to ban TikTok, and vote for policies that exacerbate inequity make a sizeable intersection. While students, educators, and community members in our most under-resourced schools have advocated for strong emotional and academic supports, this coalition marches on, badgering public schools for suggesting we deserve a better society.

That’s part of my rationale for my work on understanding math and society.

Part of why I’ve taken on the assignment of writing this book (yes, while writing a dissertation and all my other hats) is because there’s a real need for this uncomfortable conversation. For decades, a set of advocates – of which I am one – have sought to secure the right to mathematics education, particularly for those whose education was a precarious endeavor. It bears repeating that, a little more than a century ago, policies didn’t mandate mathematics education in K-12 in the way we know now. People who’ve recently derided “woke math” seek to erode the urgency of progress so many communities seek.

Some people see math as a luxury, while others see it as a tool toward opportunity. Restricting access to any knowledge is a societal failure in that light.

Some might argue that the urgency to teach higher-order maths in K-12 has led to the general disillusionment with math as a topic for far too many. They have a point. Some of the push to overtest children and hold schools accountable came from this urgency as well. Where people came to agreement in many respects was that our society was failing students. Education reformers took that to mean that we should hold schools and teachers responsible for students’ test scores with ever-escalating sanctions and rewards, particularly with students deemed “the lowest third.”

To the credit of those who developed the Common Core State Standards, they saw how our curricula and standards weren’t meeting the moment. The impetus seemed to point out what other, higher-performing countries had done: have fewer, tightly-knit standards that constitute math knowledge with advisement from multiple education community members. Of course, some advocates used words like “state overreach” and other nonsense, but to this day, many of the renamed standards still look CCSS-lite.

But, regardless of where you sat on the CCSS discussion, it was no match for a coalition that rejects even the whiff of equality, much less equity. So, even after CCSS has failed in some policymakers’ eyes, the questions that CCSS tried to answer still linger.

Luckily for us, people kept doing the work. I’ve not only taught, but had the opportunity to visit multiple math classrooms. The idea of education as a civil right still holds true for a plethora of educators. It’s almost miraculous how, despite and because of the odds, math educators breathe life into their classrooms with students and communities in mind. Students with all their languages and manners of speech still get to tinker, struggle, and win beyond the problems handed to them, too. They’re still pulling in those wild math memes and shoving it in front of their teachers in hopes for the answer, while the teacher says, “I don’t know, what do you think?” The teachers carve out spaces within spaces that weren’t made for them and still share resources, laughs, and dreams about a world where math gets to all the children and children get all the math.

In the name of authentic citizenship. But, as many have said, that would take a whole restructuring of society and its disparate values. We’re not asking for us to abandon rudimentary schools. We’re saying schools can do bigger, more, better when costs and policies don’t limit our academic imagination.

The teachers whom our society has mandated to get licensures, degrees, and continual professional development have surpassed the occasion as a way of professional life. In so many instances, the only reason why we’re not seeing more of this energy as a society is the concept of “professionalism” itself i.e. the limitations we place on our collective expectations. Sadly, districts don’t pay nearly enough for their worth, nor should they be sacrificial lambs in the political bedlam, and they’re still doing their part. Our students can carry those lessons out the door and bring some back, too, often delimited to walls and bells.

Yes, 2+2 = 4, but any teacher who’s about this life will teach you so much more.

Jose, who misses blogging consistently, but promises this dissertation will be done …

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Critical Race Theory Is About You, and All of Us

Recently, Christina Cross, a Black woman sociologist at Harvard, found her work at the crosshairs of the same person who brought us the bastardization of critical race theory. (Yes, it was.) Many scholars, from her sociology department to the primary investigators of the original study, defended her against his claims of plagiarism, but people jumped regardless. As I observed scholar after acclaimed scholar defending her work, it gave me hope that perhaps we had learned lessons from the last three years of ideological malpractice.

Yet, it also made me reticent to uplift this newfound courage cloaked in social science norms. I’m asking us to think more societally.

In using inaccurate forms of plagiarism, he gets to crusade against anything he deems “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). Of course, when mainstream media asks him questions under their terms, he turns to cellophane, but that’s another layer to this conversation. Time and again, the same set of ghouls lay out the playbook through their social media platforms and articles. To deconstruct institutions that they and so many others have benefited from, they use the very people whom those in powerful positions have rarely sought to defend. In other words, if you can reshape Harvard by attacking Black women and other scholars with marginalized identities using tools that have historically limited these populations from coming through the door, then the task is merely academic.

