Jose Vilson's Blog, page 6

What Spongebob Taught Me About Optimism In The Now

“Just six more minutes left / We’ve done all we could do / And whatever happens next / I’m glad I’m here with you …”

Being a dad is wild. As a youth, I recall weekend mornings chewing down giant bowls of sweetened cereal, and watching cartoons for the vast majority of my TV time. Then, after a decade or so when cartoons suddenly dropped from my viewing diet in favor of sports and news, cartoons suddenly become part of our viewing rotation thanks to my now-11-year-old son. Spongebob Squarepants has been around for most of that, and he and the other characters were direct descendants of cartoons like Ren and Stimpy and Rocco’s Modern Life, cartoons that tapped into pre-teen hilarity and adolescent (and adult) sensibilities.

When my son started to put Spongebob in his rotation, I welcomed the notion with open arms! (Not so much with the misses, but that’s another story altogether.)

To their credit, the Spongebob franchise has had a few off-shoot projects, including some musicals, video games, and merchandise. But perhaps the most ambitious project among the suite has been Spongebob Squarepants: The Broadway Musical. The production opened to critical acclaim including nominations across the board. The soundtrack has a collection of superstars from The Flaming Lips to John Legend, and even tapped into issues I didn’t originally consider within the original series. (Yes, this is an endorsement.)

But there’s one exceptional piece I keep coming back to. When “The Best Day Ever” (the song and episode) first came out, Nickelodeon invested much of its commercial time (yes, hoopla!) to directing eyeballs towards their feature star. It feels like thousands, if not millions, of kids recognize the song just from the initial “Mr. Sun came up …” My son’s first-grade class sang this as part of his moving-up ceremony. The original “Best Day Ever” feels like the aural dopamine aligned to the effervescent main character and all he projects.

The musical’s reprise of this song is special for its optimism in spite of and because of the circumstances the musical’s plot has dealt the main characters. (preview here)

The short version of the plot is that Spongebob and friends have to stop a giant volcano from destroying the town of Bikini Bottom. The song brings us to the part of the plot where they have to wait for the results of everything they’ve done. Yes, a few characters did nothing to help while other characters used the moment of discord to create an advantageous situation for themselves. The solution that Sandy Cheeks, Patrick Starr, and Spongebob offered has made them deeply unpopular with the rest of Bikini Bottom, especially Ms. Cheeks. (That’s as far as I can go without spoiling it.)

Immediately, the musical reminded me of the situation this planet’s inhabitants find ourselves in. In this country alone, we’ve seen the rise of fascism, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-LGBTQIA+ aggression, mass shootings, and economic stratification bust the seams of some people’s visions for an American dream. Unity and peace feel harder to attain, and the after-effects of COVID-19 have forced everyone to rethink notions of trust, governance, and policy on multiple levels. In the abstract, none of this is particularly new, but the incidents feel more perilous as our devices alert us as they do and news networks and social media occupy more of our attention span.

Oh, and climate change.

What Spongebob’s anthem offers us is an opportunity to rethink optimism. What does it mean for us to hold steadfast to a future beyond what we can currently imagine? How do we stare these problems directly in the face and still work towards the bridge or tunnel that will allow us to get the win? What are the solutions that will wrest power from those who use it irresponsibly while still cultivating the power we have to make the world better? What can we create that will give us a sense of calm in the midst of the storm while we wait for that product to work?

How does optimism win when we, in fact, have done all we can do for now?

“Volcanic doomsday caught us unaware / But we’re still here and Mr. Sun’s up there …”

Optimism, like love, isn’t a fool’s errand, but a disposition where the collection of our actions and energies would create the best possible outcome. When we’re grounded in that love with our community and humanity in mind, we understand deeply how necessary our optimism becomes. It isn’t that we don’t know how to list possible negative outcomes. It’s that we’re fully aware of these outcomes and still wish – and work – to create better. Because we have a proactive vision for a better world as opposed to one limited by hurdles real and imagined. We can respect misery, but even the worst of us get tired of being tired. Even crabs in a barrel only pull each other down because the barrel is an unnatural condition for the crabs.

What’s out there outside the barrel? Or, in our case, can we see the sun? Maybe we can train ourselves to do better with hope as an anchor.

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What The American Teacher Act Shows Us About Education Now

In the last year, I’ve visited four different classrooms, three of them within New York City. During my visits, I noticed similar trends: well-organized classrooms, bell schedules, students of varying dispositions (including behaviors), and lesson plans timed thoughtfully from beginning to end. Each of these classrooms was in a different school (and one was in a completely different state), but the job itself more or less felt familiar. We know from research that the American public generally trusts their local teacher. The American public also may believe in innovation, but generally want schools to look similar in form and function to their upbringing. We can debate the technology argument up and down, but whether virtually or in-person, the job on paper hasn’t changed much in the last two decades.

