Jose Vilson's Blog, page 36

For My Fellow Male Educators of Color

My fellow men of color in the education sphere,

Recently, there’s been lots of conversation around training and retaining more men of color to become K-12 teachers. Because there’s only 3% of us in the profession currently, seldom do I speak up and out against, or provide caveat to, elevating that number in the least. My experience is limited in that I haven’t met the 90,000 of us who stand in front of our students, hopefully bringing them the knowledge and skills necessary to do well and find their own paths towards success. In this instance, I’ll also include the thousands of principals, administrators, consultants, and other professionals who roam our halls because, in many instances, these folks might be the only faces of color schools see throughout the year.

From my classroom purview, I’m often concerned with the reasons why we male educators of color come into education at all. Working conditions continue to be deplorable in the places we want to work the most. Environmental conditions make it difficult for our students to even get into our classrooms and pay attention, much less excel against immeasurable odds. Our own education programs don’t always prepare us for the challenges in front of us, and we’re sometimes held responsible for providing race professional development for colleagues and the discipline for our students. We’re pushed either into administration or dean roles, often under the guise of “you can do so much more for so many more.” Our administrators don’t always value our expertise in content as well as student relationships, and school districts have hired us at smaller rates than ever before. Higher ed professors, non-profit organizations, and media folks still organize TV shows and conferences about the education of children of color without ever talking to one of us, as if we can’t speak to our own professions, erasing us in the name of quasi-scholarship.

None of this excuses what I’ve seen as an endemic arrogance about the ways and means by which some of us approach education.

Many of us came into education as a means of passing knowledge forward, especially the knowledge that, yes, people of color can fight against a systematic assimilation and dulling of our collective intellect. With this common understanding, it’s concerning to me that so many of us forget our lineage when financial gain, opportunity, and spotlights get involved. Some of us too quickly embrace the narrative that our civil rights leaders did so as lone trees, and not as moving forests, branches interlocked towards a better tomorrow. Some of us see the power structure that has ostracized us from so long in education sub-spaces like ed-tech and activism and would replicate said structure only with you at the top, as if we’re here to create benevolent kings. Some of us think an occasional smile and the use of hip-hop lingo translates to true academic attainment, kicking back while our students learn nothing. Some of us use the same arguments about the parents of our children that have kept our schools at a distance from the parents we also serve.

Some of us would prefer the people who work in this vein to just leave the rest of us to our own devices. Our skinfolk and kinfolk need not be the same.

The whispers I always hear about me tend to focus on the use of an article before my name, as if my critiques limit opportunities of others. This comes with the assumption that my online and offline personae don’t speak to the experiences of students, teachers, and parents after almost a decade of dragging my fingertips on whiteboards, chalkboards, and keyboards. I may have had a part in moving the education sphere’s consciousness towards race issues. I may have promoted more men of color in my doings from New York City to the White House and across the country, and my pieces doing so around the world. I may have opened doors for like-minded tweeters of color to openly critique and transform the education profession. I may have made publishers more comfortable with letting writers of color talk about their experiences in education without feeling like they’re incapable of addressing a bleach-white, toilet-paper-soft niche. I may have needed the article “the” to do so.

I do still wake up at 5:30 every morning fully intent on teaching 90 students math at the 8:05 bell, because they still come first.

When we use the word “education” in our biographies to discuss our current profession, we signal to the world that they should entrust us with their children and futures for a given period of time. Our intentions and motives must work in that vein. As a unionist, I respect folks getting paid for their hard-earned labor, and I understand the need to hustle when most people who work in the service of children don’t get paid what they deserve. Yet, we do ourselves and everyone else a disservice when we put the ends before the means. When we say proudly that we can believe whatever we want, and kids don’t have to factor into the work we do as educators, we not only look disingenuous to every and all listeners, we erase centuries-long histories of remembrance and only help our institutions decimate our agency.

If I said anything in this letter that may be misconstrued as an attempt to stop recruiting men of color into education or to reduce the promotion of people of color to other prominent positions in the education sphere, I apologize. If this is used by well-meaning racists to perpetuate the firing of us individually and the schools we tend to work in, I apologize for that too. If this is used for post-racialists to make the case that white people can teach children of color just as well as white people can, or any convoluted argument I hadn’t actually argued in this letter, I apologize only to the extent of the reader’s literacy.

If this precise shoe fit, though, please wear it, though not as proudly as you do in online and offline spaces before this letter.

In the meantime, find this as a means to our collective liberation, not as a chastisement of one person or entity. Let us all remember that, no matter how much we fight against, those of us in the education space have dedicated ourselves to finding solutions, or, at least, give our students new problems for them to find. That’s what success in education looks like.

Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our classrooms and schools with all our children’s scintillating beauty.

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How Radical Is Your Martin Luther King Jr.?

