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Eden, Janine and Jim. (2020). "Black Lives Matter March" from Flickr.
Education Dive
How will administrators incorporate lessons learned from summer protests?
Principals and superintendents are reconsidering the messages students
are hearing from their schools, and the lens through which they learn.
Natalie Gross
June 30, 2020
First Ahmaud Arbery. Then Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Rashard Brooks.
As high-profile deaths of unarmed Black people at the hands of law
enforcement, or those associated with them, made headlines this summer,
middle school principal Derek McCoy felt similar feelings of shock.
He thought a lot about his son and daughter, both Black young adults.
He thought about his own apprehension whenever he encountered police as
a Black man.
And then McCoy thought about his students — both the ones he recently
left behind in Georgia, just an hour away from where Arbery was killed,
and the ones he will meet this fall at North Asheboro Middle School in
Asheboro, North Carolina, where he was recently hired as principal.
“Are they hearing a good message from their schools? From their
teachers? Somebody who they’ve developed some trust with that they can
go to and pose some questions for?” McCoy said. “I’m hoping that
educators are embracing that piece, that role of their jobs right now.”
In the weeks since Floyd’s killing on Memorial Day and a wave of
protests against police brutality and systemic racism, some school
leaders have made headlines of their own after losing their jobs for
speaking out against the Black Lives Matter movement. But for McCoy and
others who spoke to Education Dive, there’s no question current events
should infiltrate classrooms, curriculum and school culture going
forward.
“What’s going on right now is a call for all of us to really make sure
that we’re focused on teaching the right things,” McCoy said.
Practically speaking, this means history teachers don’t have to start
day one of class studying cavemen and leave the unit on the Civil
Rights Movement until the spring semester, he said.
“We’re here to serve learners, and our learners need us to bring what’s going on right now into the conversations,” McCoy said.
Questioning what you learned
In California, San Lorenzo Unified School District Superintendent Daryl
Camp has long been encouraging educators to take a hard look at what
they teach and acknowledge there’s an information gap — even for Black
educators like himself who grew up learning from largely Eurocentric
textbooks.
It wasn’t until he attended a historically Black college and university
that Camp learned more about Black history and the contributions of his
ancestors before the slave trade, which is where American textbooks
typically pick up, he said.
“The way (slavery) is framed in our textbook, it was labor, and the
emphasis is on the physical skills that the slaves brought. But no one
recognizes the science behind agriculture, and the reality is that the
slaves had a certain amount of knowledge of how do you take and
cultivate land that was different than people here,” said Camp. “It’s
looking at slavery differently — recognizing that ... the slaves had
incredible physical strength and academic strength that really helped
build this country.”
Camp said he wants his staff to start questioning their education and
how they got to the point they’re at now, including what they learned
and how they learned it.
Prior to the events of this summer, the San Lorenzo district already
held monthly conversations about race and education with central office
leaders. There have also been periodic “Beyond Diversity” workshops
with Pacific Educational Group Founder Glenn Singleton open to all
staff, including office workers and custodians.
“Adults create the culture, and everybody has a role,” said Camp, who
is also the president of the California Association of African-American
Superintendents and Administrators. “It’s broader than the classroom.”
In New York’s Pleasantville Union Free School District, leaders have been taking a similar approach.
Administrators in the predominantly white district read the books “How
to Be an Anti-Racist” and “White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White
People to Talk About Racism” throughout the school year. But in light
of the recent wave of protests — including a Pleasantville student-led
rally in the middle of town on June 13 — the district is now making
them required reading for teachers and staff, as well.
“Those two books were really important professional reads,” said
Pleasantville Superintendent Mary Fox-Alter. “You know, we as educators
constantly say we’re lifelong learners, and this was an area that we
challenged ourselves to grow and to understand.”
District leaders have also started meeting with alumni in recent weeks,
asking for feedback on their experiences and what could’ve been better.
In some cases, Pleasantville High School Principal Joseph Palumbo said,
the district is already on the right track, such as replacing a
European history and Western civilizations AP course with one focused
on world civilizations a few years ago.
“We would encourage more districts, if you’re looking at curriculum, to make that shift in your AP program,” Fox-Alter said.
School culture and questions around SROs
Recent events have also rekindled the debate about police presence in
schools, which some studies and analyses show disproportionally impact
minority students in an education system with a school-to-prison
pipeline and documented discipline disparities between white and black
students. One of the demands of the group Black Lives Matter at School
is to “fund counselors not cops.”
Already, the school district in Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed,
and many others have ended their relationships with the police
department, and other districts are also re-examining their policies.
Harry Lawson, director of human and civil rights at the National
Education Association, said it’s been an ongoing debate for some time
that he predicts will get more attention as the start of school nears.
Lawson said the organization is currently working on guidance for its
members with points to consider as schools consider reopening plans
under the coronavirus pandemic this fall.
“If it’s going to be mandated still that people are wearing masks, and
things like that, what is that going to mean particularly if we believe
that students of color are already sort of in a lot of ways
over-policed?” he said. “We could see that being a problem.”
McCoy is aware of the debate about police presence in schools, but it’s not one he’ll be tackling at his new school.
While he said having uniformed officers on campus can “send a message
and create an air,” the school resource officers he’s worked with in
the past have genuinely cared about building good relationships with
students.
“There is a lot of work and conversation to be had about having school
resource officers in schools,” McCoy said. “There’s going to be a lot
of pros and cons.”
For now, he’s focused on cultivating a school environment that lets
students take ownership of their learning — especially in times like
these.
“This is a great time to not tell students why we’re here but to let
them find out why we’re here and to let them do their own research,
demonstrate their learning in different ways and let them make
different historical connections,” McCoy said. “This is a great
opportunity to come to (the) classroom and not only learn in a
historical context, but facilitate some authentic conversations to come
up in the classroom about what is really going on.”
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