But doing the job has become that much harder for the intangibles. We can recognize that the intangibles have probably led to the mass exodus from one of our great professions. Some credible estimates show about 300K to 750K K-12 educators across the country no longer work in our schools.

The American Teacher Act seeks to rectify at least some of the “on paper” elements here. Highlights from Congressmember Wilson include:

Awarding grants for enacting and enforcing a $60K minimum teacher salary with federal allocations to states and districtsCost-of-living adjustments for said minimumsSecurities on the grants to keep federal monies from replacing district and state funds allocated for teacher salariesProvisions for part-time teachers and existing salary schedules

A plethora of organizations have endorsed it including the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers (as well as this post from Dave Eggers at McSweeneys). This would go a long way toward signaling to our almost 17 thousand school districts that teachers – and all educators including support staff – deserve higher salaries for the work necessary to move students forward in their education and their lives. Teachers already work overtime to grade papers, create lesson plans, and get classroom materials with their own money. They shouldn’t, then, have to work another job or three to make ends meet. America lost a plethora of teachers since March of 2020. Some credible estimates show about 350K to 750K K-12 educators across the country no longer work in our schools. Our capitalist society would make teaching more coveted by simply augmenting salaries in a sustainable way.

Recruitment and retention are problems worth addressing, and this bill takes a good first step.

At the same time, I also believe bills like these also need societal shifts in thinking as well. Peter Greene addresses good critiques in his blog, and I want to take a more societal lens here. While true that American teachers still have a great approval rating, we’ve also seen a dip in that approval rating since conservatives have gone on the offensive to diminish public education through antitruth movements. The end goal isn’t just to diminish, if not eliminate curricula that could be seen as racially and socially just, but to wane the credibility of an institution that is intended to serve people in a democratic society.

We were already having issues with working conditions and such before COVID-19. Our teacher problem is a societal problem.

Believe it or not, this bill reminds me politically of the Common Core State Standards. Yes, I’ve had a plethora of critiques for the CCSS, especially on implementation and accountability. But the thrust of the policy process was what they felt they could accomplish: convince every state to take this initiative on, tie it to funding of some sort, make adjustments on a local level, and see what it does for student knowledge. To this day, even the states that have “repealed” the CCSS merely renamed the standards. The win is that most states still follow the learning. Proponents of the CCSS played would say that, yes, we need people to read texts closely for understanding and that the “basics” won’t do it anymore.

Similarly, I hope that the American Teacher Act pushes districts across the country to raise salaries for teachers even if they don’t win a grant for it. We can’t have “basic” salaries for a profession so critical to the future of society. (And really, we need to raise the minimum wage to about $27, but that’s this conversation, too.)

With so many people blaming teachers for responsibilities that our governments should take on, it’s imperative that we both raise the salaries of those entrusted with moving society forward and hold governments responsible for helping teachers do better.

Because education is inherently political, our politics need to treat education better. Our politics should include rectifying this egregious discrepancy.

Jose

P.S. – Please do follow my Instagram as I’m posting my learning more regularly over there, including my classroom visits.

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Cry On The Last Day of School, Too (on Abbott Elementary)

When was the last time you cried at the end of a school year?

I’ve done it about five times as a teacher, each moment with its own context. The first time was because I finished my first school year. I poured everything into that set of kids, despite some of the nonsense I put up with from peers to do so. The second time was because that first set of kids was graduating, and I never helped graduate a set of children before. The third was because I couldn’t finish the school year in the way I wanted to. The fourth was because the kids I had rotated with a group of students from sixth to eighth grade as their math teacher and felt a deep sense of loss and pride at once. The last was because, after a tumultuous year in which one particular administrator tried to bully me out of the profession, my students restored my belief in teaching again. It’s been more than a decade as my cries simply became sighs.

So at the end of season 1 of Abbott Elementary when we see the protagonist Ms. Teagues shed a bittersweet tear after a reassuring message to the audience, it’s something I connected with too deeply.

For America, Abbott Elementary has offered a plethora of laughs and moments of cringe. For teachers, it might even have offered moments of solace. Not since Boston Public (or most of Season 4 of The Wire) has our profession felt so accurately represented, even while being satirized at the same time. The absurd and insecure administrator. The rough yet kindhearted white teacher people don’t mess with. The newbie liberal who’s naively optimistic about their academic legerdemain. The veteran teacher who serves as the institution and the soul of the school’s functions. The custodian with random quips and secret stories for those willing to ask. The teacher who’s ambivalent about their station in life and disguises it with a stern veneer. The ebullient rookie finding new life in teaching even as they try to make sense of their personal life.

If you’ve been in the profession long enough, you see these characters get closer to the colleagues you’ve had over the years. Some (like Mr. Eddie, for example) even feel too close to you (read: me).