Back when I matriculated at Syracuse University, the Schine Student Center had a computer lab with a large whiteboard in the back of the basement used by student organizations, but the Black and Latino orgs would rapidly occupy that space. I’ll attribute it to feeling like we had few spaces where we could, at least, develop our publications and flyers while convening with other like-minded folks of color. In any case, one day, I walked in to find that someone drew a long black line with “MLK Jr.” written in the middle. I didn’t know what to do with it, and many of my fellow students felt the need to put their names on the line to denote their radicalism. Of course, names like Clarence Thomas were written to the far right, so everyone wanted their names as far away from there as possible.

When I approached it, at first, I didn’t know what to make of it. Was I to understand that King Jr. was a middling activist, qualified enough to be the barometer for us all to judge our values, but not radical enough to pass the muster of the room’s collective, and perhaps redefined, blackness?

Yet, I found myself putting my name just to the left of Martin Luther King Jr., not as far as Malcolm X or Angela Davis, but a bit more anarchist than my perception of MLK Jr. Just then, a few members of Alpha Phi Alpha walked in and remarked, “Well, what’s the purpose of this chart?” Martin Luther King Jr. was himself a member of APhiA, so I didn’t know what to make of their objection.

“I don’t know …”, I said, hoping the person who put it up would jump in.

“Well, if you don’t know, then why put your name up there?”, one APhiA said.

“Not really sure, but this is supposed to represent where our political views lie.”

“So then how does a line do that for us?”

These questions rattled my brain enough for me to take an eraser to the line and toss it in the air.

“Why did you erase it, though? It was such a good discussion piece!”

Twelve years later, and I’m still wrestling with this idea, but this time, with me as the provocateur. When David Coleman, now-president of the College Board and mind behind the Common Core State Standards, presented the CCSS plan to New York State in the spring of 2011, he introduced his divine plan for ELA with a mini-lesson on “Letters from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr.’s indelible rejoinder to some of his harshest [white] critics. [check a similar speech Coleman gave here] When I first heard him use it, I couldn’t understand why he didn’t just stick to the Gettysburg Address, but then I realized that he needed to tie in MLK as a nod to the civil rights community to say, “This is for you, too!” as if the CCSS would take us on the path toward teaching for equity.

Nowadays, everyone loves using MLK Jr. to make one point or another, akin to using Morgan Freeman to quotes he didn’t say, as if to add a moral gravitas that may or may not be there. It’s how I feel about quoting King overall. It feels less likely that one would quote Ella Baker, Malcolm X, or Marcus Garvey, but, when faced with a challenge regarding people of color, people too quickly jump on the lap of the prolific (and sanitized version of) MLK and find the most overarching quote possible to justify even the most obtuse arguments.

We don’t have to ignore the deep flaws in King’s life, and, as was made abundantly clear in my last post, everyone will have their different perceptions of the heroes we hold dear. Of course, that’s fine by me because there’s no such thing as a pure hero, but they do serve their purposes. King is one of the proverbial lions standing in front of our houses, guarding our visions for a better country to live in with hope and faith. Yet, his roar rang more globally, more fiercely as time went on. Peep this piece from his aforementioned letter from Birmingham:

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

Would David Coleman have read that far for his classroom? If so, how does he reconcile the civil rights faux-ra (portmanteau of faux and aura) with the multi-billion dollar industry that the CCSS has created right in front of us? If he’s going to present the letter as a text worth teaching, would he have the cultural responsiveness to deal with the reactions to this particular paragraph, or are the first three paragraphs universal and innocuous enough to get buy-in from all vested communities?

Conversely, how do any of us connect the work of those who came before with the work we’re doing now? Do you need King to serve the “good Negro” purpose for you or are you really about that life? This part especially goes to white allies, but applies to everyone as well: does MLK truly belong to everyone or does his standing as a Black man fighting for equality for people of color actually matter in the quotes we utter?

I’d say so.

Just because you’re in the coolest room in the house doesn’t mean the house isn’t, in fact, burning around you. For the rest of us in the house, we can’t rely on calling 911 for help. King, like so many others, was a firefighter, and our government put him out. Close read that.

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Angela Davis and The Failures of Leadership

Angela Davis, legendary abolitionist / prison industrial activist / Black Panther icon recently gave an interview that made me snap my fingers a few times. An excerpt:

If structural racism and state violence against African-Americans, aided and abetted by global capitalism, are as rampant as Davis says, isn’t she disappointed in the failure of the US’s first African-American president to speak out when a case comes up that seems to dramatise what she is indicting? Davis smiles and recalls a conversation she had with Hall two months before his death. “We talked about the fact that people like to point to Obama as an individual and hold him responsible for the madness that has happened. Of course there are things that Obama as an individual might have done better – he might have insisted more on the closing of Guantánamo – but people who invested their hopes in him were approaching the issue of political futures in the wrong way to begin with. This was something [cultural theorist] Stuart Hall always insisted on – it’s always a collective process to change the world.”

and

Isn’t she letting Obama off the hook? “Perhaps we should always blame ourselves,” she says. “Why have we not created the kind of movement that would put more pressure on Obama and force the Obama administration to deal with these issues? We might have arrived at a much better healthcare plan if those of us who believe healthcare is a human right were out on the streets, as opposed to the Tea Party.”

