What Schools Should Be Asking Now: White Supremacy and the Crisis in our Education System
Dear Teachers, School Administrators, School Board Members, Parents, and Anyone Concerned about the Future of Our Country and the Role of our Education System in Shaping that Future:
On January 5, 2021, Rev. Raphael Warnock became the first Black person from Georgia to win a U.S. Senate seat. By the next evening, violent white supremacists had breached the U.S. Capitol building seeking to take hostage and possibly kill government officials. By all accounts, there is more racist violence to come — the culmination of the past 4 years, or the past 400 — which should force us to ask a crucial question: What are schools doing to make sure an insurrection of this nature never happens again?
What are young people learning in schools and classrooms that:
Gives them the social-emotional skills to process their anger, frustration and disappointment in nonviolent ways?
Interrupts white supremacist indoctrination, perhaps happening in their own homes, with a more accurate, equitable, and inclusive version of the world?
Gives them the historical perspective to think critically about the rise of white supremacy and the failed coup they are watching on their televisions, perhaps perpetrated by adults in their own families?
Gives them the critical thinking skills to spot “fake news” and “alternative facts”?
Gives them the knowledge to understand the vast economic inequity in our country, exacerbated by Covid-19, that their families may be victims of?
Gives them the tools to take action to stop global warming and climate change?
Provides them with a sense of community — one that helps them understand their own identities; welcomes diversity along lines of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and ability status; and helps them see the humanity of those who are different from themselves?
I have worked in many different schools — public, private, charter — in many different places — major urban cities, suburbs, rural communities — with students and educators from many different backgrounds — majority white, majority black, multiracial, low-income, high-income, mixed income — for many years. In that time, I’ve learned that in almost every single case the answer to all the above questions of what students are learning to prepare them for the world they live in is the same: NOT MUCH.
Over the past week our nation has been collectively reckoning with the failure of all of our institutions to act in ways that would, as Martin Luther King, Jr. hoped, bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice. Our media, our criminal justice system, even our government, are being asked to take responsibility for their complicity in the current moment. And I have news for us teachers, administrators, parents, and concerned citizens: schools must do the same. In fact, I might argue that if there is any real hope of creating a more just society, one in which there isn’t room for white supremacy, it will require that schools rethink and redesign almost everything.
Some of you may be feeling a bit defensive right now. Maybe you’re thinking: “It’s not fair to blame schools for what kids are failing to learn at home!” Or, “schools can’t do everything!” Or, “educators are already overworked and underpaid, now you’re asking us to do more!” I get this. I live in a household of educators born of educators born of educators. As a person who thinks of my career as supporting and advocating for teachers, I’d be one of the first in line to lament how unfair our system is in the demands and constraints it places on our country’s most valuable professionals. We don’t manage to pay educators what they are worth or give them basic professional respect. Our treatment of our education system, and the dedicated professionals working in it, is nothing less than a national shame. I get it.
Here’s the thing though. For better or worse, outside of the family, schools are the primary socializing institution in our country. Almost every child in the nation spends a minimum of 13 years, 8 hours a day, in classrooms across the country. Children spend as many waking hours with teachers as they do with their own parents. And while parents and families should certainly take responsibility for making sure their children are not violent white supremacists, this very quickly becomes a chicken and egg conversation — parents have to have it to give and our schools didn’t give it to them to have. The reality is, schools are already doing a lot of the heavy lifting in raising the next generation. And we must do it better.
Schools should be places where children are learning collectively who they are and what they believe, who and what they will fight for, and what role they will play in our larger society. Schools should be places where the biases of future police officers, government officials, doctors, lawyers, tech executives, and yes, even teachers, are challenged. Sadly, they are not. Instead, the majority of what we have decided to spend our time on in schools does not contribute to making our country more critically thinking, more emotionally competent, more equitable, or more just.
As it stands, young people can graduate from high school and get college and professional degrees — the kinds of degrees that will make them the leaders of our nation — and learn almost nothing about race and racism, class and classism, gender and sexism, disability and ableism, sexual orientation and heterosexism, climate change, emotional resilience, or even how to think critically. NOTHING. You can be a straight A student and learn nothing to prepare you to process the current moment, let alone take any kind of action in it. You can be a school leader, a master teacher, an educator of 40 years and have no more perspective about what is happening on the streets of Washington, DC right now, or about the rise of white nationalism, than one of your students, and quite possibly less. And worse, most of us don’t even realize how much we don’t know. We definitely can’t teach what we don’t know.
