Jose Vilson's Blog, page 7

Lessons of Youth Activism, Climate Change, and Climate Justice

“Yeah, so first of all, I just want to give a little context. So Shell and Siccar Point Energy are trying to push a new oil field on the UK Parliament, the Cambo oil field, which is gonna be off the coast of Scotland, which obviously is my home. I just wanna start off by saying you should be absolutely ashamed of yourself …”

With that, climate youth activist Lauren MacDonald named the tension in the room and laid it bare for the watching world. The rumbling I felt behind my row of chairs turned into the youth activists in attendance lining up in solidarity with MacDonald, which turned into chants for us to join them. MacDonald demanded climate justice not just for her hometown of Scotland, but also for the adults to pay close attention to the world they were leaving for future generations. Until that point, many of us in the room knew we were coming to TED Countdown to learn more about the most consequential issue in the world: climate change. But, within the room, we also recognized people came in from all walks of life and potentially different approaches to how we get the planet to net-zero carbon emissions and a global mean temperature of at least 1.5? C.

Some attendees had openly questioned the youth activists’ tactics, wondering if these disruptions were even necessary given the ostensible mission of the summit. (Yes, I’m being generous.) Others hoped she hadn’t walked off stage so Mr. van Beurden wouldn’t be left to drive his own narrative for the remaining part of the conversations. I, on the other hand, wish we didn’t have to have youth activists to begin with.

Too often, whether in the United States or elsewhere, adults, particularly those who lean anywhere left of center, use a common refrain: “The youth will save us.” They shouldn’t have to save us, though. Adults, especially those with power, should learn how to use every lever possible to pull us from the brink of calamity. But we have a plethora of examples over generations of intrepid youth taking time out of their own schedules to push adults to get it together. We can name a cause and you’ll find people younger than 20 saying the things adults should have taken to heart.

So, of course, when I got a chance to speak to MacDonald directly, I said exactly this with the hope and she and others like her didn’t take it to mean that I didn’t appreciate their work. I got the opportunity to tell her and so many others how proud of them I was as someone who also aspired to change the world in my youth. So much of what passes for activism now and “granting voice” is still an exercise in power. Those of us willing to cede the mic – lest the students wrest the mic away – usually don’t have the institutional power to shift organizations towards a better experience for the students involved.

This became even more poignant for me as I considered the context of Scotland, where representatives of countries across the world made the prospect of climate justice seem more likely. To his credit, former US Vice President Al Gore’s speech, which came right after the panel featuring MacDonald, galvanized and recalibrated the energy in the audience after the schism. The energy in this space could have been bottled up and brought over to Glasgow for COP26 with all the inspiration, splendor, and attention to science. But, no matter the messaging, it’s evident that the goals of white nationalists, capitalists, and conservatives have brought the United States closer to its own demise, and The United States’ contributions to climate decay run in opposition to the goals of a shared humanity. As a few advocates mentioned at the summit, our solutions must be borderless, unified, and consistent, but the loud minority in this country drag us further away from all three of these goals.

So when I got to the mic to suggest that climate justice was educational justice, I already understood that hope and realism worked hand in hand for those of us who’ve seen the consequences of governmental failure. For generations, many youth activists have fought for better environments from which to learn, including safe drinking water, better building conditions, and fresh air in the school space. When they don’t receive these essentials, they too get nudged into either despair or advocacy.

The question should rarely be whether our students want to stay in school; it’s whether these environments push them out.

For those that take on the arduous task of activism, it’s critical to name the adults who serve as bystanders, many of whom believe these kids deserve these conditions. Our jobs provide a safety from fully engaging in more critical dialogue. Adults, especially those under the employ of the school, rarely align ourselves with students in their demands, instead preferring to quietly support or acknowledge students’ struggles. While it’s true that youth protests are better served when they speak with their own voices, we lose something when adults won’t offer full-throated and full-hearted support to their concerns with full action.

Which brings me back to the summit. In time, the students had the opportunity to collectively make demands on TED and us, which I appreciated. I also had the opportunity to meet prime ministers, parlimentarians, policymakers, musicians (THE EDGE), filmmakers, and take a tour of The Royal Mile in Edinburgh (highly recommend Invisible Cities). I averaged 14,000 steps a day and still felt I could have done more. I ate plant-based the whole week, which wouldn’t have enticed me until that event. I was fortunate to have attended and am ever thankful to dream with folks who deeply cared about the issue from their vantage points.

But, perhaps most importantly, it made me think that, for better or worse, our youth activists have real moral authority, which should disappoint adults across the board. This is not a messaging problem. This is not a money infusion problem. This is a society, economic, and ethical problem all at once. It will take a multi-generational movement in the millions to force the hands of many including educators, scientists, and a critical mass of people consistently disempowered by our system.