The interview is a magnificent read, but this excerpt shook my core. At a time when more teacher leaderships have popped up than ever before, and even the US Department of Education has finally taken a strong interest in teacher leadership initiatives, I find Davis’ words a quake in my boots. She calls us to action in the most subtle ways, eschewing the narratives of personal responsibility, but in a way that still puts the onus on us.

This interview has given me remarkable perspective on leadership as a whole, whether it be teacher leadership, school administration, or district administration. About a year ago, I sat on a panel in front of almost every superintendent and network leader in the city and implored them to think of themselves as public servants. Yet, when I looked around, folks looked ecstatic or shook, and nothing in between. Did they want to hear how much we loved accountability, high stakes testing, and top-down management or nah? Did they want us to embrace the decade plus of managerial hodgepodge of BloomKlein-era, No Child Left Behind, Race To The Top, corporate-style, whats-best-for-kids legerdemain? Or did some of them think it dangerous of us to rethink leadership?

Shortly after coming off the stage, one of the organizers of the event told me, “Everybody here reads you! It’s just that some people here read you because they love you and others read because they love to hate you.” At least they feel something.

Similarly, many of us are afraid to speak to this truth, where we don’t just blame one single thing. We know that our current education discussion centers less on the systemic faults of public education, but on the role of teachers, and way too often. Many of us have pored through the research and discussed the talking points from the research ad nauseam. We’ve yet to move the needle much in the way of student achievement because we’re stuck in an innovation holding pattern, mainly from folk who use the word “innovation” and “disruption” too often (and often, with bad intentions).

But when do we all take some time and, instead of lobbing grenades across each others’ moats, we look at the castles we’ve built which are not nearly as flawless as we’d like to tell others?

How do we look at ourselves as part of the inner workings and find ways to forgo the one-directional gossip and find the inner strength to say, “This stops here?” I don’t know the answer to that, either. As a math coach, I often felt like I was fighting an uphill battle for respect from my colleagues, but eventually, I got it and I appreciated it. Yet, in four years, I still looked around and wondered “What have I done to effect school community?” I could say I tried my best, but I can’t say I ever felt satisfied as a math coach with my progress even after four years. Did I help build a movement to make the experience of school better for students or are we still mired in trying to stay afloat?

This is the moment where we move past personal, collective, and systemic responsibilities and consider all three at once, the fourth level of consciousness.

Now that I’m back full-time in the classroom, I find calling myself and others to task has me rolling perfectly round boulders up the steepest mountains. With fewer people understanding why I want it rolled up there. I have a feeling many of you empathize.

photo c/o

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The Other Half of Teachers

After the bell sounded today, as with every day, I like to sit at my desk for 10-20 minutes to decompress. I exhale a few times, staring at the scuffed white board filled with numbers and figures hastily put together from students’ responses. I don’t capture dialogue well, but all the math is there, and I most certainly planned for the academics, so I’m satisfied with that piece. I could have moved a few students from their seats, could have prompted for more individual thinking, and could have been more stern in redirecting a few students as well.

Overall, I’m thrilled that I’m not ditching the classroom first thing tomorrow, even though I tell my students weekly that I’m retiring from this. Over the course of five years, we can’t say the same for 50% of my colleagues.

After reading the aforementioned article, I had to ask why so many of us stay, and then, why would I? If you let some folk tell it, summers and holidays off motivate teachers to stay, even when we’re miserable for 200 days out of the year. Our unions and associations protect us with a job for life. Our system isn’t efficient enough to get rid of all the bad ones, and the good ones work just hard enough to stay in this profession until we can collect our enormous pensions from the state. We’re mainly engaged in an elevated mass babysitting effort until the end of the school year where we hand out bubble sheets and hoped the students listened to us for even a fraction of the time. The good news for teachers, according to some, is that they just have to sit in meetings and let adult supervisors talk at us for hours at a clip, with little to no bearing on the things we do when we shut our doors and talk to our kids.

The answer is, presumably, a lot more nuanced than that.