This show feels even more necessary as the profession is under serious turmoil. As many as 570,000 educators have left the profession, depending on how you look at the numbers. On the one hand, the pandemic has had a deleterious effect on the teaching workforce. Many of us who’d been asking our school systems to rectify working conditions, including capacity for digital learning, were rebuffed repeatedly and systemically. This happened across the country, whether the teaching force was unionized or not. With over 16,000 school districts and a decentralized decision-making structure, the United States was bound to have a mess on its hands when real crises happen. While some federal policymakers have collaborated on some common-sense solutions, we’re still further away from making the teaching profession an attractive option for real recruitment and retention.

Plus, with so many educators turning their hobbies into side hustles, the phrase “do what you love and love what you do” has never been so poignant.

Yet, for 22 minutes or so at a time, Abbott gives educators the gift of mirrors. We’re offered the proper level of critique and dignity we deserve, especially for those who teach in less-resourced contexts. How can you not relate to Mr. Hill’s idealism or Ms. Schemmenti’s brusque yet warm attitude? How many of us haven’t had a Ms. Howard down the hall still going about her business even as she can’t stand the newfangled approaches to our work? And maybe Mr. Eddie’s cool and stalwart demeanor comes not just from a strict upbringing but understanding that he prefers being taken seriously by everyone around him (yes, that’s my mirror). Even Janelle James’ portrayal of Principal Coleman gives off a loveable quirkiness that had held together many a staff (don’t ask me how I know).

But Quinta Brunson as Ms. Teagues truly grounds the stories as the central character not because of anything she did in particular, but because she’s willing and able to activate her innocence about “how things work” to a comedic fault. For non-educators, they’ll look at this as a flaw, but to educators who are about that life, we see it more as a necessary level of learning. The teacher you think you have to be or want to be as a teacher is usually not the teacher you actually end up becoming. The tools you acquire by failing, by falling, by crying all become part of the teacher persona who’s equal parts compassionate, demanding, and thus effective.

Becoming that teacher doesn’t happen overnight, but, with dramatizations like Abbott Elementary, we get to watch it more intimately, even if absurdly. That might someday hold the door for the next generation of educators to pass through, and let them know what we went through when teaching felt like this.

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We Put The Public in Public Schools (A Reprise)

Last Monday, a coalition of parents, educators, students, and New York City Councilmembers came together to rebuke school budget cuts to New York City schools. For their part, the present City Councilmembers sought to atone for their yes votes in favor of the decimating budget, elevating activists who’ve been at the forefront of a plethora of fights regarding our schools. For my part, I stood in wonder as dozens of people (with a former mayor on the side) came together this quickly and with this level of urgency.

Of course, I also had something to say:

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We have a situation where NYC finally got a voting system that, by many accounts, seems to give various voters more choice, but still ended up with a mayor with regressive education policies. It’s no coincidence, for example, that large budget cuts to schools come from a candidate that openly embraces Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration. Bloomberg himself has pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to expand charter schools in metropolitan areas including NYC.

Meanwhile, we haven’t heard much opposition except from what the mainstream has considered the far left. Since A Nation at Risk, Democrats and Republicans have sought to bring their renditions of accountability, austerity, and standardization to public schools while espousing innovation for privatized schools. These days, it’s evident that the anti-truth narrative of parental choice and conservative curriculum has captured the white electorate for Republicans, we see fewer Democratic officials who have solidified a future-thinking narrative for our schools, as evidenced by recent polling here.

I could get behind someone who fully embraced paths forward for public schools. I can’t stand the notion that we’d be letting go of one of this country’s most enduring social safety nets for people who never send their kids to them.

As we speak, pundits and politicians across the country are starting to get delicate about their market-based paradigms, especially when far-right nationalists use pejoratives against communities for simply seeking dignity, respect, and compassion. Looking out for queer students makes us groomers. Looking to teach history correctly puts us in line for harassment, firing, and blasted all over conservative news outlets (and the other spaces that fan the flames). Seeking a person’s right to full health care makes us murderers. And so on. These same folks proffer – incorrectly – public school students, educators, and parents as the problem.

At some point, we have to know the difference between those who want to improve public schools and understand its importance in our democratic experiment and those who seek to destroy schooling by squashing those who attend them.

The steady descent into fascism in local spaces should terrify us all, even in so-called blue states. Should they succeed in dismantling public education, we’ve also denigrated sources of health care, food security, and so many other societal needs for millions of children. Creating chaos to increase distrust in our institutions and intentionally defunding schools does not bolster the futures we seek.

But as an advocate, I know exactly what to do when public schools are under attack. I hope you’ll join us.

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Where Contrition and Closure Go Hand-In-Hand

“Vilson, you should read the names of the graduates. You know them anyways.”

