Jose Vilson's Blog, page 5

A Note on Nikki Haley, Slavery, and Teacher Professionalism

There are complex answers that deserve interrogation through all their interwoven facets and there are complex answers that converge toward a simple response. The cause of the American Civil War is the latter.

Unfortunately, former governor Nikki Haley quickly found the nuance out the hard way when, in response to a question about the cause of the Civil War, she answered “Well, it was basically about how government was gonna run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.” Over the past few days, she’s done everything from alleging that the questioner was a Biden plant, to doubling down on the “freedoms” answer, to finally acquiescing that it was about slavery. Her opponents have blasted her for not being able to answer such a simple question, while other conservatives have reveled in the idea that it was Republicans who freed the slaves while Democrats sought to keep Black people enslaved.

Of course, this all muddles the moment we’re in now, and the reason why, for many, the word “slavery” is difficult to say for some political leaders. Part of that starts in our classrooms.

The recently departed Roni Dean-Burren (RIP, Dr. Roni) set off a firestorm less than a decade ago when she took a picture of her son’s social studies textbook and pointed out an egregious mistake within the text. In it, the writers of the textbook captioned one of their maps with “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.” Describing enslaved people as “workers” is an obfuscation of the highest order. While McGraw-Hill issued an apology after Dean-Burren’s video went viral, it bears reiterating that so many writers and editors pored over the texts and saw nothing wrong until a Black woman scholar who happened to be a parent in the district found it printed in her son’s textbook. She goes on to point to several other errors about marginalized people throughout the textbook, in case readers thought the atrocities just stopped at Black people.

Given the distribution of these textbooks, thousands – if not millions – of children will have read “workers from Africa” as fact. In the same article, writer Laura Moser describes the Texas State Board of Education as favoring the Lost Cause, a movement that has only picked up steam in the last two decades.

I bring all this up because the recent wave of censorship laws is a multipronged, protracted strategy based on fear with the ultimate goal of revenge against a perceived loss of social order. While I could explore all the facets of that “order,” the one that I haven’t seen explored enough is the chilling effect it has on teachers and schools. For years, I’ve advanced the idea of teachers as vanguards and stewards of any well-functioning society. First, when I use the vanguard, I mean that educators are usually the first adults that we meet to explicitly teach us written and unwritten rules of society. Secondly, we’re still wrestling with the idea of education as a gateway to social advancement and schools as sites for social reproduction with all the problems embedded in that. Third, it’s important to name expertise as a complicated, yet vital pillar for teacher work. The deprofessionalization of teaching compounds teachers’ inability to push back against wayward teaching of deep history.

The Lost Cause movement – and those seeking to profit from that movement – have known this better than most, and have planned accordingly. For educators (principals, teachers, etc.), it means our work is that much more difficult. Whatever you mean by difficult.

It’s no coincidence that, a few years after Dean-Burren named the insidious wording of “workers from Africa,” school boards and state houses have pummeled schools and communities with censorship laws subverting truth and all its complications. The mere mention of slavery might blacklist a teacher from a school district. It means book bans, scripted lessons, and social targeting via on- and off-line harassment. Dismissing the horror of slavery is an intentional erasure of accurate history, but also an immoral rebuke to reconcile and repair institutional harms done over centuries. When teachers can’t teach the breadth of history with the gravity the topic deserves, we get a set of students – and whole communities/societies – who dilute those horrors.

Generations have grown up with textbooks that diminished the impacts of oppression and marginalization. It doesn’t mean we have to let them win.

In thinking about Haley’s comments, some strategists have suggested her equivocation was a way to please voters who would otherwise align with former President Trump’s agenda. The obvious question is, why would a presidential candidate who wants to be president in 2024 want to align themselves with a former president stuck in the results of 2020? But the less obvious question is, why would a society that (mostly) abolished slavery make slavery apologists and Lost Cause crusaders a core constituency to lead the nation? To many of us, this points to America’s inability to rectify its wrongs and prove itself the democracy so many have fought for since the country’s founding.

In the efforts to synthesize efforts to include racially and ethnically marginalized people’s humanity into CRT, think tanks didn’t magically create a new tool. It took advantage of a pervasive sentiment that has been waiting a century to take back power. Teachers as agents of the state, have either been coerced or are willing participants in this project through laws and community/social pressures. Our textbooks and curricula have been mitigating the truth of slavery for decades, thereby socializing us toward compliance for generations now. When a small yet vocal set of pundits yell “Keep politics out of the classroom,” they’re signaling that they’d only like their politics advanced upon everyone else’s imagination, a set of politics that this country has favored since its inception.

If we really wanted to advance professionalism, as so many teachers do despite the nonsense, they’d be given license to say, “I hear you, but slavery was the main cause of the US Civil War. Here are a few ways students have imagined building a better country, but I can’t water that down for you.” Anything less is wrong, but also in alignment with what we’ve seen for too long.

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Tired of Being Tired (Towards A Better 2024)

Have you ever taken a ride on Kingda Ka roller coaster at Six Flags Great Adventure? You get in a seat with the high-velocity harness, waiting for the click to secure you. Unlike other coasters where the suspense builds as you climb, this one rolls the passengers up a few feet and then has you wait a minute or so before lift-off. There’s no clear signal of when you’ll lift off, but then POP you can feel yourself lifted upwards like a slingshot hundreds of feet into the air, then the usual lull just before the apex, then down the twisting ramp. By the time you and your fellow passengers come back downward, it feels less like a rocket launch and more like a dizzying glide.