This can’t be “expert” driven, though. The expertise already lies with so many of us.

I don’t know what the engagement in this issue fully looks like for myself, much less each of us individually. But collectively, we have about a decade or less to put the world on the path towards redemption. Ths stakes are high. It’ll be a shame if adults don’t do their/our part.

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Sunshower, Just The Sign Of The Power (On Parenting and School)

The morning sun glistens just above the project buildings east of my son’s schoolyard just before school starts. The scene might have enamored me to the school he now attends, a school that’s grown with him since. For four years, I had to ask for permission to attend his first day of school with different results, a byproduct of teaching full time and providing a first-day experience for the middle-school children I served. The stars aligned in his third-grade year when the pandemic hit just as I prepared to announce my transition from the classroom to the academy as a doctoral student at Teachers College, Columbia University.

When asked whether he wanted to attend school face-to-face for third grade if given the chance, he gave it a few minutes and said “No.”

His parents acquiesced, somewhat gladly. With so much chaos and seemingly few mitigation strategies and plans, we wouldn’t have chosen face-to-face, either. My activism with other well-regarded parents and community members again came up against pundits and politicians willing to throw Black and brown children for capital and getting back to business as usual. We specifically asked for scaffolded school reopening, upgrading school building conditions, and thoughtful wraparound services that would transform the social contract New York City had its citizens. Instead, we saw a small set of well-funded parents whip up antagonism in stark contrast to the majority of parents who opted their children out of the consternation. This COVID era is unfair for everyone involved, and every option felt like the best of the worst, certainly. Yet, our school systems had months to make a choice that inspired more confidence and, at times, seemed to have a handle on the process of getting kids back safely to school.

But our society couldn’t secure our last and most enduring social safety net for NYC public school kids and all of us paid for it.

And I watched my son labor through class assignments. He tried. His teachers said he was doing great. My wife and I, both educators, pushed him where we could and kept running up against limits to his personal and academic well-being. The routine was breakfast, Zoom on with intermittent breaks, lunch, Zoom on, Zoom off, wait for his parents to finish their work, dinner, and repeat a few more times. He didn’t have many young people in his immediate space to process the George Floyd proceedings and the ensuing protests. He still doesn’t know what to make of the horrific scenes of the insurrection happening on his ninth birthday. I hug him 10 times a day, but even the best of us have to run up against a society that’s structurally antagonistic toward his health and well-being … and that was before COVID made it into our zeitgeist.

Oh, and a rash of COVID cases hit his school over the summer, a swarm of texts hit my phone to just let me know. Gently.

Now, he’s back at school, and I take him there every day with no need for permission. The sun follows us above the bus to school, and its light careens off those windows and into my eyes even on rainy days. Now, the routine also includes a bus ride to school, a daily form to fill out, and several welcomes to school from the principal, the parent coordinator, and a few other educators who’ve seen me around. A surgical mask and a cloth-based mask wrap around his face. I pinch the wire near his nose so his glasses fog up less. A couple of his classmates recognize me from an interview I did last school year. The kids do as they do while the adults pirouette between contagion concerns and professional responsibilities. A vaccine mandate for adults looms while only 10% of consenting students are allowed to be tested as pediatric cases rise across the city and the country.

Millions of miles away, a star shines its rays onto the planets in its orbits. This has been true for billions of years in all its intense regularity. Yet, as I sit watching my son head into the school building, none of this moment feels normal. The in-person mandate ensures that I place my faith in that sun and all the other stars to keep our son safe from all that should harm him. We shouldn’t have to choose between the power of science and the power of faith (or lack thereof), but here we are.

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Big Educator Energy (Pt. 1)

Imagine putting the locus of your faith in actual people, not the ones you pretend to know or the ones you envision, but the actual people each with their own big and bold visions and ideas of the world.

That was the mantra running through me as we developed the latest and greatest EduColor Summit 2021. (You can view the keynotes on your own time here). Organizing events like this make me wish more folks had the opportunity and the collective will to give more educators of color and conscience their own microphones. From 11am to 7pm, I found myself listening to students, educators, and parents who, through unfathomable nightmares decided to dream big, and share their visions with us without candy-coating the message.

We have several, structural and cultural reasons why this work matters now more than ever. Not only are we in a perilous time with multiple states coming for educators’ jobs simply for speaking truth to power, but we also have a plethora of other global maladies that could be easily addressed if not for nefarious and well-resourced people across the spectrum profiteering off the chaos. We’ve decided that speaking a better world into existence mattered more than the risk it might bring to our livelihoods.

This was true before COVID and even more so during.