Most of the teachers in my circle love the profession. They get to work 30-45 minutes early just to get their minds and hearts ready to teach, however they teach. They’re not just classroom managers; they’re active facilitators of learning for students. They’re asking questions and moderating discussion, tolerant of students’ youthful mistakes and intolerant of students’ misconceptions of their own ability. They’re at once stern yet joyful, steady yet nurturing, well-planned yet amenable to student responses, empathetic and receptive, and hopefully, human. They’re using extra hours before, during, and after school to grade the mounds of papers they have, plan lessons, and review the readings they had to do as part of their professional responsibilities. Given the state of working conditions across the country, the fact that folks even want to stay ought to make everyone pay closer attention to us, but not in the “Let’s disrupt everybody in the name of ed-tech” sorta way.

Then there’s every description in between, and I don’t know how to answer that.

For most teachers I know, at least two of these components keep them in teaching: the administration or fellow educators work well with them, their students keep them engaged and hopeful for a better profession, the (little, ever-waning) perks of teaching outweigh other jobs in a topsy-turvy economy, or they find ways towards professional fulfillment. I don’t have that answer either. Every educator seems to have their own. The people I hang out with generally focus on the kids, but some of my colleagues might feel differently. I never know what to say to that, either.

My personal reasons focus on the students as well, not just as students, but as people, fully capable of exerting their energies towards positive movement. Yet, I’d be happy if they didn’t ask to go to the bathroom every five minutes. I’ve also been blessed to get to speak about this profession on “larger” stages (what’s larger than the classroom?), but I wake up before the sun does routinely so I’m in mid-day form by 8am. I’m supposed to tell you everything’s perfect right now with my teaching situation, but far from.

I just know that, for nine out of ten days, I’m happy I’m going to teach the next day. Perhaps forever. And the tenth day? I just hope it’s a Saturday.

photo c/o

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The 10 Best Posts on TheJoseVilson, 2014 Edition

What an epic year!

Remember when Audrey Watters and I facilitated a one-of-a-kind conversation at EduCon with teachers, edu-techers, parents, and an assortment of individuals who wanted to know why we were mad? Remember when I finished writing a book only to find out that I may or may not be allowed to release it, prompting my publisher and my union to sift through pages of conflict of interest law, only then to find out that none of it mattered because the author was going to release this tome anyways? Remember when I had a book release party at the UFT building, and a few hours later, a meeting with Dr. Jill Biden and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan while some snarky onlookers thought I was being co-opted, but if their favorites had the same schedule, they’d yell “Go get em!” Remember when people invited me to a panel with Randi Weingarten and a series of anti-CCSS folk only for the last guy on the panel (me again) to say, “Oh, now that we’ve had this conversation, can we talk about racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia now?” and “Why would I join up with the Tea Party when they consider me less human?” Remember? Remember? Remember?

I do. That was just the first half of the year, too.

Below are the top ten posts of 2014 according to WordPress Stats. Less comments, more way more views and shares this year than ever before. I’ve cemented my legacy in race in education writing this year, too, and perhaps it’s appropriate that I’ve had my own lane already because now that lane’s getting busy too.

Thank you all for your support!

My top ten:

–  Bad Teachers [Running Out Of TIME]

“What is a bad teacher? Out of the dozens of teachers you’ve had, how many of them would you actually call “bad”?”

–  Educators Say The Darndest Things About Kids

““YOU DON’T KNOW ME OR MY HEART!” I’ll hear. No, but, when given the chance to present themselves, some educators choose to present the worst, the ugliest, and the most malignant in us, and the rest of us stand by too often with our hands under our butts and our eyes to the clock.”

–  Not All My Teacherfolk Are My Kinfolk

“Institutionalism racism is by design, and often, we are the embodiment of the institution.”

–  On Due Process, Or What You Call Tenure

“Due process for educators at least gives teachers who want to stay a stake in the school system they serve.”

–  If This Keeps Happening, The Teaching Profession Is Doomed

” We can’t simultaneously say that teachers don’t seek the media or writing opportunities and then get mad when we don’t get to speak about education in the public. Which one is it?”

–  Michelle Obama and Why Teachers Need To Embrace Critique

“Truth be told, plenty of people of color are frustrated with our education system, regardless of whether we call it charter, public, or private. Often, the very “well-meaning” teachers who stand in front of our children are also agents for the system, and sometimes work as a cog in said system.”

–  Race, Class, and Acceptability As A Connected Educator [Aspiring to Karen Lewis]

“Because so many of us of color still waver between calling you in and calling you out.”

–  Don’t Choke Our Kids

“Don’t choke. Don’t choke our kids. Don’t cut their breath before they’ve even drawn it.”

–  Fight With Us Too, Damnit (Educators and Jordan Davis)

“I just wondered, aloud, why educators so active on Twitter when it comes to issues of educational technology, teacher evaluation, the Gates Foundation, anti-testing, lists that they did or didn’t get on, education conferences they attended, or what so-and-so said and how they replied so bravely, couldn’t dedicate a few tweets to discuss this tragedy.”

–  We Can Never Turn Our Backs

“To protect and to serve, and that’s something we can never turn our backs to.”