The ride from launch to base takes almost exactly a minute (yes, I checked), but it feels like forever until it’s not. If that’s not the most appropriate metaphor for the academic school year, I don’t know what is.

Looking forward, we see just up ahead a deluge of midterm exams, benchmark assessments, standardized tests, meetings with parents and fellow educators, and so many events to plan. At the beginning of school, I always had good expectations for how I wanted the year to go. I’d have a a handful of goals I’d set for myself and another handful for my students. As I gained more years of experience, I also knew to control those expectations so I could hold steady for the year. By year six, Winter Break felt less like a rushed escape and more like a well-timed end of a paragraph.

That takes time and experience with doing the work, and helps when you’re getting back into the swing of things again. With less than a week left until you get back from break, give yourself the space to start a new paragraph.

When speaking to teachers, principals, and other educators, it’s evident that people are tired. But they’re also tired of being tired. On paper, the job is still the same. The social and interpersonal parameters of the job have changed significantly. Even so, a significant number of people want to do something wholly new. Here’s a good list of things I’d do in preparation for the new year (applicable in multiple situations):

Make a list of people that merit a one-to-one conversation. If there are any lingering things from 2023 that you haven’t had the energy to address, this is a good time to build up the energy (and talking points) to have the conversation. The break might have cleared their head, too, and help everyone do their work better. The best time for the conversation doesn’t have to be now, but it’s better to do it before the rush of the year hits again.
Write down a small list of commitments and principles for yourself. Did you intend on reflecting every Friday? Or did you want to visit at least one classroom that you rarely get to see? Did you pick up a book that everyone’s talking about? Set the commitment and make it part of your habits. You don’t need to share them with anyone, if that helps. Really, if you did this exercise in the beginning of the year, you can tap back into them. To the extent that you can do right by what makes you a better person, the better.
Find other things outside of education that deeply interest you. Educators often internalize – forcibly or unintentionally – signals suggesting we need to be “on” 24/7. Unfortunately, it also means our spheres of influence (friends, spouses, family members) rarely get a sense of the fullness of our humanity. Pick up that instrument. Take the remainder of the week to binge-watch that series. Look up routes around your school that you’d walk/drive/bike through to get some fresh air. We are more than our work, and we’re better for thinking through that.
Remind yourself of your community. Education can often feel like a solitary act because it’s just us. For teachers and paraprofessionals, it’s usually just you and the students. For principals, it’s usually just you and, if you’re lucky, an assistant principal or dean, and even then. We can break that by reminding ourselves who is in our social community. An exercise I sometimes do is to create concentric circles (I like this one) and figure out who you’d put in those rings. It’s not that you’re ranking people, but it’s to help you maintain connections when things get hard. Because they always do. “Who can you turn to?” is always an appropriate question, in the classroom and outside.
Create a healthy boundary for what you’re doing. Some of the most hostile moments I’ve seen in my career come right around testing season. It’s no wonder: the students read everyone’s energy even when we think we’re hiding it. It’s probably best for us to take a few steps back and think about the purpose of the day, the month, and the remainder of the school year. While the narrative about student behaviors has been disheartening, they’re also reflective of the world and the moment. Show some grace. Follow protocols so it’s less personalized. Take responsibility for what you directly did, but let go of what’s not yours to carry.

Taken together, this advice hopefully serves as a way for educators across the board to feel seen. It’s not that this is a definitive list by any means, nor is it a perfect list, but it’s a start to a conversation we’ve all needed to have for some time. The idea of “resting” and “healing” has felt flaccid when not backed by a set of actionable items to do for us all. This also means that the advocates pushing for better working conditions have our work cut out given how unrelenting the “learning loss” narrative has been. We push on.

In the meantime, enjoy whatever’s left of the break. By the time the new year starts, here’s hoping you’ll enjoy the ride especially when you know what’s coming.

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‘Origin’ and Teaching Our Son Before The World Does

A few weekends ago, ARRAY Inc. invited EduColor to a screening of Origin, a movie based on the events surrounding and within Isabel Wilkerson’s best-selling Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Before the screening started, Hank Azaria thanked everyone for coming and introduced a new initiative: to make sure as many 16-year-olds as possible got a chance to view the film for free. Shortly thereafter, though, he described the movie as great in the movie sense, but “it’ll change you.” The movie was rated as PG-13, I steeled myself for what I perhaps should have seen coming.

Without giving too much away, one of the scenes in the movie depicts George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin, including the shot that catalyzed a movement. My 11-year-old son and I were moved, too. We stepped out of the theater so we could talk out the shock. Instantly, I recalled where I was when Judge Debra Nelson and a jury of Zimmerman’s peers acquitted Zimmerman of all charges. In fact, Alejandro was two years old and our family was a few miles away from where the tragedy happened. An hour after the verdict dropped, I was expected to attend a STEM professional development with my colleagues.

The dread of facing colleagues from across the country when my mind felt chaos was in alignment with how society expected Black people to endure systemic suffering. Worse still was that I had no one to process the grief with at the PD because professionalism is ostensibly separate from our shared humanity.

