The Complexion of The Teaching and Learning - Episode 5 - “Brown v. Board’s Double-Edged Sword”

[MUSIC] Greetings listeners and learners who are now tuned into the complexion of teaching and learning. A podcast docu-series in which we traverse across time to explore the social, historical, political and professional experiences of educators of color. I'm your host and color learner Brandon White. English language art specialist for Unbounded. We seek to serve students across the country by keeping our work and learning grounded within the intersection of equity, instruction, content and standards. In this episode, we will explore the undertold impacts of the Brown vs. Board court decision that declared segregation unconstitutional in schools and other institutions. Throughout the episode, we'll be attending to two of Unbounded's five charges by talking about race systematically and examining bias in his role in our work and learning. I hope that the reflections in this episode and the discussion questions available at the end provide fuel for meaningful, necessary and courageous conversations that you can have about how teaching and learning have evolved in this racialized country. If you're just tuning in, I encourage you to listen to the previous episode which explore the experiences of educators of color before, during and right after chattel slavery, continuing into the Jim Crow era and U.S. expansion. Last episode, we explored the preservation and persecution of teaching and learning norms of Asian, Black and Indigenous peoples from the early to mid-20th century and explored how the courts were leveraged to fight for school integration. In the case of the landmark Brown vs. Board decision, it was a groundbreaking moment in which presiding judge Earl Warren concluded, quote, "In the field of public education, the doctrine of separate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." This was major due to the hard work of the lawyers from the NAACP and the Black educators who quietly fed them data and experiences. The highest court in the land deemed the age-old Jim Crow added separate but equal, unlawful. This was a big deal. Big enough for it to be in my high school history books decades later. In fact, my senior year of high school was the fifth anniversary of the Brown vs. Board decision. One of my favorite teachers, Mr. Reddington, had us read an article about it in U.S. history. I distinctly remember feeling confused after reading because there was an abundance of facts that I couldn't string together. This court decision happened 50 years ago, but my high school's majority, Black and Brown. There are some white students that attend, in fact, more than many other schools in my district. But why, though, does the International Back-Aloriant Program have something to do with it? Does the fact that it's a magnet school has something to do with it? In other words, these history books were telling me about a critical blow against school segregation, yet somehow I was still witnessing its sting. I needed more pieces and I would come to receive them. In search of those pieces, I found out that there were Black educators with varied and nuanced views of the concept of school integration that weren't just Black and White and bad pun intended. Professor Sonya Douglas-Horseford, author of Learning in a Burning House, Educational Inequality, Ideology and Disintegration, breaks down the deeper discourse that was taking place amongst educators of color regarding integration. I often point to the 1935 special issue of the Journal of Negro Education, which included the article by W.D. Des Bois, that's an Negro-Nate-Support School, where he has a position where he says, "Yes, we would want, you know, integrated schools, but at what cost, basically." And rarely do we have true equality, and so how can you create, again, this integrated space that we all desire when Black children are not seeing or treated as equal? Right? So that was kind of this conclusion that yes, it would be nice, but we know that equality, you know, that's just not, we really just don't treat people as equal in American society. Other articles in that special issue that really, there reflects the tension and debate on whether or not people thought that integration was the way to go, because for some, it was really changing a lot. It was the idea that if we could, you know, we have to change the laws on the books in order to really realize equal opportunities. And so there, I think there's a lot of things to that. We talk about nuance. What is left to assume when pursuing or demanding integration with an asset only lens of white schools and a deficit only lens of black schools? My textbooks didn't capture these factors. Leaving room for wide open assumptions about why Brown was pursued and/or how it was perceived. Was it for resource access? Or was it because white education was the right education? And speaking of knowledge and the truth, last episode we also touched on the less pure motives of those deciding on Brown versus Board. The United States had a growing rival at the time called the Soviet Union. And while the United States would bash its rival, Russia could always be like, "but you kind of oppressed black people while touting freedom." The United States looked crazy so the optics had to change. Kind of. Derek Bell, law activist and author of the book Silent Covenants labeled this phenomenon "interest convergence." Basically noting that racial justice occurs in this country only when it aligns with higher national priorities. In this case, international credibility. This may sound