We’re at a retirement party that my wife and I organized for Ms. Nuevo (now that she’s retired, I can name her) when another colleague (we’ll call Mrs. A) mentioned that my sixth graders were now eighth graders. It’s been two years since I left the school I called a second home for 15 years. I didn’t want to leave while COVID-19 upended our societal norms and a racial uprising momentarily grasped America’s imagination, but the system made it difficult to meet in a reasonable middle. I would have been just as happy teaching part-time while doing my doctoral study, but the time had come – for example – to consider what life is like without a teacher improvement plan hanging over my head due to administrative carelessness.

So when Mrs. A asked me to read their names at graduation, I almost teared up. My last principal, who I still tell people was the best principal I worked for, concurred with a casual nod.

Fast forward to last week and I just came back from a back-to-back trip to Birmingham, AL and Exeter, NH while the country was either celebrating or honoring (hopefully) Juneteenth (more soon). While both talks took different turns, a common point I brought up was the idea that our classrooms are political, separate from “partisan.” Everything from how we get to teaching and the students in front of us to the curriculum and standards we proffer is political. The pandemic taught us that, even when the buildings get shut down, we still have school because we still have these relationships and all the powers that come with them. Thus, we would do better to acknowledge how politics are part of our way of being rather than treating them separately from our personal selves.

But I couldn’t have formed those opinions and theories without the thousand-plus students in my care, and the families and communities that trusted me with them for all those class periods in the middle of triumphs and tragedies.

I get my usual suit and tie on. When I hop out of the Uber, I heard “VILSON!” These sixth graders who barely passed my shoulders were now much taller and with deeper voices. It felt good standing outside where I was wont to help organize the lines outside into the auditorium. It felt good seeing my colleagues as well, many of whom are the reason I get to dissuade public notions of teacher professionalism.

The auditorium wasn’t as full as it once was. The greeter at the auditorium door didn’t know who I was. I smiled knowingly. The drums banged to introduce the graduates. One of my sixth graders who was consistently in trouble (in other classes) for one incident or another was now leading the auditorium in singing the National Anthem. The salutatorian is a student who got accepted into Exeter, the school I just visited for my second speech a few days prior. The band teacher got the students to play White Stripes’ “7 Nation Army,” but with the girl who led us in with the Anthem doing her rendition of Jack White’s vocals. The guest speaker was an alumni of our school who eventually graduated from Syracuse University – my alma mater – and is continuing his education, too.

By the time it was my turn to read names, it felt like an out-of-body experience. I had words prepared but I just kept it to my job.

As I read their names, I recalled their faces in class. The young brilliant children who were my last set of students were now one step closer to fulfilling their destinies. After the ceremonies, we all met in the backyard. I recognized so many faces: parents who I had known for a decade, students whose brothers and sisters I also taught, elders of the community who served on the parent association. In some instances, I had taught three to five children within a family. Legacy.

A few students mentioned how sad they were that they didn’t have me in seventh grade and I shared their sentiment. Those of us with even a little empathy will recognize how the pandemic was the type of disruption we would never want for our children. While many of us fought for better ways and means post-shutdowns, we seem to be regressing as a society now. But I also learned some things. When I left, the principal in her second year brought back homeroom, a fight I had for about a decade with administrators. The children and adults had a consensus leader who they felt cared about their well-being and felt they could work for, not work despite.

In many ways, the school got smaller, but the hearts got bigger.

Afterward, I ordered white rice and red beans with grilled chicken from one of my favorite local spots. I’m sitting there looking out the glass windows and doors as Inwood/Washington Heights walk on by. I’m remorseful because I didn’t get to spend a full year with them face-to-face. I didn’t get to move up with them as their seventh-grade teacher as I’d done for so many years prior with other classes. I didn’t get to go on trips or finish those lessons on slopes or algebraic equations.

But reading their names gave me the confirmation that I had a role in their overall education. A few hours later, I’d have a class on public policy and education where my special guest was a New York Times national correspondent. I brought her on because her book focused on how America wrestles with the parameters of the teaching profession, a required text for my course at that. Maybe all of us should have to read the names of the people we purportedly serve to orient ourselves better at the work we do.

Because what is policy if not relationships codified?

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It’s OK To Not Have The Words

There was a moment, just as I was getting into the groove of my second class, where I thought I had it all together. And then, I didn’t.

I’m teaching a class this summer on education and public policy at Teachers College, Columbia University, an endeavor I didn’t foresee until about a week and a half ago. Two years ago, I was a new doctoral student taking this class, and now I had a chance to remix it and interpolate it with some middle-school-pedagogical considerations and current knowledge to boot. But there I was, about 30 minutes into class when a student secretly messaged me mid-mini-lecture on the new events. At least a dozen students were murdered in a small town in Texas. I kept calm and kept going. Shortly before our scheduled break, I extended our class break but didn’t have the words for the moment. I paced back and forth for the better part of 15 minutes, not knowing whether this amount of time and the right amount of grace would let the adult learners know I cared.