That’s where the “Big Educator Energy” comes in. In the critical conferences that I’ve worked on this summer, there was certainly a level of uncertainty about stepping into even mentioning race. In higher ed, it often looks like e-mails to provosts and college presidents, demotions, tenure denials, and loss of funding. In PK-12, it looks like e-mails to principals, letters to the local conservative paper, and doxxing in front of school boards. Personal opinions turn into inhumane policy.

Some of these folks literally do the canceling they accuse everyone else is doing, and do so with the boost of many major news outlets.

So, when we endeavor on these projects, as I and others have suggested, we must do so boldly and without apology. Pretending that our country doesn’t have institutional and structural atonement for its past human-rights violations including slavery and genocide doesn’t get us healed much like standing on a dirt heap under our rugs doesn’t get our living room cleaned. Our schools’ curricula have generally kept us from addressing said atrocities. Our pedagogies hinder our students from being fully engaged citizens. Our school buildings continue to fall apart, and too many of our children still see our schools as sites of harm instead of headquarters for good.

There’s another wave just beyond the wave of people who want to pretend we can get back to “normal.” It’s not hard to see that second wave, full of autocrats, racists, profiteers, all buoyed by people who’ve bought the maleficent message at their own peril.

That second wave will require an interwoven network of students, parents, teachers, and other community members who believe we can do better, and energy to match. If our energy is big enough, we can snatch a few victories from defeat’s toothy jaws. As many have taught us before, it’s important to dream, then act upon that dream, especially in a living nightmare.

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Bob Moses and The Enduring Education Injustice

When I first met Bob Moses, I was potentially too eager to meet him. For years, his book Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project had taken over several facets of my pedagogical imagination, from how I taught students about integers (even when I couldn’t take them on trips myself) to slopes and equations. Not only did I have the privilege of meeting civil rights and Black liberation activists who were living legends like Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, and Felipe Luciano, I also found tutelage in educational giants like Pedro Noguera, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Karen Lewis. But one man – among a handful – sat at the intersection of the fight for civil rights and education. Friends and acquaintances across the board would relay stories about him, encouraging me to find him whenever I got the opportunity.

That, I did. But before I would, I had the pleasure of sitting in the audience for a panel with him and several luminaries as part of the American Education Research Association’s conference in NYC, 2018.

Everything people had to say about him was correct: both the gentleness and fierceness wrapped in struggle and hope. Rather than relay what he said, I’ll just share the video (above) of his remarks and discussion with fellow panelists. When the panel ended, I bum-rushed the stage to meet him. Of course, a small clutter already surrounded him, but I didn’t let that deter me. When it was my turn, I just said, “Thank you for everything you’ve done. You’ve had an immeasurable effect on my work as a teacher and activist, so thanks.”

OK, it probably wasn’t as eloquent, but I did ask him for a picture and told the amateur photographer: “I need this picture! This is my OG and he doesn’t even know it!” He let out a small chuckle and still took a few pictures with me for posterity. It was the first and last time I’d get to meet him. More recently, I was the opening speaker for the NCTM annual conference where he would be on a closing panel until he pulled out for personal reasons. In his absence, his co-panelists including the actor/activist Danny Glover asked us to dispel the current myths about educational justice, including current deleterious notions about the origins of public schooling for our Black and brown children.

Even when he was among us in the physical, it was evident that we were ill-equipped in some ways to meet the current challenges for both civil rights and educational justice. Now that he has risen as one of our ancestors, I always hope we can grab those lessons and apply them to our current context.

A few hours ago, my wife asked, pointedly, “Why don’t we hear more about him in our schools?” It’s a great question. People like me who’ve elevated his messages of mathematics as a key to 21st-century citizenship will have influenced thousands of people across the country (and the world?) to take up the mantle. Unfortunately, the educational zeitgeist generally fears authentic conversations about equity, even before local and state governments took on so-called “critical race theory” laws. Teaching the concentrated truth as a way forward has rarely been the objective of American educational institutions, especially in our math classrooms where decontextualized axioms still reign supreme over deep, contextual problem-solving.

The mere mention of alternative math histories seems to bring out the anxious conservative out of both-sides faux-moderates. Imagine telling the narrative of a Black kid from the projects who attended one of New York’s lauded institutions only to leave his teaching job to organize Black voters in Mississippi to students of similar circumstance. That’s misaligned with the centuries-long story of the American Dream. Telling children that they can actually do something with their education besides leave the hood doesn’t align with the saviorism that continues to pervade among inner-city Black and brown schools. There have been few instances in my lifetime when someone in the education space would mention his work in both civil rights and math education with equal clarity and intensity.

As if saving us from our squalor mattered more than deconstructing why that squalor exists, especially and disproportionately for Black children.