Bonus! Here are five of my favorites from the year as well.

When Can We Talk About Race? (Michael + Trayvon + Renisha + …)

The Race Discourse (So Hopefully You Won’t Have To Go Through That)

Beautiful Bytes of Data (guest post by Anthony Mullen)

Join The EduColor Movement, Part 1 of Many

Racism Without Racists (The School Re-segregation Edition)

I would love to hear from you all. Please give me a shout when you get a chance. Thanks.

The post The 10 Best Posts on TheJoseVilson, 2014 Edition appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

We Can Never Turn Our Backs

I hadn’t seen it live, but the pictures popped up on my social media screens. One set of photos has officers’ caps pointed directly at the procession. The other set of photos has the officers’ caps pointed in the opposite direction of a big screen with NYC Mayor Bill deBlasio in the background. For the police officers and the insulated mass of folks who agree with them, they must believe they were doing something courageous, for, how dare a mayor speak candidly about conversations he has with his Black son? How can he simultaneously lead the nation’s largest police force and harbor tenuous feelings about how they might treat his son?

In the mix with this reality is the perception of what a police force ought to do, what it currently does, and what the difference is between these two purposes in the eyes of many.

What I’ve heard a few times from rank and file teachers here in New York City is that they wish United Federation of Teachers (UFT) president Michael Mulgrew fought as hard for his members as the NYC Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA) president Patrick Lynch. According to them, the UFT has become more of a political organization, and seems more adept at giving back items that unionists fought for in the last 40 years, including length of school days and retroactive pay. They say the UFT hasn’t fought enough for its most embattled teachers, many of whom have been harassed and fired for frivolous reasons.

Pat Lynch, on the other hand, has proven himself quite a firestarter, saying just about anything to absolve his members from wrongdoing, creating a culture in the city that makes police dissent seem sacrilegious. His most recent salvo made him judge, jury, and executioner of the mayor and him administration in one fell swoop. Yet, what’s most striking for many citizens of NYC, especially people of color, is the belligerent memo, which the PBA denies sending out, that says the police will operate as a wartime unit and would act accordingly.

Who does the PBA seek to have war with? The rest of us? If so, at least in the eyes of many people of color across the nation, that’s already fait accompli. Many of us already think twice before we say anything within a 5-block radius of a police station. We already put both hands on the steering wheel when we get pulled over. We already keep our hands out of our pockets when we walk about stores, low and high-end. We already try not to make eye contact with police, and already have two types of conversations with our sons and daughters: the birds and the bees, and the bullet and the NYPD.

We already know one of “us” might be gone at the hands of the police every 28 hours on average.

But that’s what some teachers want, which is fine. NYC Educator has made good arguments here, and they deserve a second and third reading from everyone. Yet, if we push too far back into tighter versions of unionism, we’ll regress to 1968 levels of racial angst. Around 60% of all NYC teachers are white, 44% of them in high-poverty schools. All the while, incidents involving people of color and the police have ballooned in the media, starting from Trayvon Martin and peaking at Eric Garner. All these murders merit discussion, with pledges of allegiance dedicated with a signature to justice for all. Yet, in many classrooms in NYC and elsewhere, the teacher is either incapable of having this nuanced discussion or sides with Pat Lynch.

I can’t see myself supporting a union with a Lynch as its head. I do find fault with some of my colleagues across the city. I do disagree with some of the harder lines some of us take on practically everything. I do think some of us don’t have an actual plan besides “no,” and, for parents in already strenuous situations, “no” is not a plan of action for helping students get ahead in life. When teachers don’t do right by our students, mistreat them, or think of them as less than human, I don’t want them as colleagues anymore. At this point, we as teachers don’t run around saying this because we hear plenty from well-monied politicians like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo or New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, both of whom I gladly protest.

But the police protest is about whether police can brutalize if they seem the person suspicious. Even the most popular activists want police. Just not this current rendition of it, institution and all.

This confluence of elements makes it harder for me to empathize with police, who feel maligned by protestors and the media in their own right. My profession puts me at the behest of the community, and the community asks me to serve in the capacity of math teacher. I try my best given my circumstances. My job isn’t as dangerous as a police officer’s, but I continually reflect on whether I’m serving the community, and, if I knew that a large section of my community felt under-served by me and my colleagues, I would probably want my union representatives and my bosses to talk to the community and find out how to better serve them, not double down on how great a job I’m doing.

To protect and to serve, and that’s something we can never turn our backs to.

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Live and Let Die

On Saturday morning, I was flipping channels, trying to take my mind off last week when I saw the Shrek series come on. I’d already watched them, but, for some reason, I couldn’t stop watching the larger gingerbread man try to beat back a cauldron of warm milk while pulling down a castle drawbridge. By Shrek 3, we see the king, revealed as a frog in Shrek 2, on his deathpad, passing on the torch to Shrek and his now-wife Fiona. The camera pans across the Land of Far, Far Away to the scene of the funeral, when we hear Paul McCartney and the Wings’ “Live and Let Die,” with frogs doing the vocals as a Ye Olde Foot Locker box glides down a fountain. It’s hilarious and somber at once.