I don’t know. It took 15 years for me to develop that intuition in my middle school teaching. Even then I didn’t always know. Luckily for me, I also know it’s OK to not know.

Something that people underrate when it comes to creating safe and brave spaces is that there may be significant pressure from interlocutors of the culture to have exactly the right words for the moment. A part of that might be how we’ve never had this much textual information with such ease of access in human history. That access has given us a plethora of sources from which to generate opinions and messaging that align well with what we may be feeling at the moment, whether it’s the right meme, short video, or cartoon. We don’t always give ourselves the opportunity to let a moment marinate, opting for the perfect tweet, short video, or screenshot.

As the news reports and research flood in from various sources, we may seek to name the sadness, the rage, and the mourning in digestible bits. And we then seek to document that with something thoughtful, relevant, and connected to the moment. We don’t have to.

In fact, maybe the right words are the ones you have right there, including the plethora of swear words in our arsenal. Maybe it’s simply saying “I don’t like this” to whomever you find in earshot. How else can you meet the political bystander effect sweeping through so many of our politicians who otherwise have no shortage of speeches during re-election with anything other than actual anger and sadness? A silver lining in globalization is that now we see how other countries have quickly handled similar incidents as soon as they happen while America lets millions of people die by not passing legislation that will literally save children. We get to share the fissures in the rhetoric, too. Safety can’t be predicated on who has more guns but on whether guns are easily accessible in the first place. While police officers literally stood by as the onslaught happened within the schools, a community up north in Buffalo, NY was mourning its elders and educators who were murdered only a week and a half before.

Rage doesn’t necessitate all the words, but it does necessitate naming it rage.

On Thursday, I was hoping to open up space within my virtual class to examine some of the ramifications some more, and tried to put together some thoughts to build upon, but I know community takes work. We’ll keep working to repair the harm in our spheres of influence. As many of my more religious folks have mentioned, we can have all the thoughts and prayers we wish, but faith without works moves nothing. Educators know how hope drives feeling into action, and I’m ever hopeful that this set of collective rage can move legislation and our collective conscience.

But I’m also hoping I can keep tapping into the present the more I explore the past with my students. I’ll commit to engaging as much of my works towards this and so many other causes where my words aren’t enough. But I’ll also commit myself to just feeling what needs to be felt. The words may or may not come, but the nods and the active listening will take hold.

Blessings.

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A Word About The Work We Must Do

About five years ago, the Teacher Activist Group in Boston, MA invited me to speak at their 7th annual Boston-Area Education for Social Justice Conference. I had already been there a few times for keynotes and bore witness to the significantly evolving teacher activism landscape over those years, including the ascension of teacher-activist Jessica Tang to the president of the Boston Teachers Union. Sometime after my speech, the organizers asked me to sign books, which I was more than happy to do. At the tail end was a Black woman teacher who spoke to me at length about the state of schools for Black children. One thing she said stuck out to me to this day:

“Back then, the value of a Black teacher wasn’t just diversity. It’s because we were invested in expanding our children’s minds. My teacher was showing us various ideas from around the world, including world history and socialism. So many ideas and, even when we didn’t agree with them, we were better for having learned what they were about.”

As a burgeoning sociologist, one of my personal goals is to make abstract theory into digestible bits. I get that we risk losing complexity by not going deeper, but we also gain time and application, too. Unfortunately, this also works for nefarious applications, too. Over the last 20 years, our education systems (including many private and charter schools) have been so driven by high-stakes testing and performance data that we lost out on critical engagement and the immersive, comprehensive spaces we needed to get there.

Part of how we get to a point in this country where a man can bastardize critical race theory for a major political party’s culture war is because we gave away notions of literacy to multiple-choice tests and “close” reads that don’t prompt readers to critique texts in a substantive way. The newer generation of conspiracy theorists waits for the Facebook suite of tools to pull them down the proverbial rabbit holes of the day rather than them chasing the grungy self-hosted websites of yesteryear. Our schools may have expanded and mandated more content and may have included more pedagogical strategies than 100 years ago, but somewhere we lost a guiding principle of educating for an informed democracy, including all the advances in civil rights.

That is, if that was ever a common principle across the board.

The work we must do now is more than telling people “we don’t teach critical race theory.” I’d love to hear more about elevating social studies as a critical part of PK-12 education, about culturally responsive and sustaining education for every child across the board, alternative assessments for children particularly at the high school level, a redefinition of literacy which includes 21st-century literacy, and better use of acceleration strategies in the STEM fields so we can talk less about leaving children behind and more about catching children up so they can become independent learners in whatever path they choose.

In other words, we can say “critical race theory has two tenets: 1) we have systems that depend on racial hierarchy and 2) we can do something about it.” We’ve been doing this work towards a better democracy for decades and can’t shy away from it by going on the defensive. We teach the truth without apology. We’re unafraid because we know our communities trust in us to do this work and we know history will look kindly on those who put justice, compassion, and the truth in front of young people who need it the most.