To mention Bob Moses would mean to mention Ella Baker and the hundreds of quiet-yet-pronounced and community-rooted organizers of the 1960s whose tales America can’t dilute, including several of his colleagues who died at the hands of white supremacist violence. It would mean to pull in the lessons of the Algebra Project, an organization that’s meant the world to thousands of students across the country who have carved spaces for belonging in math and their communities. It would mean to acknowledge the work so many of his intellectual descendants in several spaces, too many to name in this reflection surely.

He was a genius prior to the MacArthur Award for sure.

As someone who sought inspiration from the blueprint he left, I’m left with a plethora of questions. What better problems did he leave us with? As I read obits and social media posts about him, I see how he left gifts for each of us. Selfishly, I see his birthday, exactly a day and several years before mine. I read up on his upbringing, his education, and how he took a left from a path that usually leads folks like us out of the projects, opting instead to go into teaching and then organizing in the quiet and even more perilous places. Shaking his hand and getting the chuckle and affirmation that he knew what “OG” meant was enough for me to feel like I was on the right path with my own work.

But then I think about how I wish more people in the education field felt a similar possession about his story. His social-justice orientation to the world and to Black people in this country should serve as an exemplar for what we want “real life math” to look like rather than the clamor for … whatever it is people think they’re doing with education right now. It’s not enough to have students in pre-service to learn Bob Moses. It’s that we should laud folks like him and so many others as regularly as possible, especially in places where our students could use more mirrors, and the better problems he’s left for us to solve.

May his legacy grow like latticework wherever we pursue justice in education and, by extension, justice in our society. May everyone be as fierce in their resolve and let our giants alive and past teach us the way forward.

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Our Collective Lesson Plan [On Teachers of Color In This Moment]

After last summer, this is the way it had to go down.

In recent weeks, conservatives have waged an all-out assault on their rendition of critical race theory via state and local legislation in recent months. There’s the actual critical race theory developed in the 1970’s with two pillars: that white supremacy is baked directly into our country’s laws and that we can and should change the relationship between laws and our racial hierarchies. The low-hanging fruit, which many in the media have picked, is that this is a part of a multi-pronged attack on the Biden administration and those who voted for him. That none of the critiques about President Biden have really moved his approval ratings or his messaging means upending the narratives on a state and local level. There’s also evidence to suggest that the country’s ostensible and temporary support for the Black Lives Matter movement’s aims led to higher voter registration, a clear trigger for a party that sees more voter participation as a serious problem.

Pardon me if I dig deeper, though.

There’s also this second, preposterous catch-all definition of critical race theory as per these newer bills: anything that mentions race is critical race theory. By this definition, anything that even smells like a courageous conversation can be subject to a criminal investigation. We have a plethora of evidence of systemic racism in our schools, from our textbooks and teacher evaluations to budgeting decisions and perceptions of schools. Yes, we get to say that racism exists in our system, but given everything we have on record, simply stating that racism exists is an abysmally low bar. Now, with critical race theory, the plethora of parties that once railed against social justice math, DisruptTexts, and the 1619 Project have formed an anti-anti-racist coalition.

The Venn diagram of these disparate groups is now a perfect circle.

This is potentially noxious for efforts to increase teacher diversity across the country. What people may not know is that teachers of color comprise at least half of all teachers in each of the four largest school districts in the country, but their surrounding communities – yes, suburbs – usually don’t reach even 10%. The benefits of having more teachers of color have been researched and enumerated. If the temptation is to simply discuss outcomes through narrow forms of assessment, then we miss a larger function of schooling in our country: our schools are generally the headquarters for societies’ passing down rituals and traditions it wishes to impart on the future. Humans don’t come to these buildings neutrally by any means. Generally, teachers not only believe they can make a difference in students’ lives, but also that they’d be good at their jobs. Of course, this gets more complicated when society asks teachers to both impart society’s standards while adjusting to an ever-changing world. We layer race, class, gender, and other identities into this and we get even more barriers where there should be more and better pathways into teaching.

Where we lose our way when it comes to the recruitment and retention of teachers of color isn’t in the test scores, but in the way that our society focuses strictly on these narrow measures and “outcomes” to the detriment of students’ individual and collective humanity. How do we propose attracting teachers to a human-driven profession when we refuse to see these teachers? What’s more, how do we ask teachers to both interpret racial uprisings and white supremacy that our students consistently ask about without directly addressing it? What’s more, who’s more likely to diversify their book collections for their students, to help interpret racial dynamics within a text? Who’s more likely to ask their students to introduce concepts of numeracy from Mayans, Incans, Persians, and Africans across the continent side by side with Greco-Roman nomenclature for popular theorems?

Who’s more likely to snicker at “In 1942, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” nonsense? To recognize how many slave-owners used both sides of their mouth to suggest that all men were created equal? To step into the classroom with the idea that Black people made democracy in the United States – and elsewhere – possible?