The truth is, despite the inspiring work of many individual educators, schools as a whole are doing very little to prepare students to be justice-minded adults who are not riddled with biases about people of color, low-income people, and people from other marginalized groups. In fact, most are actively contributing to and upholding white supremacy. This is true in every kind of school, in every kind of place, run by every kind of person. Some examples from my own life:
This year, in the majority-Black large urban district where my child goes to school *and* in suburban and rural majority-white school districts where I work, teachers still taught lies about “pilgrims and Indians” for Thanksgiving. Lies that lead children to believe all Native Americans are dead (they aren’t), that European colonizers didn’t commit genocide (they did), that Americans didn’t steal this land we are living on (we did), that Making American Great Again might be a good thing (it’s not).
This year, in suburban and rural majority-white school districts where I work *and* in the majority-Black large urban district where my child goes to school, students are still reading books, and getting handouts and flash cards, that feature images in which all of the people are white — inaccuracies that support the idea that only white people are worth representing, learning about, reading about.
This year, in the majority-Black large urban district where my child goes to school *and* in suburban and rural majority-white school districts where I work, educators are still calling the two weeks we have off at the end of December “Christmas Break,” still assuming everyone does Santa (even when there are Muslim, Jewish, and Jehovah’s Witness students in their schools and classrooms), still failing to teach any other holiday from any other cultural tradition that might be relevant to their specific students or important for learning about the diversity of the larger world. And the Santa is still almost always white.
This year, in suburban and rural majority-white school districts where I work *and* in the majority-Black large urban district where my child goes to school, students are still being shamed for their class positions — the kind of housing they reside in, how many toys they got for “Christmas,” what their parents do for a living, what they wear, whether they qualify for free breakfast and lunch.
This year, in the majority-Black large urban district where my child goes to school *and* in suburban and rural majority-white school districts where I work, students are still being rewarded for “raising the most money” in fundraisers as if that is not directly related to the class position and social capital of their families or has anything to do with the task of educating students for justice.
This year, in suburban and rural majority white school districts where I work *and* in the majority-Black large urban district where my child goes to school, what students learn is still based on textbooks written by companies out of Texas that DO NOT value diversity, equity, justice or truth telling. Districts are giving untold thousands of dollars to companies for curricula that explicitly devalue the history, experiences, and contributions of people who are not white men.
This year, in the majority-Black large urban district where my child goes to school — a district run by almost all Black women with Masters and Doctoral degrees — flashcards with pictures and words reading “handcuff,” “gun,” “cop,” and a military “tank” were sent home as part of the kindergarten reading curriculum (in the middle of #BlackLivesMatter protests no less)!
This year in suburban and rural majority white school districts where I work, school leaders are making decisions about what kind of education is best for students and families of color and low-income students and families during a global pandemic without actually talking to those students and families about what they want and need.
What did the schools and classrooms you are affiliated with do this past week to teach students what the 1st Amendment actually protects? What “sedition” is? What a “coup” is? What “false equivalence” is? What “fake news” is? What the 14th Amendment is? What “racism” is? How the government is structured? Who becomes president if a new one isn’t certified? What of substance did they learn that would explain this moment? What had they learned proactively prior to this moment that laid the foundation for helping them understand it?
We all know the answer, and the examples are endless. For generations we have created and sustained an education system that is as segregated now as it was at the time of Brown v. Board of Education; that is based on curriculum that does not teach the things we claim to value; that trains teachers and administrators in schools of education where they get almost no knowledge or skill to cultivate equity, diversity, or justice; that tracks students in ways that reinforce racial and economic segregation; that creates standardized tests that are consistently problematic; that fails to recruit or retain teachers of color; that funds schools in ways that provide more to those who already have the most; that consistently celebrates that which is white, and male, and already dominant while ignoring the contributions, people, and cultures that fall outside of that, or introducing them in only the most cursory and stereotypical ways; and on and on and on.
In short: we have an institutional problem. Across the board in our K-12 schools and our colleges of education, we are FAILING to provide students with:
critical thinking skills,
social-emotional skills, or
cultural competence and social justice skills.
Racism is taught, as the saying goes, which means anti-racism can be taught as well. And the truth is, we just aren’t teaching it.
We are in crisis in this country. And if there is any hope of getting out of it, schools must dramatically shift what we are doing — NOW — from the curriculum and textbooks we are purchasing, to the lessons we are teaching in kindergarten classrooms, to our training of preservice teachers and administrators.
I had some hope that Covid-19 would motivate a true reckoning in our education system. It didn’t. Perhaps white supremacists trying to stage a coup in the Capitol will.
Right now, every educator should be asking what they can do to prevent this from happening again in the future. If this moment of horror doesn’t force us to change course significantly in our education system, at every level of the system, we will have many people to blame for the destruction of our nation, starting with ourselves.
*Originally published on Medium
- Written by Shayla R. Griffin, Ph.D., co-founder of Justice Leaders Collaborative