Nevertheless, Alejandro wanted to watch the rest of the movie after the moment. Luz and I looked at each other, and for a minute, I winced. She knew better than me that the subject matter might traumatize him. She and I tried hard to anticipate which parts of the movie our little introvert shouldn’t watch. We also took a minute to set aside our own skepticism about what he can handle and the lessons he’s bound to learn with us. We remembered the movies we watched in our youth that grounded our critical lenses.

For me, that was the seminal work Eyes on the Prize. The women at the Boys Club of New York who showed it to us fed us cookies and other snacks. The public lynchings enrage me to this day.

Maybe they knew like Luz and I know now that we’d rather Alejandro learn this from us than from the noise we’re seeing now. Back then, our schools could only afford social studies textbooks from three presidential terms ago. Conglomerates started buying up news stations large and small, distorting how we received news and concretized knowledge. The prison industrial complex and the crack cocaine epidemic swept away so many of the knowledge keepers, and the few left in my neighborhood spoke in whispers to tight and small collectivities.

In the midst of this, my parent pushed me to focus on our studies because this was the only took they felt they could wield against the outside world. Things are different and the same all at once.

We can place the blame on social media, the lack of civics education, and the disruptive ways our students have processed the world now. Yet, both as a veteran educator and a parent, I rather not wait for my students to have a deeper knowledge of chattel slavery, the genocide of indigenous peoples, the other amoral histories that got us here, and the victories towards a better world despite and because of this. We have school systems that reflect this history, too. Any time we teach toward truth and reconciliation, we set up more children to create a better world than the one we inhabit now.

For all the pundits and charlatans who decry liberalism in our school system, there’s another set of us who’ve seen how even our fellow educators perpetuate racial castes reflexively and intentionally. And “us” feels like a fraction of the educator workforce.

As we exited the movie, I hadn’t been in a theater full of sobbing people since Fruitvale Station. I wholeheartedly recommend watching it. The cinematography is amazing, and the stories Wilkerson shares about her life while writing the book were also heartbreaking, but purposeful. Some of the things we learned within the movie were new to me, too. The people who need to see it the most have ostensibly been enraptured by revanchist narratives about a country that was barely theirs, either.

This is a story less about how we were done, but how we get over. That’s different.

Also, we would do well to consider how our pain and suffering are interconnected rather than separate, interwoven rather than isolating. I still believe that our world needs an overabundance of empathy and love in the midst of derision and hate. When someone chooses to point at a group of people suffering atrocities and finds multiple ways to consider them less than human, the inhumanity they seek in others is often found within that someone. To this day, we struggle to name injustices large and small. We see people engage in bad faith and whataboutisms because contrarianism is more comforting than harder work on ourselves and our peers. When we peek just outside of American borders, we see how our world is so much smaller because of our collective hurt and a majority of people who want to see it do better.

But Alejandro will know this early and often. My generation and so many generations before needed someone who held themselves as the standard bearers for keeping the stories straight. Like so many children in the lower rungs of this racial caste, my son has gotten multiple talks as he should. Some might say the truth is infectious. I prefer to say it’s like a vaccine: it might swell at the site of injection, but it keeps us safe from deadly diseases over time.

Hopefully, Alejandro will be here long enough to see a world where we won’t need them anymore. I’ll do everything in my power to make it so.

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What Does A Good School Even Mean?

Recently, I saw a meme suggesting what school should have taught us as opposed to what it teaches us. The setup usually lists a set of skills that seem like common sense: how to do your taxes, how to work through the legal system in ordinary situations, how to determine your credit score etc. They would eliminate skills such as, but not limited to, the Pythagorean Theorem, how to calculate slope, fictional texts, and most concepts after the first half of Algebra 1. These sorts of memes argue for the utility of school i.e. the extent to which what children learn is directly applicable to their post-K-12 life.

Fine.

However, when we look through the current standards, we see evidence of the types of skills that open doors to dealing with complex problems, no matter how amorphous. For example, it’s hard to understand how to do your taxes when you can’t calculate taxes and interest, both of which are standards in middle school math. You can’t read legal papers without reading for voice and vocabulary, which are part of the literacy standards across the content areas in elementary and secondary education. Also, these memes assume that these various systems don’t create complex webs of rules that bar the ordinary citizen from full access to them, thereby creating dedicated professions to help ordinary citizens untangle the tapestry.

But ultimately, it’s about what we value and who we value that informs what a “good” school is.

In spite of the neutral language that many advocates use to argue for their visions of schooling, it’s often mired with explicit and implicit biases about the school, like the composition of the student body, the architecture and upkeep of the school, and the location of the school itself. I’ve listened to educators who worked in public school settings tell me that they never worry about the schools they send their child to because they live in neighborhoods where they don’t work. Of course, the composition of the student body in those schools were very different than the schools they worked in, which also meant a whole host of resources and expectations were also different. Yes, the home district was predominantly White. The schools where the educators worked were predominantly students of color.

Yes, every one of the folks I spoke to who advocated for this dichotomy sat back and rarely advocated for equitable conditions. The “way it is” doesn’t have to be.