Ostensibly, we would need a movement greater than last summer’s, one that preferably moved from statements and black squares to one that treated human rights with more precision, courage, and comprehensiveness. Until then, I fear – and know – that there are a plethora of teachers across the board who will have to revert to teaching subversively or will be retroactively and from this point on harassed – if not dismissed – with these laws’ permission. If your first inclination is to say “teacher diversity doesn’t matter anyway because we haven’t seen test scores rise,” then we’ve completely lost the plot when it comes to teaching and learning. In a country where it was illegal for Black people to read and write a century ago, where Black people never received so much as an authentic apology much less reparations, where a global pandemic exacerbated and exposed the multitude of indignities our country stands by, it behooves us to interrogate exactly what we think we’re passing down to our children.

Ultimately, these laws would solidify schooling as a painful and inequitable process. The pain these legislators, politicos, pundits, and writers must be in to suggest that making room to share is equivalent to replacement is innumerate. Our collective lesson plan is the blueprint for creating an education that gets us collectively closer to a compassionate, just, and shared humanity. Pushing our country further away from mending the ever-bleeding wounds won’t sanitize the wounds, y’all. Those of us who teach with justice and equity at the center of our work know this viscerally.

There is nothing these laws won’t touch. That’s how systemic oppression works. The change we seek will hurt, but we’ll be better for it. I welcome a day when we could appreciate our differences and build our society from there. Until then, we try to use our classrooms as microcosms for the governance we’d like to replicate for the rest of the world. That’s the only mechanism for hope I know.

photo c/o

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We’re Not Even At Equality Yet

A jury of Derek Chauvin’s “peers” found him guilty on all counts of murder: unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. Millions reacted to this conviction in their homes, in the streets, on social media, on their own, in the company of others, or perhaps not at all. As the judge read the charges, perhaps many reacted with a sense of excitement, but folks in my circles reacted with a sense of relief and exasperation. George Floyd isn’t back so we’ll never get justice, but accountability was crucial here. Surely, this trial and the conviction would send a signal to the world that we’d find some form of accountability for these agents of the state whenever they performed as judge, jury, and executioner on a person’s life.

Then we found out that a police officer killed Ma’Khia Bryant only 800 miles away from when the conviction came down a short time after.

Therein lies the structural and deeply personal part of this conversation we need to keep having in America. Too many of us believe that simply changing the faces and phenotypes of the people entrusted to keep the social contract is enough. Too few of us see the ruse. In my heart of hearts, I do believe that much of the work we must do to make a better world rest in us doing so collectively, regardless and because of these differences that stratify us. However, the persistent lies and obfuscation we see play out in front of us lead me to believe we need a more urgent conversation than incremental solutions. Concurrently, words like “equity,” “woke,” and “anti-racist” have been diluted, not yet to the point of obsolescence, but sometimes I do wonder.

I get that the current dialogue asks us to “rethink” what struggle would look like. School administrators have even taken up the language, asking us to “reimagine” what school looks like. Whose thoughts and imaginations got us here in the first place? Who’s being asked? What’s the context for this new set of thoughts?

Concurrently, the New York State budget finally includes a path towards fully funding public schools, a fight that’s heaved and ho’d for the last three decades from a broad coalition of parents, educators, lawyers, and activists. Even after the case and the eventual appeals won in court, legislators – particularly Governor Andrew Cuomo – dragged their feet to ensure fiscal equity for our schools. Now, a new yet similar coalition has demanded more than equality, but a redistribution of power through initiatives including police-free schools and true integration. It’s taken about 30 years for the New York State legislature to ensure some form of funding to public schools across the state for three years with nothing guaranteed after that period. How long will our demands take to get met on issues as ostensibly simple as safety, mental health, and taxing the wealthy?

We’re not even at equality yet, much less equity. We don’t even have the same conceptualization of what it would mean to be fully free, no matter how many times an individual from an oppressed group becomes famous and/or wealthy.

If education is a function of society, then what messages are we handing down to future generations? That we need to stage racial uprisings for decades to get even a semblance of accountability? That we need to organize thousands of parents, educators, students, and other citizens to upend a whole legislative branch and force our governments to do the right thing? That the sort of small bandages we’ve offered in the form of language and items were no match for the structural, cultural forces that continued to enforce separate and unequal processes, no matter what this country’s founding documents said?

Yes, hope is a motivator for me because it’s the only way we carry on with this American experiment. But hope without grounded theory is just flailing in the winds of society, aerial waves shoved along usually by the powerful and those who benefit from that status quo.

So being from the projects (Lower East Side, the Ave, if you must know), I’m equally skeptical when governments and the actors who hold power within it actually do what they say they’re going to do. I’m technically in the business of picking off bricks from buildings and making meaning from why those bricks exist, but I’m also about determining what buildings were set afire and examining the ashes. Generally, we see progress that moves people forward and creative and evil ways to dial that progress backward. We should be in the process of expecting that our governments get accountability right even when justice isn’t done.