But then I listened to the lyrics, and it got me thinking about schools, and specifically how intentions and reality often clash.

When you were young and your heart was an open book

You used to say live and let live

Imagine this scenario, one that’s typical of many I’ve heard and seen in the last decade:

You go into teaching believing the hoopla of the mission work, the gilded bells and dulcet harping of the greatest, most important profession in the world. They tell you not to hold onto your ideas too tightly. The students will let you down. The adults will betray you. The job itself will weigh you down. Your sleeping habits will come off schedule. Your diet and thus your health will fluctuate.

Yet, if you make it out that first year, these negative elements of your job have less of an effect on you as you grow into your life as a teacher. After a few more years, you’ve gotten some expertise and feel confident enough in your knowledge as a teacher that you’d like to share that expertise with others. You have a certain way in which you work in your classroom that sets you apart from other teachers, perhaps makes you remarkable enough to get noticed by others outside your school building.

You go through a few litmus tests and, all of a sudden, you’re dubbed a teacher leader. This feels great, and, even though you may not get paid extra except in after-school hours, you still feel emboldened because teaching can be so isolated that, once given the option to work with others, you jump right into the position without missing a beat. You’re so proud of yourself, adding another notch onto your pallid résumé because it feels right.

Then something goes wrong. Horrible wrong. Then another horrible thing happens. And another. These horrible things keep happening. The inevitability of horrible things being blown out of proportion, but actually happening has finally come to fruition. You start looking around, waiting for someone to tell you you’re not the only one feeling this weight. 95% of the students behave well, you’ve caught up on almost all your paperwork, and your administrators all seem to like the job you’re doing and have felt you to your own devices.

But for the last year or so, you’ve felt something just wasn’t quite right. The teacher who usually has a pulse on these things won’t speak. The other teacher can’t be bothered. As a matter of fact, most of the staff tell you they’re working harder than ever, but you’re not as quick to step into that school building as you once were. You start to get more reflective, analyzing your relationships with everyone in the school building, everyone else with each other, and everyone else with the students. You start to see the disconnect. You despise it. You obsess over it. You want better, but you’re rolling boulders much larger than your fatigued muscles can handle.

But if this ever-changing world in which we’re living

Makes you give in and cry …

You start to tell yourself you believe your own hype. You pull back. Far back. Your students still matter and not that much else. You realize that the community you sought to lead was never there to begin with.

You’ve gone through levels of consciousness unfamiliar to those who haven’t sought to analyze the systems around them. In stages: happiness, elevation, frustration, deflation. Then a rebirth, where it’s no longer about pointing the finger at someone else, yourself, or the system, but all three at once without a blink. But some folks never get to this rebirth. They’ll stay frustrated because that’s how this system works.

But what does it matter to you? When you get a job to do, you got to do it well.

photo c/o

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The Race Discourse (So Hopefully You Won’t Have To Go Through That)

I wanted to write this piece as a bit of a year in review, but, in light of so many recent events, I prefer to let these cats out of their collective bag now. It seems, in the last few years, I’ve developed a reputation for having hard discussions with folk who have lost touch with other people’s humanity. Just last week, someone accosted Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis and me over her Ivy League, National Board Certified, double-mastered credentials. After asking questions and presenting facts in a professional manner, and getting little out of the other person besides ed reform talking points and ad hominems, I wished him well as it was a school night, and Lord knows papers matter more than a stranger who won’t Google what he’s saying to me.

Then he called me a pu … well. You can figure it out for yourself.

It was odd because, up to then, I thought we engaged in a way that wouldn’t warrant misogynist name-calling, but, really, I was waiting for that moment. Most of us who fight for social justice, especially those of us who have to consistently defend our humanity, have moments like this where you want to know and don’t want to know whether someone’s true intention is disagreement or dehumanization. On the one end, after about 45 minutes, I got the point that he disagreed and should have discontinued, but on the other, perhaps it mattered to know that my dialogue with him didn’t just come from looking at my points, but looking at my face, my skin, my person. It’s important for my education folk to see that, for some of us, this is how dialogue always goes because we can’t just have a conversation.

Race isn’t injected into the conversation. It’s already there, splayed just below an tin-foil surface.

Then again, it’s been this way all year for me and others, from people on all sides of the education debate. For instance, if someone would have told me that the presidents of our national teachers unions and the most popular education researcher would have written statements on #BlackLivesMatter and the ramping up of police brutality against people of color, I would have been shocked (SHOCKED!) because race doesn’t fit into the anti-testing narrative except in the form of “BLACK AND BROWN KIDS ARE SUFFERING BECAUSE WE SAID SO!!!”.