I’ve argued on several occasions that telling the public “We don’t teach critical race theory” isn’t effective in beating the attacks back. America must name the vital role of our institutions, defend the value of those institutions in nation-building, and make the experience of these institutions better from a racial and social justice lens. Otherwise, this country continues to leave the responsibility of keeping this country prosperous to the people least likely to benefit from its largesse.

It also occurs to me how we’ve seen this in K-12, too.

Now that the United States is about three years into this era of censorship laws, we’re as far away as we’ve ever been from having authentic conversations and actions that lead to a pluralistic and inclusive democracy. State houses and local school boards across the country have further concretized racism, sexism, and transphobia into a variety of ambiguous policies, it’s created an icy effect on classrooms across the board. But, as I listen to teachers across the country, it’s not only solidified boring and traditional views of curriculum and pedagogy. These laws have also made the recruitment and retention of Black teachers and other teachers of color that much harder.

For every white teacher who’s nervous about teaching Morrison, Coates, and Baldwin, there lies even more trepidation about hiring Black, Latinx, Asian, and Native American teachers whose lived experience could inform those texts. This extends into all subject areas, too, because the “problem” is the embodied history.

American society has, at best, paid lip service in defending its teachers of color. Even though the burgeoning body of research clearly shows a plethora of academic and socioemotional benefits in having more teachers of color, we also see how teachers of color are less likely to be promoted, more likely to work in less-resourced schools, and more likely to be fired. Even though the benefits extend to white students, teachers of color I speak to are unapologetic about who they wish to impart this knowledge to.

This was happening before 2020. Imagine how the confluence of censorship laws, a global pandemic, and systemic racism are having on the prospects of retaining this critical subset of teachers.

At times, it doesn’t even take a “CRT” or “DEI” law to target these teachers, either. It just takes an administrator wishing to target them through seemingly innocuous rubrics and metrics to get rid of them. It just takes an anonymous complaint from someone with no evidence, just negative vibes. With these laws in place, some teachers in high-pressure schools have sent permission slips home to allow them to acknowledge Black people’s humanity. How is that progress?

In this vein, some people name the Brown vs. Board of Education decision for the dismissal of over 30,000 teachers in the US South, but not enough name the mechanisms of white supremacy in that dismissal. Superintendents and governors at the time didn’t have to dismiss licensed teachers and principals from their workplaces. But they replaced these educators with often-unlicensed white educators because they, too, understood the power of teacher diversity. When we couple these dismissals with white flight, we get a clearer picture of why the works of Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and so many other legal scholars create an important lens for our work as educators.

Critical race theory is about you, too. It’s about all of us.

Many private higher education institutions have less to fear than public counterparts, which might make one think that they can take bolder steps and stand firm in their espoused commitments from only four years ago. Not necessarily. Also, while public universities have seen governors demolish DEI programs over the last year with little retribution, many public-school policymakers have turned their attention to “science of X” propaganda and further from culturally responsive curricula. Of course, research suggests a plethora of benefits from making broad changes in how we think about literacy, but people prefer to talk up phonics and decoding. As if. While policymakers wave the learning loss flag at Black and Latinx communities, this curricular retrenchment feels less like a pendulum swing and more like a generational pivot from a small spark in 2020.

Instead of fighting for an inclusive set of curricula and pedagogies for every student, policymakers have gone more narrow to make these vital institutions more chaotic and less secure. We learned the wrong lessons from school shutdowns.

Thus, the malcontents understand how deeply America holds its ideological traditions. All of them. In invoking race among other identity-based structures, they sense that a large swath of America won’t fight back, even if it means that institutions like schools, libraries, and colleges must crumble in front of them. The policymakers, institutional presidents, and other engaged citizens can’t keep throwing their red muletas at these charges and, every time they attack an institution, yell “¡OLE!”

It’s about time for us to learn how to fight the bull. Or at least call out its excrements.

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What Choice Do We Have? [On School Choice]

Here’s something I never got to tell you.