Yet, as a teacher, I’ve learned to meet people where they are. It’s more than “We have a long way to go.” It’s also the abject resistance towards making concrete commitments to forward movement. It’s more than “change is slow.” It’s that change is urgent and necessary.

None of us are exempt from committing to this work. All of us have our role to play, some explicitly more than others. Until we see that level of change, then I give myself permission to hold these multitudes: that we can see these wins and that we’re not even close to seeing those wins because part of what our national imagination does. Please.

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Why I’m Opting My Son Out Of Standardized Testing (And You Can, Too)

Recently, my son revealed the difficulty in observing his ninth birthday. Usually joyous occasions, this past birthday was mired in nervousness over the perpetual, coordinated assaults on American ideals of democracy. Just as he was finishing online class, government representatives over 200 miles away openly opined on election malfeasance on the US Senate and House floors to the delight of former President Trump’s glee. A few minutes later, the news reports would show the waves of insurrectionists cruise into this usually impenetrable building like knives through unrefrigerated butter. His stubborn parents shook off the nonsense to center him, even as, in the back of our minds, we worried whether the insurrection at the Capitol was the first of a continuous set of actions between that moment and the inauguration of President Biden.

He’s sitting there, smile in tow, brimming at another year around the sun even as he observes the world we’ve brought him into. What, to this nine-year-old, is a learning loss?

He’s learned a lot this year. He learned how to create his own school schedule, how to advocate for himself and his learning, how to flip between several different computer programs, how to use Zoom and Google Meet depending on the Department of Education’s policies, and how to work independently while his parents navigated their own set of works. He learned how to put on his own mask, wash his hands for 20 seconds, and stay physically distant from strangers who he senses do otherwise. He’s got a larger vocabulary and can read our expressions well. He’s got a way with puns and jokes beyond what I had at his age. His musical tastes have expanded to early 90’s rap, older school R&B and soul, and a sprinkling of ballads from various genres (I’m not apologizing for that, either). There isn’t a Mario game I’ve handed him that he hasn’t tried to beat within two weeks.

Oh, and he’s inherited lessons on injustice, hope, and how much further we have to go towards any sense of equality, most of it from his own reflections.

Contrary to some people’s beliefs, my thoughts as a teacher of hundreds of students have aligned closely to what I want for my own son. The issues with standardized testing are manifold. It’s hard to advocate for standardized testing unless one ignores its abhorrent connections to the eugenics movement, massive disinvestment in the social safety net, distorted notions of accountability, and the mass closure and privatization of public schools. But even if we ventured to ignore decades of institutional malfeasance, we must reject notions that we somehow need these tests to accurately assess learning loss. Many of my students lost a lot more than learning with little to show for it. If anything, the last couple of decades have shown time and again how, generally, school districts don’t offer authentic support to those labeled “failing.”

On paper, districts and schools are supposed to provide “services,” but what, to a global pandemic, various hate crimes, perpetual economic stratification, and structural delegitimizing of full human beings, is a service?

Yes, it’s worth noting that Alejandro has two veteran and venerated educators, so he’s had a wealth of knowledge to inherit. So it stands to reason that, if my son’s been learning a lot this past year without standardized testing, other children ought to be asked what they actually learned, things beyond the standards surely. “Learning loss” assumes that a form of equality (it isn’t even equity right now) existed for children already stripped of both resources and agency. This coming school year, our school systems would do well to take better measures than whether a student aligned all their learning to what a publisher demanded.

So Alejandro’s parents are opting him out, not because he has the opportunity to fail this exam, but because we can reject the framing of learning loss and school reopening altogether in the service of rethinking what this looks like.

Society’s collective need to renormalize everything negates all the steps it took to get us here, including the consistent inhumanity this country has shown to its citizens descended from enslaved peoples, indigenous peoples, and immigrated peoples from marginalized countries and continents. It’s hard to recognize, too, that the people most likely to be seen through deficit lenses have an abundance so deeply underappreciated by our schooling norms. I openly acknowledge that many of the policymakers, administrators, and reporters ostensibly understand that inequity, but will proceed at deliberate speed because a small subset of mostly white wealthy framers said so.

OK. But my son doesn’t have to be subjected to the whims of a small obstinate few in a city that largely is supposed to serve students who share similar backgrounds to him. The results can never do justice to what our children have experienced, and what their parents have known so long about this country. To be clear, many a tragedy have occurred on many birthdays in the last year. This country owes a great debt to our children of color, even more so across multiple identity markers, especially disability, gender, and class.