We can and must remember the stories because getting further requires us knowing from whence we came.

I don’t believe that education is the placebo everyone wants it to be, but our education systems are the only social safety net that can end this particular culture war and move towards cultural peace. Black people knew this during Reconstruction when they voted overwhelmingly to expand public schooling for their children. The legacy that those communities and so many others unnamed and remembered continues to this day. We know through this course of action, we can bring in and elevate even more stories and, by doing so, expand the base of people who feel seen by how we teach.

We can’t settle for what’s framed now as wins and losses. In this way, we learned what the root problems were and we didn’t wait to do something about it.

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God Keeps Me and Us Around (2021 Year-In-Review)

Many of us end this year the same way we ended last year: by staring at screens, searching for answers to questions we don’t know how to ask.

Screens of all sizes feed us information about the way people wrestle with institutions, with each other, and with themselves. The people who cheerled the personified mess four years ago and vociferously rebelled against any mitigation efforts have openly questioned why the current US president hasn’t singlehandedly eliminated the global pandemic. Conversely, many of the people who thought the last president would be gone within months of taking office have seen that, upon his first term exit, he has more power from his seat in Florida than he did on the phone with heads of states across the world. The screens read us the numbers. We compared COVID-19 to the flu and underestimated the flu. We compared the pandemic to 9/11 without including civilian deaths and destruction across the Middle East and so many other war-torn countries. Our multiples are off.

We’ve now normalized mass deaths and stopped questioning why the climate has changed with bodies dropping befitting the darkest science fiction. In my studies, I’m being asked to observe and make connections to the past while this active present stirs me.

It’s difficult to celebrate such a year when we’ve reserved seeing full faces for our screens, our homes, or amongst people who think puffing up their chest is enough to fight a disease that’s killed hundreds of thousands of people. But alas, where joy and community were at a premium, some of us tried to find it. For me, it was in the random texts I shared with classmates, the memes shared over DMs, and the way my son and wife have unwittingly tolerated my dad jokes. Hundreds of people and I shared screens together and they got to hear about a veteran math teacher turned burgeoning sociologist, too. Gratifying.

The spring and summer brought moments of love: walks down the East River Park, face-to-face meetings with family members, and the occasional protest about school reopening. I found amazing success with three virtual gatherings I had a hand in because doing them for myself wouldn’t have mattered as much. The pandemic hopefully taught more of us this lesson, too. EduColor got some big wins for the collective (more soon) and even The Kid Mero came through to bless us for back to school for the fall. Much to the chagrin of my friends and fellow activists, New York City made its choice for the presumptive mayor. But personally, I was clear that, regardless of what was happening in the world, I had to make space for sunshine and the spirit of the work that chose us.

There were moments when I knew it was my ancestors blessing me with abundance. It was somewhere after the weekend trip my brother and I planned for Alejandro to LEGO Land / Watkins Glen and our trip to Atlantic City where I saw the fruits of all the hours I put in. We still had on our masks and washed our hands. The prickly moments of all the months prior dulled with every intricate brick structure, every vroom from Chase Elliott’s #9 car, every outlet store with that item of clothing that fit us just right, and every beach wave that crashed onto my ankles and then my knees. I sported a color coating just before the first day back to class in August, where our society mostly pretended we’d go back to normal, not necessarily better.

I went to Chicago for business, alone. Vaccines worked. Masks worked. Social distancing worked. For the flu, the cold, and COVID, all of which I hadn’t caught in the year and a half I started wearing masks publicly. What also works is going back to places that have served as sources of inspiration for the life I lead now.

I looked across the Atlantic, wondering when I’d ever go across it. By year’s end, I had made it over this ocean twice. The first time, TED Countdown Summit in Edinburgh, Scotland allowed me to meet youth climate activists, Al Gore, international educators, politicos, writers, podcasters, The Edge, and dozens of other people who actually believed that changing society was possible, necessary, and doable. The “doable” feels daunting here in the States. In The World Innovation Summit for Education in Doha, Qatar rewarded me for the lessons I learned over a few decades: how to communicate with others who don’t speak the same language, how to love spicier rice and show appreciation to the chefs, and how to speak up to deepen conservations that only go surface level. I heard a few TEDx Talks in Arabic with no headphones from a pre-teen child and it was among the best I’d ever heard.

I flew about 50 hours in total for these two trips for two weeks total. Going that far away from the United States and convening with people who’ve moved millions in their work was amazing. These trips can make the petty squabbles we get into on a daily basis even smaller by comparison.

Oh, of course, I missed home. I didn’t miss everything surrounding it. In a short time, Omicron would come into our screens more regularly, then to our shores two weeks after, then into my body a week after that. Caught flights, caught feelings, caught COVID.