cynical, but it is unfortunately historical. International newspapers wrote think pieces about it. It had been petitioned as an issue to the United Nations by folks like Du Bois and Black and Brown nations saw the hypocrisy. In fact, then Secretary of State Dean Atchison noted during the Brown decision that school segregation was being "singled out for hostile foreign comment in the United Nations and elsewhere." And that quote, "racial discrimination in the United States" remains a source of constant embarrassment to this government in the day-to-day conduct of its foreign relations. And it jeopardizes the effective maintenance of our moral leadership of the free and democratic nations of the world." Professor Victoria Maria McDonnell, author of the book Latino Education in the United States further breaks down how interest convergence played its role in this landmark decision and the wider civil rights movement. "When things collide together and make sense for the power, the dominant power," Ellen P. Bush said, "Oh wow, look at that. This community was so progressive that they integrated schools right away." And you have to say to yourself, "That group of power didn't do it just because they were so progressive usually." They did it because it worked for their advantage. So we know, for example, what we call Cold War civil rights, correct? So in many places you have here in Baltimore and Maryland, you had President Kennedy was so furious because African diplomats coming to DC for the UN, they were being told in these diners and hotels that they couldn't stay there because they were black. And so you know, it was like a top-down. You have got to open those schools hotels and restaurants because we look bad in the world. We're supposed to be the free people of the world, right? Democracy, etc. Here we are, keeping black people segregated. So you have these both top-down leaders, but you know, we're going to see the big push was not until the black and brown people themselves fought from the grassroots level. There were pockets of areas that may have fallen fairly gone ahead, but it wasn't until you're on the ground fighting that you really see changed. It is important to step back and put this in historical perspective. First, we saw how Frederick Douglass leveraged interest convergence to convince the Lincoln to include black people in the Union Army to win the Civil War. Then we saw how abolitionists leveraged interest convergence to create the emancipation proclamation for the same reason. Now fast forward to the 1950s, we are seeing black educators and lawyers leveraging this moment of international shame to abolish segregation. It was extremely strategic, but there was always a challenge when someone changes the safe face instead of changing to build character. Now remember, the Brown versus board decision took place in 1954. Telling American schools, government, businesses, and policy makers, they couldn't be outright discriminatory anymore, was like telling a baseball player, you can't swing the bat. It was such a critical part of the cultural, commercial, and political identity of the country. And unfortunately, two things happened. One, America kept swinging the good old fashioned way. And two, America found other ways to get on base without swinging. courtesy of the Brown versus board decision itself. So, unbeknownst to me and unreviewed by most grade school textbooks, there was a Brown versus board one and a Brown versus board two. I didn't even know court cases could have sequels. So why were there two? So after Brown one in 1954, schools and districts with predominantly white educators and students were refusing, sometimes violently, to allow their schools to be integrated with educators or students. So the next year educators and lawyers had to fight again in the Supreme Court, arguing that desegregation should start right away. And the state said it would be too difficult and costly to happen right away. So for the second round of Brown, the court unanimously decided on two things. One, that school desegregation will occur at all deliberate speed. What does that really mean, though. I mean, were they going at an accidental speed before? I thought the problem with desegregation was the pacing, not the intentionality. And then too, they decided to give federal district courts, not the Supreme Court, the power to supervise the integration process. The very districts that were complacent with not prioritizing school integration were now in charge of seeing that it takes place with all deliberate speed. So, Sonya Douglas-Horseford shares the impact Brown 2 had on the process Brown 1 was aiming to achieve. So, we often reference Brown 1 and kind of celebrate that decision, you know, we failed to, I think, given the attention to Brown 2, which said that, you know, local boards and states, you know, had all deliberate speed in terms of the implementation of segregation. And so, we don't see a lot of segregation activity happening actually until the 1970s. And just across the country, as well as the requirement or the need that seemed for civil rights attorneys to then, you know, block cases in local school systems. So, for example, I'm from Las Vegas, Nevada, and it was until 1968 that there was a case against the Clark County district for maintaining separate schools. And you would see that across the country. And so, you know, again, that's 14 years after the Brown decision where schools were still maintaining these separate systems and required additional lawsuits and activities, push them towards the kind of goal of integration. And I think that's the challenge