The country is in the midst of a pandemic that has disproportionately affected the Black community and a national movement to protest systemic racism in American life. The education system is at a juncture, too, recognizing its own role in exacerbating race and class disparities and the work it must do to achieve equity of opportunity.
Last week The Chronicle convened a virtual event to bring together educators from K-12 and higher education. The event was hosted by Michael J. Sorrell, president of Paul Quinn College, and Scott Carlson, a senior writer at The Chronicle, and included William R. Hite Jr., superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia; Carol Johnson-Dean, interim president of LeMoyne-Owen College and a former school superintendent in Boston, Minneapolis, and Memphis; Zeus Leonardo, professor and associate dean of education at the University of California at Berkeley; Alicia Oglesby, director of school and college counseling at Bishop McNamara High School; and Kim Hunter Reed, commissioner of higher education for Louisiana. The event was underwritten by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The discussion explored the education system’s underlying assumptions, what counts as high-status knowledge and who has access to it, and what approaches to increasing equity hold promise. The following excerpts have been edited for length and clarity. This was the second event in a series on race, class, and education that will continue.
Poverty and Access to Opportunity
Zeus Leonardo: When we talk about race and class and education, I collapse race and class into one word, so a bit like Einstein collapsed spacetime, right? To me, “raceclass” is one word, no hyphen, no slash. Obviously it affects a lot of groups, including Latinx, Indigenous people, Asian Americans, etc. But in this moment, I feel that it’s important to put our finger on Black education and the access to high-status knowledge, the kind of information or knowledge that gives students a better chance of getting to four-year colleges or elite colleges.
Carol Johnson-Dean: Across the country, and across every state, you see these huge gaps in preparation early on. And Black students are 3.8 times more likely to be in out-of-school suspension, so again, lost opportunity to learn. What we see as we go through these discussions about social injustice, as we’re having these protests, is that these huge gaps in treatment have a very significant impact.
Kim Hunter Reed: These equity gaps have existed for too long. Today in America, your parents’ educational level, your parents’ socioeconomic status, tells us everything about your likelihood of success. We have to change that reality. We have to say, regardless of race or place, you will have an opportunity to have a pathway from poverty to prosperity. We say: Everyone, come to college. But we don’t explain how to get there, how to pay for it, how to make a choice. We don’t do enough to make sure people understand why it’s relevant, why it’s important, how to do it.
Michael J. Sorrell: Isn’t that because we’ve created a system that effectively discourages, punishes, and discredits you for not already knowing that? The test-optional conversation going on right now I boil down to assessment. What exactly are we assessing, someone’s ability to be ready-made by the time they get to us, so we as an institution don’t have to do very much work? How do you create an assessment model where you actually are assessing people’s ability to take advantage of opportunities?
Promising Approaches
William R. Hite Jr.: We’ve done a lot of acknowledging and admiring this challenge. And there are some things that can be done. We have to start with the notion of access. It’s one reason why, in Philadelphia, we put all third graders on a college campus. We do that because there are 60 institutions of higher ed in and around the city, and children walk by them every single day and never set foot on a campus. We’re trying to create the attitude, Hey, one day I want to be here. And we have a great partnership with the University of Pennsylvania, which we established this year, for 20,000 rising high-school seniors, a course that prepares you to apply for college. And for opportunities like Advanced Placement or gifted education, how about those becoming opt-out programs versus opt-in or criteria-based?
Dean: At LeMoyne-Owen College, we have a high school on our campus, and we partner with the school district so that, in their junior and senior year, students can take college courses. There are colleges all over the country where these partnerships actually work, and they increase the likelihood, particularly for first-generation collegegoers, that they will enroll, because they’ve already earned several credits toward their degree. It reduces their financial expense for college, and it increases the likelihood that they will have a successful college experience.
Partnerships are key. We no longer have the luxury of operating in isolation. That’s going to be increasingly true for law enforcement, for health care, and for education. If we don’t figure out what our connection is to the community we serve, we will be ill-prepared to serve it.
Reed: One thing we’ve done is to set a different expectation for all students. Our Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and our Board of Regents set a joint goal that with the Class of 2029, every high-school senior will graduate with a college credit, a credential, or both. It’s a different conversation than a deficit model of looking at gaps. Instead it’s, No, we need to think about system redesign. Because if we’re going to make sure that everyone has opportunity, then we have to design for opportunity for everyone.