My studies went back to the screen for the last week of the semester, as did my son’s. By the time my test came back positive, I had turned in one 15-page paper on that Tuesday, felt dispossessed that Wednesday, and wrote another 15-pager that Thursday. Another epidemiologist is on my screen reassuring the public – and me – that things would be fine. I followed the science and it told me I’d – we’d – be fine, but I also held onto the faith that the world wasn’t done with me yet. The number of people who passed due to COVID and the names of people who died in the age of COVID took over my conscience for a few hours last week.

As I type this now, I’m writing in the corner of my house where the Christmas tree lighting disrupts the darker corners, conscious that the symptom I have now could have been much worse. I remain thankful that I’ve gotten this far when Black men such as myself have a hard time even making it to this age before COVID. I prayed thanks to my family, my friends, and those who believed in me even through moments when I didn’t believe in myself throughout the year. I came through on my resolutions to be more devoted to my spiritual person, to make more facets of my life reflective of the person I wanted to be, and to guard the boundaries that would clear the path to the blessings I’ve received thus far. I know I couldn’t do it without all the faces and names who let my imagination run laps in front of them, and the people who matched my energy on that faith. (Thank you.)

The best rap verse of the year by Andre3000 has a four-bar poem within it and it goes:

I’m supposed to smile as if God knew that I would be troubled
Keeps me around, for what? I don’t know
But I do know that it’s crucial, that we do so, pronto
I don’t know how much long though

Maybe 2021 was a lesson in hoping collectively even when we’re not given rational reasons to do so. Maybe I – we – get to smile even when it looks like we shouldn’t. Sure, the problems kept revealing themselves to those of us who see patterns. Maybe the classroom is a microcosm of our society because, whether we’re face-to-face or remote, the deep inequities our society has allowed both in our learning and in our conditions have brought us to this moment. Maybe and concurrently, we can turn up the volume on love, joy, and learning how to make our individual wins a portion of the collective pot.

Leading with faith has given me permission to believe in us in ways I couldn’t before. I believe getting through this moment is more than doable for us when we collectively care. If and when we believe in that with greater consensus, we can beat any deadly virus and properly mourn those who’ve already left.

Bless up, 2022.

Jose

c/o HipHopDX

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College, Career, Or Whatever Readiness

In recent times, the term “college and career ready” has come back into trend. It’s a term that first saw a spotlight during the Obama administration, when then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and company wanted to integrate the Common Core State Standards into our schools. While there were a plethora of controversies during the era and certainly some flubs, many of them documented here, one of the lasting impressions the administration left was the framing of K-12 education as a funnel for the workforce. Historically, it’s true that many business leaders and policymakers thought it best to insert their own visions for an educated labor pool, but this became more poignant as our latest current of education reform elevated skills and international competition as a mode of structural urgency.

But, taken from a societal lens, it’s nonsense.

“College and career readiness” assumes too much. It raises the expectations on students, schools, and communities to do the heavy lifting while lowering the expectations on governments and societies to provide pathways toward these ostensibly solid goals. For instance, why is college a goal when generations of Americans continue to accumulate burdensome student debt they can’t pay off for another generation? How many people’s college experiences prepared them for the current job they’ve attained? How many people continue to get college degrees above a bachelor’s degree for a job that only necessitates an associate’s degree? How many rich students continue to do well regardless of their performance in school?

Also, how well does matriculation into college reify our informal/formal social caste systems?

Black students are still more likely to be unemployed than their white peers a year after graduation. In fact, white students with a high school degree are as likely to land a job as Black students with a college degree. While I agree with the plethora of people across the spectrum that we should do everything we can to ensure that our schools offer our students as many opportunities to succeed as possible, our political will has yet to create a society that truly aligns the notions of college and/or career readiness with the prospects of what America deems successful.

Oh, and economic stratification between when wealthy is growing rapidly. Our misunderstanding of the middle class continues to grow, as does the gap between the wealthy and everyone else.

Of course, our country also sees a growing ideological middle that prefers to make small overtures to improve people’s lives without doing the most necessary, yet simple things more urgently. Homelessness, expensive health care, inadequate wages, awful working conditions, climate change, incarceration, and food inequities are just some of the pressing issues that one of the world’s wealthiest nations currently faces, not to mention the rise of white nationalism and fascism. While I prefer everyone get their education, I also see so many pundits and politicians with prestigious degrees who make deleterious policy and practice for the people of this country.

What is the lesson when our society values these institutions that churn out influential misanthropes?

The lesson isn’t to pulverize students with more teacher-student face-to-face time, whether it’s extended hours or weekends. The United States already has some of the highest teacher-student face-to-face time in the world. if the time becomes more extracurriculars for the younger students and more programs for teenagers, I may be in favor, depending on the structure. But overall, I hope we can decrease time spent on instruction and more on planning and looking at student work. A larger part of me wishes we concentrated more on citizenship, authentic democracy, justice, and compassion for others. While this seems fanciful in this moment, I have to believe this pathway will make this planet more inhabitable. If “college and career” rhetoric aligns to this set of principles, we’d be better for it.