About seven years ago, I wrote this post that went viral. I didn’t expect to see some popular public intellectuals sharing it with their audiences, and other public figures rebuking me publicly, either. Yes, the leader of the schools would try to reach out to me as did a few of his people. (I didn’t respond, but I did write another post about Capital Prep Harlem and another post in response to that.) I did foresee that a fair amount of scandal would follow both the school leader and the mogul. In researching Capital Prep schools back then, I saw how the confluence of bad management, hedge fund managers wishing to rinse their monies, minimal regulations, and music business models would drudge up the burgeoning school that landed a few blocks from where I live.

As New York Magazine reports, that’s exactly what happened. I wouldn’t have guessed to what extent.

After reading the NY Mag article and reading some of the accounts (including from people who left years ago), I had to sit there. I hurt for those who had to experience this firsthand. Even though I disagreed with his methods, I was hoping he would win. By “win,” I meant that he’d provide a solid alternative for families who have been disengaged from the educational process for decades. Families don’t send their children to schools expecting that the school, led by charismatic leaders from similar backgrounds, would treat their child awfully. Similarly, educators don’t expect to work for leaders who would later thwart their efforts to teach children well.

But, over the years, I saw protests from students, families, and educators, who had no way to address and redress the harm. I’d listen to other adults who could only speak to me about their experiences in this and other schools like this in codes because the feeling was still too raw.

“I told you so” isn’t the point. It’s not about one school leader, one music mogul, or even one type of school. It’s about the current notion of school choice.

On the surface, the argument for school choice sounds pitch-perfect. Everyone should have an opportunity to go to the school that fits them and their community’s needs. From a racial standpoint, it means students of color should have the chance to leave their under-resourced schools to more well-resourced schools like their wealthy-white counterparts do. Students of color, particularly Black students, shouldn’t have to withstand racial and other forms of identity-based discrimination from their peers, teachers, or principals to get a good education. Over the last two decades, the privatization of public education made it possible for even the most earnest adults to wave the “school choice” flag and scream that they were winning … something.

What’s more, the enactment of integration efforts has only led to white parents carving out their own schools – and districts – to evade sitting their children with “others.” Students of color should have similar options as well.

However, over the last three decades, we’ve also seen how the enactment of “school choice” has created levels of rot to the detriment of the very students who ostensibly stood to benefit the most from those policies. We already set up students for a certain level of failure when we create a lottery system or a standardized test for children to get a sound and basic education. The “losers” of the lottery matriculate in public schools where, regardless of the quality of the school, they still feel disenchanted for not getting in. For students who stay, they’ll get peppered with demerits for infractions ranging from not wearing their “behavior lanyards” around their necks to not “TRACK”ing their teachers.

The adults in the building fare no better, either. If only we all had the chance to listen to overworked educators, principals under duress, and schools having to co-locate and see the inequity immediately. The “results” may seem worth it in the form of graduation rates and achievement scores, but how this set of schools got these numbers leaves everyone but the school leaders disillusioned.

In naming these faults, one can point out that many of these incidents are also happening in public schools, and they’d be right. Specialized high schools and gifted and talented programs aren’t always helpful in this respect. Our dialogue about public vs. charter schools doesn’t serve this conversation well because it doesn’t include how independent and/or private schools also influence our school systems. But we shouldn’t be doubling down on practices that made public schooling awful for many, putting them in schools with less regulations, and calling it “equity.”

Rather, my prompt is to push for every school to be a great choice. To paraphrase Linda Darling-Hammond, America’s obsession with choice subverts a vision for equity and justice for our schools.

If families want to choose between an art-based school and a science-based school in the future, that’s great. If families want to choose a school that may better address their students’ specific needs, that’s fine, too. If families want to create a school that has more resources to the detriment of other students, that’s inappropriate.

What’s more, should a student not get into the school they wished to get into, the next bunch of options should also feel like great choices with a great education. That’s big vision work, and more of us need to invest in it.

In the short term, a good school – and by “good,” I mean “positive academic and socioemotional experiences for students, families, and education,” not “high achievement scores” or “inflated graduation rates” – is a good school, and I’m happy for students who get that. I’m an advocate for public schools, but I prefer my critiques push the dialogue forward, not back and forth. For the long term, we need to excise the idea that simply having a choice is enough. This dynamic often sets us up for false choices. I prefer that we remain vigilant about the education our children receive, and hopeful that all of our students can learn well.

These are the sorts of results we won’t see on test scores, but we’ll see them in our society. It’s harder to measure, but a better alternative than the one we’re seeing now.