with current segregation, of course. If we focus on integration, but we don't pay enough attention to why we don't have integrated schools to this day, and it's based on that resistance, right, right, resistance, anti-black racism, and interest conversion. Dana Goldstein, New York Times Education Journalist and Author of Teacher Wars, a history of America's most em battled profession, further expounds on what was present in the Brown series, what was absent in the Brown series, and its impact. Not much was thought about teachers in the decision. The decision notes that many other Southern states had equalized teacher qualifications and pay between black and white schools previous to Brown v. Board in '54. Now the reasons those Southern states did that was to attempt to first all demands to desegregate. So they were hoping that they could point to the fact that the teachers all had college degrees and were earning similar salaries to say, look, these are equal schools. You know, as we know, the court struck the root of segregation itself and didn't want to take that kind of evidence as gospel. But the decision doesn't say that teachers must be integrated in any fair way. As any student of history knows, there was not much attention paid in the decision itself to implementation, and that's traditionally how the court might act. But it allowed for a lot of the resistance to integration to be very successful for about a decade. And then subsequently this idea of integrating teachers and protecting jobs for black educators, it was not something the federal government ever really got heavily involved with. And the other big flaw of Brown v. Board, of course, is that they've had little to say about segregation in the north or the west. And one thing that I like to always talk about is we talk about Southern segregation as goodgeray or by law and northern and western. Segregation is the fact though, or it just exists because of neighborhood housing patterns. But in fact, I think what we all realize now is that northern and western segregation of schools were also goodgeray because of the racist laws that exist about housing like redlining. So the law also contributed and in fact responsible for segregation in the other regions of the country. But Brown v. Board only applied to the Southern states. These rupos in the law created sinkholes that allowed things to fall back into their racial order as much as possible. It is important to note that while there was language in the Brown decisions that provided open opportunities for the courts, the communities and the classrooms to maintain a racial hierarchy, it also had language that pushed against it. So what do you do when you're asked to stop doing something you don't want to stop doing? You find another way to do it. That technically respects what was asked of you. That's what courts, communities and classrooms did to maintain racial order. They found new ways to exercise it and this backlash will be monumental and change education in ways we seldom recognize. Prior to Brown 1 and 2, a black or brown kid was way more likely to have an abundance of black or brown educators as their teachers. 60 plus years after Brown, this isn't the case. According to a study done by the Washington Post, Black, Latino, and Asian students face significant teacher ethnic identity gaps while nearly all white students are educated in districts with an overrepresentation of white teachers. TNTP recently released a study revealing that teacher preparation programs are significantly wider on average than the public school population. How did this happen? Professor Vanessa Siddle Walker, author of the book The Lost Education of Horace Tate, explains the context and the consequences that teachers of color faced due to the loopholes of Brown 1 and Brown 2. The black educators have wanted the Brown decision. They are preparing the children for this new world and they are hopeful that America is going to do what it's supposed to, which is give the children the quality of opportunity. Right? It's going to be fair, finally. The problem as the black educator sees it in 1968 is threefold and this is my language, but I think this language is a way of capturing what's happening in that moment. You have to understand that for black educators, these segregation was supposed to be an additive model. They would have in place what they had already been trying to do for black children and they would have access. That's what they are trying to create. Now, what is it that black educators want in an additive model? They want access. They want the facilities and textbooks and science equipment and pianos and press crowd equipment that their children had been denied. They want full access to American democracy. And for them, school desegregation that works for black children would have aspiring people who would advocate when they were pedaling and access things that other children had. By 1968, there's become what I think of as a quiet desegregation compromise. Almost like age is compromised in 1877, where it's more important to move on quit bothering the South and let the South work out whatever. And of course, that was detrimental for black education in 1877. We see something similar again by 1968. The federal government needs desegregation to happen, but it's more important to have the language of desegregation than it is to have an on the ground equitable desegregation. And so the federal government, which black educators said, "Look to in the early 60s to help create a system that would be fair and now started to retreat and just say let's just desegregate." But