Until then, “college and career” sounds like promises unkept from the onset. We should be suspicious of folks who don’t pair “college and career” with a society that values education and jobs equitably when we’ve cleared the badges.

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What Gets Taught

Whenever I do a keynote presentation or workshop, I’m often asked: “How does this apply to me when I teach in a school with all-white staff and an almost all-white student body?”

The moment we’re in right now is why. Say less about the Rittenhouses, the Carlsons, and the Trumps of the world and more about the society that has created pathways for permission towards white nationalism, murder, and fascism.

The current pandemic has taught us several lessons. Among them is that our solutions must be contextual, historical, borderless, and structurally compassionate. To bring this to the school level, it’s cool when a student has that one teacher who believes in them as a student and as a person, develops culturally-responsive and engaging lessons, and wants to stay in the profession for more than a couple of years, but if it’s only one teacher out of seven or eight that the student has, we need the goal to be higher. Every one of us may have a right to close our doors so we can focus on our own lessons, but, at some point, we must see how our teaching and the teaching across the hall or on another floor (or school) have a relationship to one another. Unfortunately, some students might not see any teachers in their lives who meet these criteria, but this makes the imperative that much more urgent.

This is to say, we have plenty of evidence that all of our classrooms are interconnected. We can’t pretend that individual choice can trump collective failure … or success.

If this moment hasn’t taught us anything else, it’s that we need a serious reimagination about what education is. Let’s say schooling is the set of formal processes by which we try to manage mass instruction for a given populace whereas education is the set of lessons, values, and understandings one acquires from society. To give a common example, plenty of people who society has labeled well-educated never graduated high school. Policymakers and pundits have flooded the narrative about education reform as one of failure, but, time and again, we see instances where the onus for that failure has been set at the feet of students and communities who simply want an education or, at least, their right to schooling.

Much has been made about what’s wrong with black and brown kids, not enough about what our society teaches all of our students time and again. Contrary to popular belief, I have yet to find a community that doesn’t prioritize education. I also haven’t found a country willing and able to completely transform school systems to keep that energy with its schooling. In fact, we see historic waves of people fighting for the right to an education and for the societal responsibility to grant every child an education.

On the other hand, we rarely interrogate what the winners of our school system learn from this system. That’s also part of the machination here.

If the winners of our system only learn compassion through charity and hardship as an inividual function, are they truly getting a good education? What do we make of students who are neither college nor career ready, but have access to both because their distant relative owned slaves? How do the winners of this system graduate from their elite schooling, then insist on pushing this country and the globe towards white supremacy, fascism, and economic stratification while 99.9% of us continue to feel that pressure? If educators are the vanguards of a community’s and society’s values, why are pundits and politicians outlawing them teaching the truth?

Must the truth reveal itself in our society’s inequities or can we teach children about them so we can collectively take action against it?

I also prefer we not do this from a colorblind lens, either. I’m more suggesting that the truth about our racialized society can’t be resolved without a thoughtful analysis of power and systems. Also, what gets taught may or may not align with the Common Core State Standards and all their derivatives. If all of our children get the optimal amount of learning provided by the content (whatever that means), but still treat people with less power as less-than people, what how does this work? Maybe we should worry less about alignment to the Common Core or to preconceived notions of literacy, math, or whatever subject area we’re focused on and more towards actual citizenship, dignity, and authentic respect for others in this space we share. I want no parts of a schooling that doesn’t include these elements in our children’s education.

Education and love might not be the answer, but without them, policies and laws simply won’t work.

It’s not to say that kids can’t get their education elsewhere. Surely, freedom schools and all types of schooling systems have sprung up across the country trying to find pockets of re-education “for me and mine.” These are valient efforts. I also fear that, for each of those, there are a plethora of swindlers hoping to create a schooling structure for the express purpose of capital, much to the detriment of the children society consistently leaves behind. I also wish we did more in exploring the erasure of Native American/First Nations people and the social exploitations of people who are identified as Asian, both East and South, and how they’ve often been shoved as a wedge in this Earth we share. Our ways and means of schooling demand this.

So, to the original question, I replied, “White and wealthy kids ESPECIALLY need these lessons from willing white people because, when we don’t teach these lessons on justice and empathy to them, they might even run on whiteness and wealth and become president someday, to the detriment of everyone else!” A few folks walked out. The person who asked it stayed. I’ll keep doing my work as I generally have much more patience for children of all backgrounds than I do for adults. However, I have hope that the work I do with children and adults can transform the systems.

We have an obligation to share what we’ve learned with each other because, otherwise, we end up learning in ways that keep us further from our most authentic lessons.

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