Paths to Equity and Access: The Grand Challenge
Educators respond to all kinds of forces that lead them to make decisions that don't benefit all children. If you're the parent of one of the 10% of the kids who are in experiences that will get them, by today's standards, ahead in high school, accepted at Harvard, and then into a professional job, then you do not want school to change. That alone puts enormous pressure on educators to maintain the status quo.
Homework, grades, schedules, leveled courses, ability grouping â all are strategies that teachers today inherited from their parents' teachers. We know from experience, data, and research that these practices work against all children getting access to full and rich curricula, engaging experiences, challenging work, and even relationships with adults who matter. School reforms of the twentieth century created different educational experiences for what our parents' generation referred to as the âhaves and have nots.â Over time, parents, educators, and community members have become comfortable with that model.
The cultural biases of those in power, and yes, the desire to preserve privilege, have filtered out both an interest in change and reasons to change, so the structural consequences of schools created by past generations are seldom challenged, even today. Neither are the implicit biases that impact the way we see kids. These biases have played out in schools so that those identified as high performing or gifted have been entitled to special and more interesting learning experiences than those identified as needing extra assistance. And, extra assistance often translates into the mindânumbing work of drill and practice.
Creating paths to equity and access for all children remains the grand challenge of public education in America. We can name all the problems and we can generate an endless list of solutions. We also know that educators can do little to nothing about home and community poverty. What we can control is what we choose to do more of, or less, in our learning spaces to give us the chance to notice children, to see their faces, hear their voices, find their strengths, and help them know their own value. This doesn't happen by chance. Rather, these are outcomes of school communities that focus on leveraging resources to authentically engage learners, not just to provide rich opportunities but also to insist on children getting access to opportunities that challenge their curiosity, stimulate their urgency to seek knowledge, and encourage their interests, questions, and passion to learn more. This is our life's work.
It's my time to git it, and I wonât be late
I said it's my time to git it
So I stepped up to the plate
Let's make the world a better place
With no mistakes
Where every race can come together
At a growin' rate
Let's celebrate
Let's jus' show and elevate
So one day I can make it to Heaven's gate
I got a lot of questions for God
I can barely wait
Ever since I was born I knew I would be great
Cuz
I have a dream . ..
â Kolion Troche, 2016 high school graduate and rapper (Moran et al. n.d.)
The decision in our district a few years ago to support two librarians in creating a very inexpensive sound studio in their library (at first just old desktop computers and a basic sound board) created a new pathway for teens to write, perform, record, and produce their own music. Teens from all walks of life found their way into the studio. Kolion was one such teen. When he enrolled in one of our high schools, Kolion, a Brooklyn native, was fresh out of the juvenile justice system, and headed to a high school placement. Most people would have bet against this 17âyearâold's odds of staying out of trouble. However, when he walked by a newly constructed space in his new high school, a music studio connected to the school library, he made perhaps one of the most important decisions of his life. He wandered in and asked, âWhat's this space?â The teacher â young, a minority, and wise beyond his years â connected with Kolion and invited him to join in the work of nascent studio musicians.
Kolion wasn't on a path to graduation at that point but he did have a love for rap music, and inside was a poet ready to be unleashed. In November, the principal indicated that he was working hard, but the barriers of state tests and verified academic credits seemed insurmountable. Pam crossed her fingers, hoping he would make it to the winter holidays. He did. Days became weeks and learning seemed to become timeless for him. He came to school early. He stayed late. He wrote rap lyrics for himself, for friends, for his biology class. By May, he had one state test left, earth science which was a ninthâgrade course. On a sunny day driving in her car to and from schools, Pam got a call from the principal's office. She listened, then pulled off on the side of the road, palpable joy coming into her car from the other end of the line. Kolion's voice. The principal's voice. He'd made it. He would walk in June. He had found his voice, and in doing so, changed his trajectory from being on the verge of dropping out to graduating from high school. Pam says now that she knew whatever the investment that had been made in creating the music studio â and it was small even in our advanced versions â was worth every dime when she saw Kolion poised on stage, waiting to hear his name called to come forward and receive his diploma.
Equity provides resources so that educators can see all our children's strengths. Access provides our children with the chance to show us who they are and what they can do. Empathy allows us to see children as children, even teens who may face all the challenges that poverty and other risk factors create. Inclusivity creates a welcoming culture of care so that no one feels outside the community. We've all seen that children are not impossible challenges, but their needs can challenge a teacher's capacity to serve them well. And we've learned, along with other progressive educators, that we must willingly search our values and make decisions differently if we believe that every child matters. In doing so, we come to cherish all our children.
The âInsurgent Missionâ to Create âHabitable Worldsâ of Learning
Kolion was no magic student. No magic intervention or remediation programs existed to pull him through. He made it to graduation because he found a mentor with an âinsurgent mission,â a teacher who chose to âupend the status quoâ as he connected with kids to change what learning opportunities in high school could become (Zook 2016). In discovering his passion for writing and performing rap music in a school that made that not just okay but promoted it, Kolion found a reason to keep coming back to school every day to connect with peers, diverse teens united through their voices, agency, and influence in their school community. Indeed he found his way as a learner. We are fortunate because we have Kolion's and many other learners' stories to share. Their stories give us hope for a different future, a progressive future, where school is much different than it has been for more than a century.
What I've seen the most change in was that students were encouraged in their participation in the studio to understand the person across the table from them. If you have that student who wears the pants with the holes in them and the earrings and the tattoos and he may be an outsider to someone who wears a fitted cap and baggy pants and a hoodie. They share so much in common but yet through appearances they seem so distant. What a program like this does, from what I've observed, is that it puts them in the same room and it allows them to speak a common language because their language is not their fashion or their group of friends or their family background; their language is music, it's words, it's writing, and â it's sound and it's fluent. What it does is create a connectivity between them. And, literally I've seen it demolish barriers between individual students, between teachers and students, between teachers and teachers. I've witnessed that and I think Kolion can attest to that same thing. He's experienced that and he's become a role model on his own just because he's become an example of not succumbing to the stereotypes that are so relevant and strong in our society right now. (Moran et al. n.d.)
We share stories of children, adolescents, and teens all the time, for it is through their voices that we challenge educators with whom we interact in our district, state, nation, and around the world. We challenge them to consider their own beliefs and values about the young people who are required to occupy our learning spaces for up to 13 years â 180 days a year, five days a week, about seven hours a day in school, and into the night and weekends as they take work home. And many of the educators we work with can tout fantastic tales of bootstrap successes among graduates not unlike Kolion.
Sadly though, the social, political, and economic narrative of schooling in the past has been grounded in a âsoft eugenicsâ belief that while some children have the capacity to become whatever they choose to be in life, others do not. This plays out in the decisions that educators make, often based on decontextualized data and confirmation biases that stem from immersion in traditions of education that did the same to us. Even if lip service is given to words such as equity, accessibility, inclusivity, empathy, cultural responsiveness, and connected relationships, schooling today is still far more likely to support practices from the past that have created school cultures in which none of those words define who educators really are, no matter what they aspire to be.
Consider how the âhabitable worldâ concept developed by Rosemarie GarlandâThomson, Emory University researcher and professor, sits at the core of the philosophy of educators who developed and now sustain the structures and processes of schooling that impact young people such as Kolion (GarlandâThomson 2017b). GarlandâThomson views public, political, and organizational philosophy as representative of one of âtwo forms of worldâbuildi...