As an educator who sent their child to a public school, I didn’t send my child to the school for wayward notions of academic excellence. Any discerning citizen would better interrogate why solely using standardized test scores to measure school quality has deep, deep flaws. I sent my son to that school because it had a student body that attempted to mirror the diversity of New York City. The school catered to the Black and Latinx parents who wanted to send their child to a school with ideals steeped in progressive pedagogy. The principals welcomed us into the schools and the environment felt more open than even the schools my wife and I worked in. Every child learned at least one verse of “Lift Every Voice” and a Black Lives Matter at Schools bulletin board hung prominently throughout the year.

When issues arose, people paid attention, and it wasn’t just us. No one tried to undermine our intellect even in conflict. Our child’s confidence in his academics and personhood grew multifold. That showed up on his report card sometimes, but in his interactions with us and his peers even more.

But we’re fortunate because we’re educators and generally know what to look for in pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment. Not every parent/guardian has that deep knowledge. Thus, schools might recruit students with glossy advertisements, promising rigorous curricula, and a religious/private school aesthetic in a secular framework. They’ll elevate the parents who’ve become “true” believers to cheerlead for their institutions, too. Individually, I don’t begrudge people who would do anything for their child to get their child a good education, whether by lottery, tuition, or cozying up to a parent coordinator to put in a good work.

Societally, I simultaneously believe that every child deserves a good education. Every child.

There are a large set of education advocates who’ve said, “But Jose, we can’t wait until America corrects its property taxes and education laws to get our talented and gifted children the education they deserve.” OK. But a strategy that only strategized for the “in the meantime” doesn’t get us to something more everlasting. As I’ve illustrated, we don’t have to center dominant ideas of what a good school is to send our children to good schools. We also have to work on deconstructing school systems that intentionally create inequitable and unjust schools at the root.

Even if every school had the same exact resources and truly equitable measures for success across the board, our internal social wiring makes it so that schools with scores of students with marginalized identities will never be looked at as “good.”

This separate and unequal dichotomy explains the so-called gaps in housing, politics, law enforcement, and other post-K-12 sectors as well. The project we undertake by advocating for education as a human right, for every child, is one of full citizenship and democracy. Any less is underwhelming. We may not all come to agreement about what a “good” school is. We may continue to make individual choices for when we send our children into the far future. But one thing we need to hold ourselves to is the idea that all of our children deserve an option of schooling that sees them as fully human and fully deserving and capable of the breadth of human knowledge and beyond.

Maybe they’ll find a2 + b2 = c2 boring, but they’ll have known that communities across the world fought for the idea that our children deserved a good present and future. Because, not just despite, our past. That’s a meme worth sharing. More soon …

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Learning Loss and the Lessons Americans Refuse To Learn

The United States of America has spent the last three years arguing about the pandemic’s effects on students’ academic and socioemotional well-being. Of course, this gave rise to the hodgepodge of tutoring services looking to accelerate their earnings, revanchist groups pretending to advocate for “parents rights” as a cover for dismantling democracy, and a plethora of people who coopted longstanding traditions from marginalized groups for their capital gains. These movements felt contingent on the idea that our kids were doomed (DOOMED!) if adults didn’t go back to a pedagogically rudimentary disposition (“back-to-basics”) to stop this “liberal” society from falling off a cliff with their COVID safety measures and mass school closures.

But, as David Wallace-Wells illustrates here, the picture is a lot more complicated:

And what it shows is quite eye-opening. American students improved their standing among their international peers in all three areas during the pandemic, the data says. Some countries did better than the United States, and the American results do show some areas of concern. But U.S. school policies do not seem to have pushed American kids into their own academic black hole. In fact, Americans did better in relation to their peers in the aftermath of school closures than they did before the pandemic.

Unlike what’s been parroted time and again, his interpretation of the data suggests that we should be concerned, but not for the reasons we kept hearing. There’s definitely more work to do on the hyper-local/district level in poring through data, but a country with thousands of school districts, myriad decision-making structures, and a pandemic that killed over a million people within its borders fared better than average. Of course, I’d also like to pore over the data on the local level with identity markers in mind, but the article also seems to account for economic subgroups and I’m left pondering how we can rethink our educational priorities.

Despite the jingoistic flag-waving some do whenever this topic is brought up, The United States has never been #1 on these international assessments. How does The United States expect to be #1 in education when we’ve never authentically prioritized education for every student in America?

When people say “learning loss,” they also pair it with the idea that students are losing their positions in life somehow. If the end goal is to get into a highly selective – or “highly rejective” (h/t/ Akil Bello) – college, then that feels more like an indictment on a society that keeps leveling up the accreditation stakes. While 10-15% of students at Ivy League colleges are categorized under “legacy,” this country has generally blamed the Black and Latinx students – who often come in with higher GPAs than the average – for attending these schools. The specter of multiculturalism in the hallowed institutions is enough to drive rejected students to Fox News and the like. Even after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, students who were used as a wedge to strike down affirmative action in colleges still felt the anxiety of college admissions.

This all points to how education as a construct is severely hampered by structures that existed prior to the pandemic. There’s a sizable subset of parents right now imagining phantom students that their children must be better than, which only breeds contempt for anything “public.” The “learning loss” narrative just puts students, parents, and communities on a hamster wheel with no off-ramp.

Saying a child is “behind” assumes a race for which we have no real finish line besides death. And we rarely accounted for those losses, even less so during this pandemic era.