Our students deserve more for their resilience than this country has offered them, especially because this country can offer that and then some. Perhaps now is a good time to assess our students less and assess itself more.

For more information on opting out in New York, please follow the work of NYC Opt Out.

The post Why I’m Opting My Son Out Of Standardized Testing (And You Can, Too) appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

Karen Lewis Taught Me

“José Luis, I’m writing your foreword.”

That’s how it went. My publisher and I were brainstorming names for who would best introduce my first solo project This Is Not A Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education to the world. For what it’s worth, Haymarket Books let me have my vision for the book, but they nudged me in ways I didn’t know I needed. As we approached the editing phase of the book, the publisher saw how the book needed to meet the moment. So one thing lead to another and President Lewis and “Coach” John Lewis sat in [an undisclosed location] with my family (Luz and Alejandro). We made the usual introductions between family, then she stated matter-of-factly that she would have the first word in my book. I looked at Luz, then Alejandro, then Coach, then back to Karen.

I must have giggled a bit and said “Sounds like a done deal.”

By then, I had gotten used to her directness, the warm demander so lauded by Black women education scholars past and present. There I was, an up-and-coming national voice in the movement against the corporatization of public schools facing the local legend turned national hero. Our main order of business took about 30 seconds without much fanfare. Because she said so.

Of course, she also pushed me to do the work of making the book meet her expectations for greatness. I didn’t have plans to let her down even before her provocation, but now I felt the duty not just of the movement at the time, but of ancestors from centuries before. She shared some of her reasoning for taking on this book in her foreword:

I became aware of “JLV” late one night after someone provided a link to his blog. I was taken by the truth, the vulnerability, and the clarity of his writing. It was clear that this man (and there are so few men in the profession, let alone men of color) had a passion for educating children of color. This passion fuels a constant search to make education relevant no matter what …

From our first meeting on, I had to earn that foreword. She made corrections on a number of facts in the manuscript and asked for a rewrite of the last few chapters, too. She was asking to be my most present and authentic self, the prodding from someone who knew I could do better.

Looking back through those e-mail exchanges, I was reminded of the person who insisted in front of my family that she preferred not leaving the classroom, but sometimes, when you’re called, you must answer. People who remember 2012 may recall that, before 2012, there were several pro-public school protests across the country in small and large ways. I participated and spoke in the Save Our Schools March in Washington, D.C., the largest (at that point) gathering of educators from across the country. While the SOS deserves its proper place in the resistance against the corporatization of public schools, the Chicago Teachers Strike manifested visions of a truly unified front. Communities across the country had felt the ripples of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top in the form of austerity measures, including ramped-up privatization, elevating high-stakes standardized testing, inappropriate teacher measures, and the continual dissolution of Black and brown teachers across cities that venture philanthropists used as their ed reform playgrounds.

The mighty CTU reframed it by speaking plainly, pulling in parents and students for the collective win.

The president always acknowledged that she had plenty of help, with many of the people we saw in red and white knocking on doors, creating signs, and making phone calls across the Windy City. But the person who Chicago media loved to hate seemed so effervescent, laughing directly at those who insisted on derailing the CTU’s efforts to create great schools. She was one of the most potent speakers of the moment, at once riling onlookers and fellow activists up while slipping in punchlines that made us both laugh and “oh snap!” at once. She could smile wider than the sun one minute and cut your chest with her eyes the next with little effort.

Saying her imprimatur for my work was a blessing is insufficient. When I received her foreword, I almost felt like quitting writing books altogether because I couldn’t beat that.

But if we met with our families at this undisclosed location to just talk business, then I would have lost out on the person. Contrary to the caricatures and the vitriol from elites in Chi-town, Karen was also one of the warmest people I’d ever met. This was ostensibly a meeting about This Is Not A Test. It was actually a meeting about Alejandro. How big he was. How smart he was. How he looked like he had a bright future with his wisdom at such a young age (not two years old yet), and a mother who, like her, also presented as a warm demander. When I told Karen I was the least popular person in my house, she said, “I know, but that’s how it goes” and we all laughed.

The last time I got to see her face-to-face was in 2015. She was well on her way to stripping former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel of his mayoralty, scaring any number of education deformers along the way. But she had surgery. She had to bow out. I went to see her (thanks, Xian and Erin). She got to tell me directly that she was fine. She knew she needed to tell me directly that she would be. Same laugh. Same questions about children. Same wit. Same emphasis about improving education in Chicago.

One can always wish they had more time with the people they loved, even from afar. To this day, her pictures don’t sit still. CTU Vice President Stacy David Gates asked us to not wish that she rest in power but rest in peace, because she lived in power.

Facts.