not in the ways in which black educators had hoped. The NEA, which the National Education Association, which black educators had looked to to help try to make white educators in the South want to do an equitable desegregation, is now retreating. They need a desegregation, but they don't want to lose membership, right? They're not beating up their southern white members to protect their southern black members. And so they're trying to figure out how to just, can we just all get along, right? So whether it's the federal government or whether it's the education association. So then what happens? And black educators see this up close. They see what's happening. They write about, you know, ACW was trying to force the interests of black children one time. And what they're saying about desegregation, this doesn't look like to us. And NEA is one of them desegregated, but sometimes turn it back on the type of merges that are created in the South. So what happens in real time? What are they talking about when they're suspicious about what's happened in 1913? with the massive firing of black teachers and principals dependent upon which records you're consulting, where between 30 and 50,000 teachers fired while white teachers are hired. How can you carry the aspiring school climate into this aggregation if you get rid of the people who know how to do it? So we lose the people and we lose the schools. Black high schools are typically turned into middle schools or they get rid of them all together. Sometimes brand new buildings just abandoned. Principles, black principals are thought not capable of learning white schools and sometimes they're left and schools with no children. Right? So they can pay them a little while. Make it look like they had a job but it's not a real job. What Dr. Tate and others are seeing is that the capacity to create aspiration is being constrained because the people who know how to do it are being fired and the schools that have a history, the trophies and whatnot of success, those schools we get rid of them and so how are we going to carry aspiration. Dr. Tate says who's going to teach little children they can be anything they want to be or as the boy says before he gives up on American moves to Ghana he says that a black teacher in the middle of Carolina what's going to happen to the children, right? And they're referring to that inner resilience that ability to believe that you can move forward not with understanding the harshness of an external climate. The aspiration is getting lost. What's happening to the advocacy? See the not the penalty but the cost for staying a part of the of NEA is to merge with white organization. That's good on its surface but in real time it means that as black people are absorbed into the larger, quite networks the agenda that advocated for black children is lost. Because these white organizations typically had the superintendents right? The people who were oppressing black children and now they are not how are they going to suddenly protect the interests of the children that they were oppressing a few years ago. So you get a heart state saying and then inclusive guide to school integration, the school boards are 99% white who's going to protect the children. So the advocacy networks are dismantled. Black educators are moving forward with these segregation and dismantling their organization. In effect instead of the additive model they hope for they participate in an exchange model. They give up the aspiring climates and the advocacy networks in the hope that they will have access and that access will be enough. Now what we know from the vantage point of time is that they didn't get full access even in 1970. All the schools were not desecrated. And we now know from the wonderful work of my colleagues that the access that we got in 1970 America is quickly retreating on. So they gave up aspiring climates and advocacy to get access but they didn't get all of that and now we're retreating on the access which raises a powerful question. Where are we now? Kofi Lomonte, African-American education scholar, professor, independent African school pioneer, author and editor of several books including Encyclopedia of African-American education explains the impacts that capitalizing on these loopholes had on the black educator and the community they traditionally serve. So I don't think there was much of a discussion at all about who was going to be teaching and whether or not there was going to be a decline in black principles and black teachers but the reality was that it was swift and quite massive. Fundamental to the educational experience of black children prior to Brown was the notion of the extended community and the relationship between the school and other institutions within the community. The relationship between the administration of the school and community members. The fact that the principal was not just a leader of the school but he or she mostly was considered to be a leader within the larger community and there was a very clear time between the school and the larger community. So on that note and that's very logical because it's all related to education and experience at children's seat. The second more obvious thing that's missing is that the current prior to Brown and that is not as common post-Brow. It's all a notion of a culturally relevant experience, a culturally sensitive experience. Like Glorinlabs and Billings and other people talk about. And again it goes back to this notion of philosophy. You're going to have a better opportunity as a child, a black child to understand and interact with me in a teaching