For years, some of us have pleaded with people of all backgrounds to reflect on the ways in which race, class, and gender work within our educational dialogue, mostly ignored or deflected. Saying such things at a large anti-testing conference this year, for example, earned me an epic finger-wag from an audience member who thought it best to lecture me on why the Tea Party wasn’t inhuman (even though that’s not what I said), a few gigabytes-worth of e-mails and calls from white people telling people of color why people of color seeking justice should just shut up and get under the anti-testing umbrella, and a slew of folks rationalizing why the disintegration (in many senses of the word) of the Black teaching corps over the last century in our country was an OK thing.

And, before this month, even with their endorsement of my book on the same subject, I still thought they acquiesced too often to the whims of folks who wish things should be exactly as they were, back when I couldn’t walk on sidewalks and the like.

On one end, you have the curious case of Campbell Brown and the Black-led NYC Parents Union suing (and then not suing?) New York State to reduce, if not eliminate, tenure. Eventually, Campbell Brown bullies the parents union around, and some of us progressives go “I told you so.” On another end, the Badass Teachers Association calls up a newly inducted president of the largest teachers union and almost get one of her employees fired for an online disagreement, a phone call with racial undertones if I ever saw / heard one. (This happens to be typical operating procedure against folks of color we don’t like who work in organizations we do like and can influence.)

For political reasons, leaders at the time decided to show solidarity with people who would otherwise have people of color erased because 53,000 seems like a lot more than 40. In other words, no one says a thing. It’s cool. Because it didn’t happen to a prominent edu-activist. Until we shut social media and whole assemblies down.

On another, ed-techers and the EduHappy Citizens Brigade deemed race talk inappropriate in forum after forum after forum. Same song, different awards, different lists, different ed-camps, different and familiar faces, different rationals. Same song.

So when do you want to talk about race? When Romans of color catch a whiff of smoke or when the Colosseum’s pillars crumble from the heat? Not sure.

But don’t let me and my confidants say that. Because everyone is a race expert now. Everyone follows the Ferguson / NYC protestors now. Everyone makes sure they have multiple friends of color and keep a colored face on speed dial to deflect whatever complicity they’ve felt or not felt in the mess we call 2014. Now everyone wants to say Teach for America is wrong / right for having had 25% of its latest recruitment class be new teachers of color. Now everyone writes petitions and gets arrested for Black lives. Now every organization has a few people of color in leadership, leaving no stone unturned. Everyone read Invisible Man and I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings now. Every white teacher is doing the empathy and listening thing and getting published in the Washington Post for it now. Every person who’s ever said or done something racist and out of line has an apology via blog post. Everyone has a pulse on what people of color think, and privilege and Martin Luther King Jr. have been adopted into every well-meaning somebody’s zeitgeist now. Now.

Everyone wants to win the race race. Now. Not back when it mattered. Now, when the media deemed it necessary and seats become available on MSNBC, not when some of us pleaded with you to make things right.

All of this is amazing because, yes, it also means that even people I truly care about have to look at themselves and the roles they play in the cultural consciousness of our schools. Some teachers in Queens still think it was cool to wear NYPD t-shirts when I rarely see such shows of solidarity afforded to teachers, because folks secretly want to spite United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew. For marching for Eric Garner and not actually against police at a time when social justice caucuses couldn’t agree on the definition of social justice.

Every moment I take a breath, I’m reminded that some of the folks who believed in Daniel Pantaleo think it OK to steal students’ air supply daily.

So am I happy that some of us have helped move the dialogue to include race, not in the periphery, but as an essential part of the work we do? Absolutely. Yet, that conversation left a bitter taste in our mouths, the reminder that, as far as we’ve come, we still have a long way to go, especially in education, where many of us prefer the nice and the benign, pretending empathy while hugging ignorance amongst us so tightly. It’s also why the methods some of us have employed in having conversations with our most prominent leaders on all sides of this debate has been necessary. In many instances, it’s changed our lives in many ways, afflicted us at work or in our activism work, left us off lists, and might have left us scared for our personal spaces.

Even as more folk gather around empathy, it’s sadly and ultimately up to us too often to explain why race matters. Because who else calls colleagues in and out whenever these issues come up? Sabrina. Xian. Melinda. Jason. Kenzo. Audrey. Chris. Bill. Rafranz. Martha. Both Mikes. Stephanie. EduColor and true allies.

Me.

In 2014, we did that so hopefully you won’t have to go through that.