What people come to realize is that, at our best, good teaching is activist teaching. To contrarians who suggest that we idealists stay neutral in the classrooms, they’d be surprised how Karen and so many others gained strength from the students they served daily. What good is teaching if it’s not teaching justly with communities in mind? To wit, what good is pretending neutrality when your kids are suffering from that neutrality? Teaching justly is teaching excellently. Karen believed in Chicago’s kids so much that she – however reluctantly – stepped out of the classroom to tell policymakers, politicians, and other corporate elites about themselves. At the end of her foreword, she writes:

“What José really advocates for is a ‘fundamental redistribution of power: from a top-down approach to one in which teachers, collectively and individually, take ownership of their roles in reforming education, something our current set of reformers don’t all believe is necessary.’ There it is again, that insistence upon ‘teacher voice.’ It’s neither whine nor bellow, but a steady trumpeting that resonates with us all. Those of us who do the work, have compassion for our students, and know the strengths and limitations of our institutions must have a voice.”

She wrote this about my book. She was an inspiration for what she expressed here. She inspires me to speak boldly and directly to power and justice wherever I go, with the students I serve in mind. She got her roses on multiple occasions while she could still smell them. She was blessed, but also a blessing.

She sits among the ancestors watching us now, teaching us to embrace joy and youth in our resistance.

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Before You Must Go (The Whole Trump of You)

By the time this publishes, you’ll officially only have four hours left in your presidency. “Good riddance” isn’t strong enough.

For you and your cabal of fascist, racist, sexist, imperialist, homophobic, classist, seditious sycophants, I would wish your souls the agony you’ve bestowed upon the world over multifold. When the substitute teacher across the hall from me yelled your name in triumph at my Latinx and Black kids, you smirked that your name could inspire such terror. When another adult used your name in an assembly to let students know to fear him, he got explicit permission from your own ill-wrought bullying and calls to violence. When an administrator clamps down on some of the strongest advocates for kids because of their explicit anti-racism, they’re using the loopholes and laws already in our policies to displace the already marginalized, creating conditions in schools where justice feels further and further away.

Yes, having that much power revealed much of who you always were, a cultish following flanking you through every move. Every time you lied about a pandemic, every family you intentionally separated, every bit of land you stole from Native American/indigenous peoples for profit, every woman of color you targeted with a tweet or a snide comment were a framework for the millions of lives you’ve made worse for having put your hand on a Bible you never read on Capitol steps you allowed your followers to smear with feces. Time went four years forward, yet seemingly a century back.

You and your administration bragged about not starting any new wars abroad, but the walls rose against the United States to keep us out. The walls closed in. The war is here.

Surely, you’ll make enough money (have made?) to cover your legal fees, and I understand you’re worried about your legacy. You don’t have to. It’s already served as an exponent for the horrid history America chose to wear horse blinkers about. Our definitions of greatness differ. Your definition harkens back to Reaganism, a framework for corporate malfeasance and institutional racism at best. My definition is the words of so many of the ancestors here who read the Constitution, saw life, liberty, justice, and simply want to hold America to what it says on paper.

Our definitions are incompatible. You can’t win. So you must go.

But it isn’t just you. You are a cause and a symptom at once, a panoply of America’s social and structural ills flouted for personal gain. While I wish it didn’t take this many catastrophes to rid us of you, I hope we only move forward from here on out. I hope the rancor and derision you’ve inspired in my students already cynical in governance can grow to do much better for us than you ever could. I hope adults who supported you and other fascist entities near and far will recant their ways. Healing can never be healing without disinfecting the wounds, then putting the proper enclosures on it, whether a stitch, a bandage, or a severance. I hope it doesn’t come to the latter of the three.

Mostly, I hope you continue to serve as a model for why we need equity and justice for all starting now. May your example serve as a curriculum to show how our country can start listening and acting with the most vulnerable and marginalized people. May the American experiment do right by everyone.

But you? You needed to go. You must go. It isn’t just that you lost. It’s that you can never ever win.

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To A Greater Glory [National Catholic Reporter]

In my latest op-ed, I wrote an article as an open letter to the Biden administration that harkened back to my Jesuit education (Nativity Mission, Xavier High). Here’s a little bit:

In this way, I’m asking us to live out our stated values politically and spiritually. If God truly lives within each of us when two or more of us are gathered, then we need to make the spaces where we gather our youth the spaces we know serve them. If we know that Jesus of Nazareth arose from squalor, then we have a duty to make our schools in our poorest districts the envy of the world in honor of the poor.

We should eradicate child poverty measures where we see them and address structural racism, xenophobia and other forms of identity oppression in our policies and practice. Yes, we can do so with culturally responsive and sustaining practices, professional development around trauma-informed learning and teaching, lowering caseloads for guidance counselors, social workers and other in-school mental health professionals, and, yes, making every public school a great school.

To read the rest, click here.

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