process if I share a calming background with you. And that cultural reinforcement is not there anymore. In my legal studio I don't know if you can name it with his work is written a book entitled " too much schooling, too little education." And basically what he argues is that there's a difference between education and schooling. He says that schooling is basically going through the whole change of going from grade to grade, following all the wounds, taking tests and going to another level. Education, he says, is gaining knowledge about one's people and about the relationship between one's people and other people in the world. And also being able to have an experience that commits one to serving their own community. And he argues that we've got a lot of schooling, we've got a lot of, you know, diplomas and degrees. We don't have very much education because the schooling that we've seen has prepared us to serve other people. And not to serve ourself in advanced work, wouldn't be. The schooling that we've received and convinced us that we can't do for ourselves, that we have to rely on other people to do things for us. The very teaching and learning heritage that survived slavery and Jim Crow was now being threatened by state level, district level, union based, and school based organizations. The advancement of Brown one and Brown two created a loophole based pushback backlash that led to an ethno professional cleansing that our education system still suffers from today. With tens of thousands of black educators divided, conquered and eliminated, the very teaching and learning norms that survived slavery and Jim Crow were now being extinguished. In response to black communities and educators attempting to achieve more high quality resources for their schools, American systems took the greatest resource they could take. Inter communal norms of high academic expectations in the world that simultaneously expected so much and so little of African Americans. We hope you're enjoying this podcast, which was brought to you by Unbounded, where we seek to serve educators and students across the country by keeping our work and learning grounded within the intersection of equity, instruction, content, and standards. For more about our work, please visit Unbounded.org for resources such as our free, high quality curriculum, and the bias toolkit, a three-part guide for facilitating conversations about race, bias, and privilege among teachers and leaders. Welcome back to the Complexion of Teaching and Learning podcast. So what do white people get out of Brown one and Brown two loopholes? Professor Sonya Douglas-Horseford explains how while white educators benefited from this tragic game of socio-political chess. You know, if you provide, again, more opportunity for white educators, which, again, I think is an example of interest conversion, right? Yes, we can desegregate this role, but we still have a group that's going to -- so, you know, white is still going to benefit, if it's not an extent, as a result of it. So I think that's something to look at. Again, looking at the large numbers of educators who continue to do white and particularly female and middle class, despite the growing number of students who are social color and living -- many of which are living in high poverty situations. Dana Goldstein continues to break down the benefits that white folks invested in the education system received. So, for the first 10 years after Brown Z board in the mid-50s, the late-50s, the very early '60s, it was not truly implemented. But when Lyndon B. Johnson becomes president and the Civil Rights Act is passed, that allows the federal government to begin the work of truly implementing integration in a broad-based way in the South. The main piece of education history that I really wanted to bring to light in my book and professional historians had discovered this in my book, which is a popular history, I wanted to amplify it, is that, you know, between 30 and 40,000 black teachers and principals lost their jobs in racially motivated dismissals as schools were integrated. So, the way that it happened was that when black and white schools were combined and the students were mixed with one another, there would sometimes be more teachers than they would need because they were moving from a dual system to a unitary system. And the jobs of the white educators were protected and the jobs of the black educators were not. Similarly, around that time, if the school was formerly in all white school and black students were going to be moving into it, the best teachers from the black schools would be selected to move with them. So, the best teachers from black schools were being used to integrate formerly white schools. Meanwhile, if the school was formerly all black, they were sending the worst white teachers to those schools. It is also important to note that according to Goldstein's book The Teacher Wars, all of this was going on as the number of jobs in education was increasing. So there became more job opportunities for white educators, many of whom didn't know how or didn't want to teach non-white children, which resulted in poor and dehumanizing instruction and engagement for black students. In his 1965 book Dark Getto, black psychologists and key player in the Brown decision Kenneth Clark wrote that black children in this new arrangement, quote, "are not being taught because those who are charged with the responsibility of teaching them do not believe that they can learn, do not expect that they can learn, and do not act towards them in ways which help them to learn." On the flip side, though, many