But perhaps an undercurrent that hasn’t been studied enough is the breadth of lessons students learned about this country and the world along the way. We’re at an inflection point where students have stepped into their power in a multitude of ways. While some demonstrate having bigger visions for activism and and a renewed sense of humanity, others have embraced alpha male narratives with the latest get-rich-quick schemes, reflecting the darkness that the world has reflected on them. They learned a lot from the social movements in 2020, but also the pushback of 2021 and the red-pilled forces that emerged in our isolation.

In fact, they’re learning right now, well beyond the curriculum in front of them. The cacophony of dying children and bombs interject the petty memes and spontaneous dances of their social media feeds. Even as they swipe, it all seems out of control, and out of their control. But being “in control” doesn’t seem to solve much, either. Some say we’ve lost control, but many of us knew we rarely had it in the way we think we do. Maybe students are learning that quicker than the adults did.

As we head into the new year, we still have an opportunity to rethink what we’re doing. The best time was yesterday, but the better time is now. Our students deserve to have an education system that doesn’t punish them socially and economically for not attaining the highest possible score on a standardized test. While the majority of Americans appreciate the efforts of their local schools and the adults who serve them, the narrative of “failing schools” is only driving towards the dissolution of public institutions.

Given that out-of-school factors weigh more heavily on student achievement than in-school factors, now is a good time to look around us, build deeper and more sustainable connections with others, and collaborate with others towards a much better future and, perhaps along the way, we can regain much of what we’ve lost.

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For Educators Who Get In Trouble But Want To Stay In Their Professions

Last night, I was asked to speak virtually to a group of student teachers who read my book This Is Not A Test for class (on sale at Haymarket Books, by the way). It was great speaking to this group of students after nine years of learning, leading, and troublemaking since the release of the book. The burgeoning educators had great questions, but the one that feels most germane to the moment was about getting into trouble. In particular, the person asked how administration reacted to my book and it quickly reminded me that I have things to share with you.

For years, I held onto the idea that people are complex human beings, especially in distressing systems. Society doesn’t give us enough grace, much less allow us to give it to each other. Modeling a level of humanity that isn’t afforded to us might help the world get closer to authentic healing. But it usually gets uglier before it gets better, so you can imagine what happened after I published my book.

Photo copies were made and analyzed for urgent instructional team meetings after the publication of the book. Social and professional silent treatments began. Rumors of me being targeted for sanctions spread. Informal observations turned into rebukes of my professionalism and character. Opportunities for advancement were squashed. Of course, I grinned and bore it because my responsibility to children mattered more than things I don’t dare mention here. Relationships between administrators and teachers are rarely reciprocal in grace-granting, which is also a source of tension for many of us.

Yes, I got in more trouble. No, I regret nothing.

I rarely discussed my actual admin in this blog (and if you asked me which posts precisely, I was more likely to deny it), but none of it mattered. One of my math coaches advised me to pick and choose my battles with a particular assistant principal, but the more the battles kept piling up, the less of them I wanted to fight. I was already part of multiple battles outside of school: the fight against high stakes standardized testing on the local and national level, the fight for educators of color, the fight against the specialized high school admissions test, the fight for a culturally responsive and sustaining education in NYC, the general fight for Black lives, etc. I simultaneously had the dubious distinction of being the first of the NYC education bloggers at the time to have their blog blocked by the whole NYC Department of Education. To also teach my students in a way that reflected my activism became harder when the whole climate of our schools didn’t agree with that.

I don’t wish that suppression for any teacher activist, much less ones whose very existence is treated as an anomaly in our schools.

But in this moment and time, it bears repeating what my mentor told me years ago: another reason why we exceed at protocols and procedures is because we don’t wanna give these folks a legitimate reason to get rid of us. Because they already do. They’ll find a way, but you don’t have to give it to them. Some topics are easier to activate on than others, and racial and social justice to the extent that I and others did always put a target on our backs in a way that fighting for better pay, pensions, and other “safer” topics did not.

So I stayed subversive. I gave my weekly assessments. I wrote my lesson plans in the recommended format. After I was transitioned from the math coach role, I took it in stride, thankful that I got to influence more students with my mathematical legerdemain. When the program changed at the imposition of the superintendent to give me two more classes, I think my only word was “Fine,” and mumbled something inaudible to my colleagues. I had a moment or two of self-imposed isolation in subsequent years, but eventually galvanized other educators so we could make it through the school years. My lessons were mostly good, sometimes great. I broke up a few fights, too, as larger men are prompted to do, including one where I came within an inch of a pocket knife.

The system gave me a collective shrug for most of my troubles. And then I went back to teaching because that’s what I do. Or did.

But for teachers who wish to be teacher activists, it doesn’t take much besides a community and a vision. The latter is your work, the former is ours. There are a plethora of teacher groups out there doing great work, and having a union helps with this, too. If I had to choose between you getting fired for rebellion and you staying, eight out of ten times, I’d choose for you to stay. With so few people willing to build movements towards justice and empathy in our classrooms and schools, even the specter of having just one increases the possibility that students will have exposure to what’s conceivable. That someone would plant the seed for hope and justice is promising.

But too much of our current knowledge base puts teacher activists in the past, as if we don’t have living examples among us. So activate on. You can wait the three years and a day, but tenure doesn’t protect those of us who walk with darker hues and just hearts in the same way. People have no idea how administrators who see due process will do us in that process. For what it’s worth, getting hired as a teacher explicitly means that you’re not as revolutionary as you think you are because there’s always a line to cross. Revolution assumes you’ll step on those, too.