Jose, who’ll have more to say on this soon …

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Professional Development Done With Us, Not To Us

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending my fourth SXSW EDU in Austin, TX. As Ron Reed mentioned before introducing scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw as the opening speaker, the conference has grown significantly since 2011. Whereas in the beginning, it felt more focused on digital learning and ed-tech, this year felt more like it was a hub for relevant education conversations. Thus, organizers implicitly asked participants to choose their own adventure. And that they did.

For my part, I partook four events: a multilingual learner and teacher meet-up with Alejandra Vázquez Baur, a mentorship session focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and a book signing (I can’t believe This Is Not A Test is still selling well after a decade!). Oh, I also participated in a panel as a special advisor for Teachers Unify Against Gun Violence with Sari Beth Rosenberg, Kiki Leyba, and Kelly Booz of Share My Lesson/AFT. I’m grateful for new shoes, but mostly for the community, too.

People from various circles in my life, particularly my EduColor life, had found a few days out of the year to come under one umbrella and share in this multifaceted experience. While the world feels like we’re seeing calamities and disasters on a regular basis, it’s good to commiserate with people who see what you see and still have a sense of hope anyways.

More importantly, for fifteen years as a teacher, I attended hundreds of hours of professional development sessions. Now as a sociologist studying teacher professionalism, I get to keep attending hundreds of hours of professional development. Here are some takeaways from a structural perspective that’ll help inform everyone’s learning, or so I hope:

It Starts With Values

In the midst of statewide DEI bans, SXSW EDU stepped into that conversation without apology. For teachers who needed space to make meaning of their experiences with book bans, restricted curriculum, high stakes standardized testing, critical race theory, and/or immigrant students and asylum seekers, SXSW EDU carved out that space within the conference. It wasn’t the whole conference, and it didn’t need to be.

Some people would snicker at the idea of discussing various identities as part of professional practice, but in talking to teachers the way I do, identity informs not just their current work, but why they’ve stayed.

Usually, educators’ first experience with a conference is one that everyone discusses or that the district approves for funding. After the conference, the educator goes to a smaller, more focused convening where they can learn more about that subset of topics or, at least, find a community of like-minded practitioners. (Some of us even created our own summit for these times of uncertainty.) What I’ve appreciated in recent times is how conferences have decided to feature what was once considered niche because it elevates everyone’s work.

Embracing values that center empathy, compassion, and learning with courage at the center helps us all.

Designs Experiences within an Experience

Critics might argue that conferences shouldn’t be all things to all people. I argue that not enough conferences allow educators the opportunity to get their various cups filled, either. In other words, what if conferences tried?

The “choose your own adventure” route sounds arduous and expensive, but it also means, like professionals do, they get to craft the learning and conversations they need to have to further their work. A small set of educators could always create an Edcamp, a model in need of revival in our times. But at SXSW EDU, many of the same people who attended Dr. Crenshaw’s talk about her work also attended panels on AI. Some who attended workshops on the science of reading also attended workshops about democracy in education.

In other words, the design of the conference gave everyone a chance to follow an individualized program for what they aspired to learn in the same larger space. It doesn’t have to be all the things for all the people, but just enough of these things to spark more things.

Of course, that wasn’t always the case for many of the conferences I attended even ten years ago. My first experience at SXSW EDU felt more like the typical education technology conference. I heard from plenty of talking heads evangelizing about the promise of the future where students’ devices would accelerate learning, so on and so forth. Back then, too many presenters started their presentations with a long list of questions, but the answers were a list of the most famous companies in the world.

No. Just no.

Now, with educators having seen a wider array of professional learning experiences on and off-line, conferences have to engage participants differently. That’s healthy for everyone involved.

Considerations

Like so many of the professional development conferences I have the opportunity to attend, I get how the cost prohibits wider attendance, especially from teachers in underresourced schools. Because teachers of color are more segregated than students of color, and also more likely to work in said underresourced schools, conferences usually lack the racial diversity necessary to meet the moment. I’d venture to say that these schools are the places where teachers are more likely to get professional development based on raising test scores and less about wider knowledge about the field.

Of course, we also have a global pandemic that has severely affected attendance, not to mention the teacher shortage crisis that districts haven’t figured out. But I think spaces like this are actually a solution to the shortages, not a problem. More organizations and foundations should sponsor teams of educators to attend these spaces as they had before because professional development should be done with us, not to us.