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Teacher Barely Notices Mannequins In A Classroom Prank

In today’s news, a prank goes horribly wrong when a group of students replaced themselves with mannequins only to notice the teacher kept teaching. “It was supposed to be a childish prank, but, when we looked through the classroom door, she just kept teaching like we were there,” said Juan Gomez, a student in her class. The school, under the city’s official department website, is classified as 90% free or reduced lunch with 70% of the students in the lowest-third in reading and math classes and 50% English language learners, all euphemisms for serving students of color.

It all started in homeroom when kids were yelling at the top of their lungs about the Michael Brown case, the teenager murdered by recently-resigned and well-paid officer Darren Wilson. As they yelled multi-lingual curses at Wilson and the white people they didn’t like in the building, the teacher yelled “HEY! HEY HEY!” The students walked right by the teacher, knowing she wouldn’t address their concerns. According to a transcript gathered from a set of Vine videos, as they clamored together in the corner of the homeroom, the teacher started off with what looked like a promising speech:

“Now, I know many of you are angry about what happened yesterday, and I’m here for you in case you want to talk …”

As the students started to get back in their seats, the teacher continued:

“But I also want you to know that you need to think about the stupid things you do all the time to provoke authority figures, like the way you present yourselves with your lowered pants, the way you speak to your friends, and your lack of proper English!”

The students then reportedly twisted their necks, snapped their fingers and said, “Oh no, she didn’t!”

Oh yes she did. Afterwards, the students yelled, “THAT’S RACIST! You think because we’re not white, we should die!?”

“No, I’m not saying that, but …”

Devonte, the loud one out of many loud ones, said, “OH HELL NO! How you gonna say that, miss? We Black kids!”

“No, hold on, wait just a minute. About a week ago …”

“WEEK AGO!!!” Students threw their fitted caps in the air and did what they call the Shmoney Dance.

“Guys, please, please, please just sit DOWN! Now, I have these standards to teach, this curriculum to figure out, and this test to get ready for, and I can’t have all these disruptions. We’ve spent far too much class time with your nonsensical, teenage hullabaloo. As far as this Mike Jackson, Brown, whatever his name is stuff, you should know I’m colorblind.”

“Miss, you mean you can’t see color?”

“NO! It just means that I don’t care if you’re Black, white, green, yellow, or whatever, I’m just here to teach and that’s it! I’m not paid to do that and I have to teach you!”

“But miss, this is really important and …”

“So?”

“Not only is it insulting to people who are actually color-blind and have other visual issues,” says Mark Perrielo in a separate interview, president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, “but … UGH!”

That’s allegedly when students came together and turned the conversation on its head, breaking into school property an hour before school started and moving mannequins into seats and dressing them in lowered jeans and colorful caps. “I just thought that the kids wanted to straighten their lives and be on their best behavior after this Mike Jordan stuff. I didn’t actually think they were trying to prank me.” But they did because, after 30 minutes of silence and non-participation, the principal walked in and dropped his clipboard at the scene. “He said, ‘How did you get these unruly kids so quiet?’ and I just told him that my classroom management game was tight. He gave me a pound right after that,” said the teacher, whose name was redacted due to utter shame and embarrassment.

“She even marked me present, sir,” continued Gomez. “I was actually in the hallway with 30 kids and she gave me a good grade for the day.” He shook his head in disgust before pausing, then laughing as he walked by the classroom.

“This is totally unacceptable,” says Jose Vilson, author of This Is Not A Test, A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education. “You’re not even going to notice that everyone in your classroom hasn’t made a sound? Didn’t ask to go to the bathroom? That they were all had their hands on their hips? This speaks to the need for teachers who respond to the students in front of them, not the students who they wish were there. Gosh!”

As to where the students got the mannequins from, no one knows, though an anonymous source mentioned the back of a St. Louis courthouse, the same courthouse where a grand jury failed to indict now infamous officer Darren Wilson.

photo c/o

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Don’t Choke Our Kids

It was the kids who told me that Daniel Pantaleo, Eric Garner’s choker, wasn’t indicted.

Outside at around 2:40pm, the kids approached me from the grocery store, coming back into the school, and said, “Mr. Vilson, they’re getting away with it.”

Unlike my generation, there’s no delusions of racism being isolated to the South, no nuanced understanding of the role police undertaker, and no after-school specials telling us it’s going to be OK.

For them, the idea of a Black president not preventing institutional racism will linger there, with less language for it, but all the rage.

So if you ever get the opportunity to talk to students who are most disenfranchised by the judicial, the executive, and the legislative branches of their country, don’t choke. Matter of fact, don’t choke them. Because it’s not about telling them not to riot. It’s about listening to their feelings and hoping they can create a better tomorrow than the crapshow adults have laid for them.

Don’t choke. Don’t choke our kids. Don’t cut their breath before they’ve even drawn it. Their bubbles were burst long before we came into the picture. It’s our job to arm them with truths and a set of tools to empower them, even if the world we left for them is still too dangerous for their existence.

Don’t choke our kids. Just don’t.

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