The hope is that, because there’s a long legacy of people named and unnamed in our systems looking to normalize that which is seen as radical, we will win. And there’ll be many more books written by teacher activists who seek to get the record straight when society says they shouldn’t.

The fact that we have teachers who want to be activists means, even amongst all the wrong, some of us did something right.

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Death By Millions of Cuts (In Defense of NYC Public Schools and Beyond)

Last year, when I dropped my son off at school, my first question to the staff was “What’s changed?”

After the cuts came down, students felt a palpable loss across the board. We can enumerate the problems with leaving any school budget thousands of dollars short: less teachers per class, tired adults carrying more of the load, less electives, desolate classrooms and hallways, less people for communities to turn to, less resources, less … of everything really. I and hundreds of others spent the summer advocating to stave off disastrous budget cuts to our schools, including a rumored $500K to my son’s school. I spent time in dozens of classrooms across the city and, while everyone generally seemed like they were doing what they could with what they had, there was also a sense that they could do much better if they had more.

And that’s the thing with these millions and billions of dollars in budget cuts. Politician math is when they demand that schools run the same activities for less.

The slide towards corrosive school funding has been lubricated for decades now. Researchers often point to the A Nation at Risk report from the early 1980s as an inflection point for American schools. The commission that authored this report used the “failing schools” narrative as a rallying cry to shift the purpose to accountability and austerity. Rather than advocate for holistic learning experiences that create a well-educated citizenry, these initiatives insisted that schools need mainly to focus on achievement, particularly in core content areas. By the time the No Child Left Behind Act came around, these ideas took hold as a bipartisan impetus. 20 years later, and phrases like “back to basics,” “classic liberalism,” and “phonics” have become boons for politicians looking to strip schools from much needed resources.

At some point, society must ask itself, “if your budget reflects your values, then why do you not value education?”

We also spent the last half-century pulling together the social safety net into our schools. Now, our poorly funded institutions are also child care centers, health care centers, community centers, food centers, emergency shelters, and so much more. In New York City, this also doesn’t bode well with the multiple crises happening here and beyond. In a city with 430,000 millionaires (the most of any city in the world), the current mayor has asserted that New York will be destroyed by the migrant crisis with little evidence other than poor management and lack of wealth distribution. If the city and state taxed the millionaires equitably for the resources they use up from the city, we’d make a serious dent in whatever deficits the city faces. Also, since the city has lost about 10% of its population since 2020, then it stands to reason that we have more than enough housing to bring in asylum seekers and alleviate the pre-existing housing crisis for the rest of us.

Meanwhile, half-empty condominiums continue to pop up along main streets, blocking views we came to recognize. They obstruct our views and our ability to sustain the city as they won’t pay their fair share.

NYC deserves much better. Rather than the deficit narrative embraced across the political system, we need values that point to getting a plethora of resources for everyone. We need schools that can do more with more. If we have less students, it should mean that NYC public schools can do more with less students. When we think beyond our individual children and the advantages we’re trying to secure for just them, we’ll see a wide array of children who deserve their gifts to be augmented, cared for, and seen. If our society had even half the resilience and sense of justice that many of our children do, we’d be way better off.

However, I don’t wish to wait until the youth take charge of society. Adulting has a way of dampening the dreams of many. Mass cuts to social services are fodder for the abdication of society’s responsibility to the public good, however complicated. I don’t blame the whole administration, either, just the folks who think stripping schools of much-needed funds is a good idea. Of course, I’m fortunate to be part of a collective that has a plan for reimagining NYC’s work (in case someone tells you we never fought back). But we’re not fighting for frivolous reasons. We’re demanding great schools for everyone, because of the crises we see. Pundits say schools should fall by the wayside so we can keep funding for departments that keep us safe, neglecting the fact that schools are one of the few institutions that proactively keep us safe.

I’m ever hopeful that the next time I visit a school and ask “what’s changed?” the staff would say “everything” in the best ways possible. That’s math I can get behind.

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Difficult For Whom: A Conversation about Conversations and Systems

Recently, my son did an active-shooter drill at his school. I asked him how it went. He mentioned how it was fine, but a few students couldn’t be quiet.

I nodded, remembering my days as a middle school teacher when I’d have to insist that children be quiet when, developmentally, they’d want to shake the room. An active-shooter drill means that teachers have to lock their doors, cover their door windows, command students to hide in a corner or a less obvious spot in the classroom, and ask for perfect silence. From a professional standpoint, I understand these drills (fire drills, lockdown drills, active shooter drills, etc.) help us prepare for emergencies and serve to instill a sense of routine for everyone in our schools. Yet, the fact that we need certain types of drills in our society feels gruesome given the type of work we’re attempting in schools. Too much of the rhetoric out there suggests that students should both be protected from sensitive conversations and be prepared for what happens when we don’t have those conversations.

Two questions we don’t ask often enough when it comes to our schools: “What will we do about this in the long term?” and “How did we get here?”

Too many people say things like “Well, I want my child to feel safe in a classroom,” appealing to the lowest common denominator. Yes, of course, most caregivers want safety. But where the argument usually falls apart is what people determine as safety. The word “safety” is relative to multiple factors, usually involving identity and social context. Where most parents agree on some measures of safety (“Can my child turn to someone when they’re getting bullied?” or “Do they have a designated person they can trust in the building when I’m not there?”), things get more precarious as we ask for finer details. Where one set of parents want to prevent their children from hearing about society’s problems, another set of parents knows their children will face those problems and wish to gather the tools to survive and perhaps thrive in this life.