Every conference space can learn how to better organize their work to focus on the learning, just as we aspire to do for our students. Educators don’t have to go to these conferences anymore to get the information they need, but we still seem to prefer the community aspect of learning with other people from various walks of life, on or off-line.

Next year, I’d love to see everyone in Austin, but in the event that you can’t make it, you should at least get to advocate for a more expansive notion of professional learning. Students deserve better and more connected learners.

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Professional: A Word That Means Nothing and Everything to Teachers

Sometime in the summer of 2020, a small, vocal set of parents and advocates decided that teachers should get back to work.

They overshadowed the public praise for teachers and schools in favor of opening up schools all willy-nilly. Of course, studies and polls kept disrupting that narrative, but the narrative persisted. Parents of school-aged children support their local teachers and schools, and much of the narrative came from adults without children. Studies showed that learning loss proponents overstated their claims given that the United States fared better than most industrialized countries. They’d say teachers are overpaid, but compared to other professions with comparable licensure, teachers don’t come close, even worse without collective bargaining.

But narratives persist, chipping away at the notion of having a democratic institution dedicated to educating youth, however imperfectly. So, after reading this great article by Deborah Ball, this begs the question: what does it mean to be professional? Here, I attempt an answer.

For the average person, “professional” refers to many things: expertise, experience, comportment, dress, manner of speaking, technique, and so on. We have a concept of what it means to be a professional athlete. We expect a level of professionalism from doctors, lawyers, police officers, and other salaried representatives of institutions. People have expectations about how they behave and look, how they go about procedures, and whether they’re doing their work to fidelity according to some training site somewhere with a fancy title.

For sociologists studying this issue, including me, we generally study these elements under the “sociology of professions.” Power, expertise, and autonomy allow society to confer a status onto individuals even when we’re skeptical of individual actors within those professions. We also observe how professional trust has gone down since the 1980’s as people have learned to trust institutions less.

But for teachers, it means multiple things depending on who says it and why. Society has gotten into the habit of treating teaching as a semi-profession by saying things like “They’re in it for the outcome, not the income.” Or, significantly worse, “If you can’t, teach.” Whatever that means. We’ve seen the proliferation of the bad teacher stereotype in movies like Bad Teacher and vertical clips of students fighting teachers.

Then, there are the daily interactions where an administrator calls a teacher unprofessional for reasons that align with the administrator’s tastes. Some administrators mean that the teacher fell out of compliance with expectations that only they came up with. They focus too much on teachers’ wardrobes, the timeliness of attendance sheets, or the type of music the teacher listens to during their off-duty time. Other administrators focus more on shared, reasonable expectations and student aspirations. They set the vision for the year and work with staff and students to make the appropriate adjustments.

The best administrators also have the right to call in/out teachers who don’t reflect those expectations and aspirations well. Teachers I speak to agree that when colleagues aren’t doing their jobs, administrators should do their due diligence. This is especially true in cases of racism, homophobia, or not attending to student learning. But at the heart of the confusion is less about having great administrators, teachers, schools, or even a great country.

The problem with the word “professional” in a work setting is that it pretends to be about merit, but it has lots of power depending on who wields it and why.

For many women I’ve spoken to, the word implies negative perceptions about their bodies and clothing. For Black and Latinx teachers I speak to, the word implies demerits based on how they speak or move. In education, the “most professional” people are principals, superintendents, and scholars in higher ed, which are predominantly white and male-presenting.

It seems petty, but that’s the point. Whoever has power within a professional setting often gets to set the terms of what it means to be professional. The term “professional” is as much about identity as it is about some merit bestowed upon a job.

But I believe that if teachers didn’t have a sense of professionalism for themselves, our school systems would barely run. As the world faced a global pandemic with millions of deaths, economic stratification and corporate greed, the neverending specter of wars domestic and abroad, attacks on institutions through anti-truth laws and book bans, and a lack of coherent policy for how to navigate these dynamics, educators of all types still showed up and committed to doing the work, not simply to work.

When society understands this and reflects this in teacher pay and dignity, society may get a clearer definition of “professional.” Or at least get closer to something more meaningful.