My grandmother taught for 30 years, integrated a school in Louisiana, and she talked about this idea of teachers coming in with this ownership of their students. It’s our responsibility to figure out how to get them across the finish line, how to make sure that every learner is addressed. We have to have that ownership in success for all of our students.
Sorrell: My grandmother taught in a little town, Waterproof, La. She taught generations of kids. The schools were really seen as community resources. The teachers knew the families. There was a different level of ownership. Scaling has robbed us of that. The economic efficiency piece of this has robbed us of the practices that have been shown to work. When we had a chance to make a decision — Do we want to perpetuate the community-based feel, or do we have to succumb to the economic realities? — we succumbed to the economic realities. We are a country that has funded our education through property taxes, and that has had some disastrous effects on creating a broad-based experience for everyone. So my question is, if we know what works, how do we put ourselves in a position to be able to afford what works?
Funding and Resources
Hite: Around Philadelphia, just across one of the main streets, you go from a district that is spending $10,000 per student to districts that are spending $21,000 per student. This is where partnerships are really important: providing our young people with college experiences while they’re still in high school, programs like Middle College, like dual enrollment.
Dean: There are two pieces to this. One is making sure that we get the additional investments, and, once we get them, making sure they’re distributed in an equitable way. Because there are parents in our communities who are more vocal, who are better connected, who are able to advocate for their students, we struggle a little bit when we do get the resources. We have to make sure that once the resources are received, those who need the help the most are able to get it.
Secondly, there are lots of assumptions that get operationalized. We decide who is gifted and who is not, who belongs in this class and who doesn’t. And we as educators are guilty sometimes of deciding based on race and class, who should belong. Sometimes our teachers will say, I don’t think this student can do the work.
I think about what we were dealing with with George Floyd, it’s like, who is qualified to be in white space, and who isn’t? And who is innocent before guilty, and who’s guilty before innocent? Because we have a set of rules about discipline. We have a set of rules about who gets in to what. And we have a set of rules about who’s smart and who’s not, who should be a leader and who isn’t. And those underlying assumptions, coupled with resource inequities, multiply in very significant ways.
Leonardo: Often, when we talk about resources, we go directly to funding. There is inequity in funding we all know about. My former co-author, Norton Grubb, talked about other ways to think of resources, like facilities and how to use them equitably. It is a default orientation that students of color, particularly those who come from poverty, parents and communities of color are treated not as resources, but sometimes even burdens to the system. Yes, some students, families, and communities do come with deficits. That’s the nature of being poor, for example, or being targets and victims of structural racism. How can we treat them as knowers, as experts in their own right, at least about their own lives? That’s a question of resources, too.
Sorrell: How do you create assessment models that are built from assets, from the standpoint of, Listen, you come from this community? There’s value in that experience. That experience has made you an expert. We should absolutely re-examine how we view assessing people’s ability to succeed.
System Redesign
Alicia Oglesby: When we see these achievement gaps that have not gone away, have not shrunk in size over decades and decades and decades, we’re managing a system that doesn’t work for Black students. We’re managing a system that doesn’t work for Latinx students. We’re managing and maintaining a system that doesn’t work for Indigenous students.
I really like the term system redesign. I might even push it to system dismantling, because if the premise of our practice acknowledges that the education system in America is racist, from that point we can examine, re-examine, dismantle, and redesign that system.
Leonardo: We have outcomes that should be predictable. It’s a system that’s actually working. If it’s broken, it’s broken relatively speaking. It’s broken for a certain half of the population, let’s say, which includes poor white students.
The common school was created as a sorting mechanism. Part of that is an economic imperative. So when we talk about class stratification, we really are talking about capitalism. We’re talking about an economic system. The culture of power is not often talked about. It’s not explicit. And we need to make it explicit in the classroom: how it works, what the codes of power are, to not only have students understand them, but to gain access to them and, in some sense, like Alicia is saying, dismantle them.
Oglesby: It’s become more of a pressing issue for our students to be clear that wherever they spend the next four years of college, they are going to be in a community that is going to keep them safe, that is going to encourage these conversations and this social activism if they choose to participate in it. Students are much more vocal about that now. I see 11th graders being much more vocal about that now and what that campus culture is, and really pressing upon colleges and universities to be honest about what that campus culture is. Because that is a priority right now.