I get that values ultimately determine what we want from schools, but I don’t get how we continue to put forth one dominant set of values that continually harm us all, particularly our schools.

In the news, conservative policymakers rebuke some collection of abortion rights, civil rights for people of color and/or LBGTQIA+ folks, and other calls for dignified treatment, clumsily jeer them as “woke,” and go on with the status quo. Even though most of the shenanigans are deeply unpopular to the majority of Americans, our country has always created a well-oiled slide for “MAGA”-identifying people while human rights need mass social movements behind them time and again. This dynamic pushes more innocuous initiatives like DEI and multiculturalism to the margins of every industry in the country. Especially education.

So, while books flew off the shelves and donations to POC-led groups came in the millions, the country took much of that progress back and regressed in many circles to 1930s ideologies. Not every classroom or school was ready to take the next step in dismantling racism. But for those that were, this not only silenced the white educators and made them more fearful to attempt this work, it also reified that educators of color didn’t belong in front of any students, even those who looked like their own.

That’s ultimately why, when we call a racial or other identity conversation “difficult,” it just means that the students we’re most likely protecting are those who would benefit from reifying the status quo. Brown students don’t benefit from not mentioning the waves of asylum seekers into our cities and schools, as mayors and governors blame them for their jurisdiction’s problems. Black students don’t benefit from not learning about slavery, Reconstruction, and/or human rights in the form of the Black Lives Matter movement. Native American students don’t benefit from lessons that just stop at land acknowledgments (at best). Christians don’t benefit from learning corrupted versions of Christianity that don’t point toward authentic peace, justice, and love. For that matter, we don’t benefit from not learning more about Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and other religions. (Especially true since any Americans used to think that the separation of church and state was critical to a burgeoning democracy.)

But perhaps most critically: White students don’t learn when the American project professes to protect them, but are really just preserving the status quo that gets us further away from a truly shared humanity. Emphasis on sharing.

Today, I took my family and some of EduColor’s executive board to see Origin, the Ava Duvernay-directed movie based on the events surrounding Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste. The harrowing film gave us glimpses in world history that one might initially think children shouldn’t know. But, if it’s one thing I know about our world, it’s that I rather my son find about these events from his parents than a distorted version of events from elsewhere. Until America learns its lessons, I’ll continue to teach my son and any person in my sphere of influence how we got here. I will continue speaking up in service of the oppressed and stand in solidarity with those who have also sought to hold the line at truth.

We can’t treat the specter of inhumanity as normal. The “difficult” conversation for this world is the one where we look at the suffering of others, learn what it would take to minimize that harm, and imagine a society that would never allow for this.

Justice is a routine that keeps us all safe.

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The Problem With How You Discuss Reading

Kids can’t read. At least that’s what we’ve been told to believe by folks trying to dismantle public education. Proponents of this refrain use frivolous things like standardized test scores with no reflection on what they’re conveying.

It’s a prickly discussion to have given our current educational environment, happening in the midst of a censorship movement against books perceived to be more racially and/or LGBTQIA+ inclusive, a critical eye on what’s been dubbed “the science of reading“, and the influx of asylum seekers across the country. As these battles persist, housing insecurity remains pernicious and perhaps exacerbated by the lack of a real plan for our most vulnerable youth. The nation is still under the aura of No Child Left Behind / technocratic solutions to the education field’s worst challenges.

Oh, and the advent of AI has only complicated the “reading” part of this because why read when a computer can do that for you, too?

In New York City, this also provides context for other dynamics at play. In the beginning of the school year, Chancellor David Banks mandated schools to choose between three reading curricula that focus on the “science of reading.” Mayor Eric Adams prioritized phonics over the controversial “balanced literacy,” a theory developed by Lucy Calkins and implemented across the city and the country in thousands of classrooms over the last three decades. On a basic level, balanced literacy prompts students to take a macro-level view of reading and writing that pushes them to write with a whole language approach. Critics point out how, in order for children to succeed within balanced literacy, they would need background knowledge to sound out words that they otherwise wouldn’t understand on their own.

But my question for everyone is: when was the last time you listened to the educators who believed in cultural responsiveness?

As a math teacher, I’ve been to and spoken to dozens of English and ENL teachers and what I’ve gathered – and I agree with – is that none of the folks who actually listen to children and communities do any boxed curriculum to fidelity. If anything, in more restrictive environments, they would subvert whatever their administrator would say and get the kids the knowledge they need. They’ll sample different texts and carefully cobble together a curriculum that both meets the demands of higher-ups and the different ways the students in their classes are processing the information. Teachers of any subject would also tell you that the energy we put behind our lessons and the encouragement we engender also matter in our pedagogy.

Disclaimer: no two classes are alike so adaptiveness is also a factor in this thing we call expertise.