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Educators Get To Imagine Bigger, Too [On TED]

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the latest celebration of TED-Ed Educator Talks at the TED Headquarters in NYC. For those who are unfamiliar, TED-Ed has created a cohort experience for educators to develop their own TED talks over the last couple of years, and it’s led to a lot of great speeches for educators across the field. A plethora of organizations – including EduColor – have gotten a chance to nominate and advocate for educators from their networks to contribute ideas that can build towards a TED talk. From there, organizations work with TED to elevate their “ideas worth spreading.”

I’ve had my own misgivings about TED over the years, but ultimately, I landed on one spot. Educators should have the opportunity to speak about an idea for about 15-20 minutes, without interruption. Just as academics, businesspeople, scientists, celebrities, and other luminaries have had.

At this point, I’ve already given two TED talks. My first on the definition of teacher voice gave me tons of confidence to pursue more opportunities to break our educational siloes. A few years later, in 2019, I gave another talk about educator voice in front of my then-boss Richard Carranza who, thankfully, appreciated it. Both took months to develop and practice. Both of these talks put me in rooms with educators across the world in ways I couldn’t do on my own. More importantly, it helped spur the idea in me that more of us could and should grow our imaginations for the world to see.

Now more than ever, we need more.

The critiques make sense on some level. Educator work usually looks best in dialogue. Not enough people think about what learning in community looks like. Some of the best learning we do isn’t when we’re alone, but when we’re wrestling out loud with an idea and hearing how others receive it. Even those of us who write need editors to help us communicate our ideas better. We also don’t want to give the impression that speaking ad nauseam for an extended period of time in front of an audience that’s compelled to be polite to you is authentic.

Yet, my experience suggests that the TED format for educators – and students – has real benefits. We have too many professional development sessions where educators (and I mean this to include principals, school counselors, etc.) listen to people who’ve barely taught tell them how to do their jobs. Some did it well, but others developed these sessions without empathy or nuance, but that’s been a not-so-subtle way of deprofessionalizing teaching in ways policymakers rarely realize. Usually, when people hear educators, they immediately disregard the feedback as “complaining,” in large part because of society’s perceptions of women and the teaching profession.

To wit, educators still have to advocate for PD done with them, not to them. The wrong kinds of interruptions can actually be a detriment to the flow necessary to build authentic learning experiences. And teachers, especially in the United States, get interrupted in all kinds and all the worst of ways.

For EduColor‘s part, we’ve already seen one of our members get their shine. Last week, two more shared their talks, and another is well on her way towards premiering hers next year. One of EduColor’s taglines is “Tomorrow, there will be more of us.” In advocating for more of us, we recognize that many of our best ideas come from people actually doing the work with their communities and giving the rest of the world feedback on it.

In this ever-evolving landscape for what we consider “media,” educators don’t have to cede their expertise or platforms for others. Thus, we get to talk back.

My Small and Non-Exhaustive TED Talk Playlist for You

Let me also share some of my favorite TED talks over the years:

Zarah Biabani, “The eco-creators helping the climate through social media.” A practical and concise talk about the ways young people mobilized around climate change at a time when people tried to squash the viability of social media to organize people. Spot on.
Bryan Stevenson, “We need to talk about an injustice.” He flips the formula of the typical TED talk to help us ground his definition of justice and why he does the work he does. I highly recommend.
Diana Laufenberg, “How to learn from mistakes.” Yes, I don’t just know her personally, but also there was a point when I heard this talk referenced in every education space for about three years. That says a lot.
Nemonte Nenquimo, “The forest is our teacher. It’s time to respect it.” This atypical TED talk captured my imagination because many people ignore indigenous folks’ calls to action.
Victor Rios, “Help for kids the education system ignores.” I recently saw this talk and thought it was a good rebuke to the notions of deficit thinking that our systems push onto students.
Jacqueline Woodson, “What reading slowly taught me about writing.” One of the best talks I’ve heard that pull you not just into Ms. Woodson’s process, but her shoes as she’s building a world for you.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, “The search for the invisible matter that shapes the universe.” This talk makes invisible matter visible. That’s enough.
Richard Carranza, “Does your curriculum celebrate or suppress student perspectives?” He closed the event that I opened with a story about his twin brother that had the whole room emotional. To be this vulnerable in the midst of citywide attacks on him is remarkable.
Al Gore, “How to make radical climate action the new normal.” I was there for this one, too, and the way he presents massive sets of data into digestible bits of action needs to be studied.

Jose, who shares back and forward …

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