What we mean by literacy might be the most glaring hole in how we discuss reading. We have different definitions of reading, but generally, reading is the ability to decode text and make meaning of the text. Reading, however, is not the same as literacy. Literacy, by comparison, is a more expansive set of acts related to how one decodes, interprets, and communicates through a medium. Literacy includes writing, listening, speaking, and making meaning of a whole communicative experience. For example, you can read an article and understand the words, but depending on the medium (book, blog, article), the author, and your experiences, you might have different interpretations of the same text. In the way of another example, a teacher might be trying to teach a student the English language, but the student might associate “English” with negative experiences they’ve had with authority figures before they get to the classroom.

Literacy, then, is as much about what “text” we produce and consume and how we produce and consume it.

The “reading” problem isn’t new, either. The idea of the fictional “Johnny” not being able to read has been around since the 1950s, but history suggests that this country would rather place the onus on the “other” rather than take inventory of the environments and situations we’re placing students in to help them accelerate their reading. While I agree that we need to do as much as possible to uplift learning experiences for students across the board, I also think society is doing a poor job of ensuring that students have equitable environments and resources for learning.

More succinctly, maybe our students can’t read, but they can read us. They can read us all.

But for decades, schools that work with children, particularly children in poverty, have been forced to do more with less. In New York City, this means the mayor has proposed another devastating round of budget cuts to places where students would have more opportunities to develop their reading skills, like schools and libraries. In fact, our libraries, already struggling from consistent cuts over the years, are now closed on Sundays across the city. In addition, the infamous Moms for Liberty has sought to elevate its profile here as well, a boon that’s already disrupted schools across the city from teaching children to learn from one another.

And that’s the thing, right? Society wrongly assumes that children who can’t read according to a standardized test given in March can’t read how society treats them and their aspirations. But they can read what’s happening around them. They can read when the mayor and those who’ve joined that chorus blame them for all the city’s problems. They can read people’s faces as they seek asylum. They can read what society believes about them, perhaps as early as when they start getting tested for reading.

Conversely, they can faithfully read when we believe in them and back it up structurally. That’s a literacy I can get behind.

Jose

p.s. – Please read and share. Thank you!

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Abolish School Supply Lists, Too

My son and I ran over to a super convenience store (you’ll know which one) to do some last-minute grocery shopping when we happened upon some notebooks in multiple colors, each of them college-ruled, 70-paged, and spiraled. The next row on the shelf featured rulers, erasers, pens, and other accessories that go under the “we may need this in school” bucket. The third row showcased pencil cases, sharpeners, and disinfectant wipes.

After taking inventory of the back-to-school displays, and noting how my diligent wife and I took care of the majority of supplies a few weeks ago, I had a freak out and called my wife to ask her if there was anything we needed for the first day of school. She said she needed 100-sheet notebooks, but the notebooks on display only made it to 70 pages. A 30-page difference wasn’t good enough for me. Knowing that this popular convenience store is notorious for triggering hoarders, my son and I searched through the columns anyway. After coming up empty, I observed the super-long lines of parents and community members with carts full of supplies, some of them angrily waving printed checklists.

I dropped my basket of light groceries in front of the store and said, “Why do we need all these things again?”

As an educator and parent, I’ve taken a good survey of school supply lists across multiple schools. Some of them read like wishlists while others read like mandates. For parents/guardians/community members, school supply lists feel like giant scrolls that feel more like a cumbersome backdoor school tax on students and families. Yes, it’s bad enough that public schools across the nation are consistently under threat of massive budget cuts (I mean, pick any source). We’re also seeing societal strife play out at the school level, including (but not exclusive to): homelessness, COVID-19, asylum seekers, poverty, and dis- and misinformation plaguing our sources of knowledge.

But if there’s an issue that seems to bring some of this home, it’s school supply lists. If we did school well, none of them would be necessary.

In a better world, schools would have notebooks, sharpeners (the good kind), and calculators for every student and many to spare. There’d be no concerns for binders, loose leaf sheets, or erasers, either, as administrators would have received their boxes by midsummer. Classrooms would have disinfectant wipe dispensers installed, the bathrooms would be functional all year, and the water fountains would have clean drinking water. Art classrooms and physical education classrooms wouldn’t be dependent on parent associations to get supplies that were necessary for their curricula.

American aversion to taxes on the wealthy keeps the rest of us further away from a truly shared vision for public schooling, and the longer the school supply list, the more obvious this becomes.

When I was a classroom teacher, I rarely paid attention to when my school would generate these lists. Students would come to my classroom with a handful of school supplies they were supposed to turn over to me, and I’d look at them awkwardly like, “Umm, thanks? I’ll save it for when you need it?” For the school year, I only needed a notebook, a stack of looseleaf, a pencil, and, hopefully, their attention. Every year as a teacher, the weeks before the first day of school were dedicated to covering the basics for my students since I felt my students shouldn’t be left behind for any reason on Day 1. Perhaps paradoxically, I also didn’t need to push that safety net on individual parents and community members.

So, here we are. While politicians refuse to create equitable conditions for students and prefer to blame the most vulnerable of them, school-based personnel are left with all the problems society places upon them. As I’ve stated a billion ways, we should be investing more in our schools since we have less students. Doing less with less is bad math when we could be doing more with more. Leaving the “more” part up to individual or small collectivities as opposed to societal investments perpetuates inequity for everyone.

But, as the school year starts, I’m reminded that every generation of students has its set of challenges and maybe abolishing school supply lists feels tertiary in a list of things we need to fix. But it’s always those little things we forget that seem to get to us right when we need it.

Jose

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