of the best black educators were taken out of closing black schools to teach in white schools, which resulted in rich and affirming instruction and engagement for white students. For the black community, this caused the brain drain, heart drain, and economic drain. What a counter punch against a call for justice. The implications of this are heavy, but how do we avoid undervaluing the brown case just because costly truths about them are undertoed? Professor Horusford gives us some insight. There are some limitations to that. I think we also need to honor and recognize the significant changes that it did make in getting that language, government sanctions, segregation, out of the law. That was a necessary step. It's our charge now in the current moment to use the tools that we have and to recognize the current demographic landscape of American schools now that has different, some of the same questions, but also, I think, different ones in terms of what does it mean to have an integrated school? But it also, you know, the civil rights movement did increase some opportunities as it relates to increasing the black middle class, right? And so I think so of the things that we need to look at, and you also saw an increase to the number of black school superintendents. Dana Goldstein also provides some historical and personal insight about Brown's benefits. The implementation of Brad V. Board had not just a very strong effect on students, but also on teachers. And so along with the many positive stories of integration that I tell in my book, both for black students and white students and black teachers and white teachers, there are some really hopeful stories in the book, and so I don't want to take away from that. And I am white, but I myself think of myself as someone who benefited from integration as I was part of a busing program and truly valued my experience in an integrated setting. The Brown versus Board decisions also brought about critical shifts in how Latino sought educational justice in the courts, schools, and communities. Professor Victoria Maria McDonnell breaks down how Mexican Americans were treated in response to Brown and how they responded back. So what happens when you get to the 70s when we really see these segregation actually happening because of the system? Then, angle leaders of school districts start putting Mexican and black students together and saying, "Here you go, we've desegregated Mexicans are white, so now you're together, and now we've fulfilled federal orders." And so by that time you have a shift from the very middle class, more assimilationist view of the old advocates groups among Mexican Americans. They were being pushed aside by the younger Chicano, right? So they were like, "More, you know, brown is beautiful, you know, brown power, the older guy for moon-lack groups, they're like, "Thanks, you guys did a lot of groundwork, but we're going to take over and we're embracing, you know, Amesbisa, Archikani, that, our Indian, American roots." And so in that strategy then, they finally got legitimacy from the US government, Supreme Court in Cisneros versus Corpus Christi in 1970. It was the first case to extend the US Supreme Court's brown-beat board of education to Mexican Americans. So it recognized them as a minority group that could be and was secretly discriminated again. So you see that shift in the way the Latinx community viewed themselves and embraced and had more, again, alliances with black when they were not trying to pursue this whiteness strategy. A perfect example of this change in education activism were the 1968 East LA walkouts that spread. Throughout the Southwest United States, Chicano students organized walkouts to demand more Mexican teachers, more Mexican counselors, Mexican history and culture responsive professional development for white teachers, bilingual education, smaller class sizes, community centered literature, and more funding. At the same time, a similar shift in education activism was taking place in the Northeast, where Puerto Rican parents, educators, and lawyers dissatisfied with the slow response to brown, led boycotts and strikes with African-American community members. As Northeastern school districts continued to designate Puerto Rican students in low expectation tracks and continued to exclude the Spanish language from instruction and identity. Folks and organizations like Dr. Yvelina Antanetti, founder of United Brox Parents Inc. and powered parents to demand involvement in their children's education. The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and powered community members to use the legal system to acquire educational justice. And a speed off, led by Anthony Appendorah, worked with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund to make PS25 the first bilingual school in the Northeast established in 1968, with the New York City's Ocean Hill Brownsville District. This takes place during the time when a speed out commission report showed that, quote, "The longer Puerto Rican children attended public school in the United States, the less they learned," end quote. All of this activism would result in the U.S. Government passing the Bilingual Education Act, authorizing millions of dollars to create language education programs in the nation's public school districts. The right to a bilingual education for students with non-English home languages was further concretized in the court case Lao versus Nichols and the amended Bilingual Education Act in 1974, pushing states to hold reluctant school districts accountable, and sound familiar, for implementing best bilingual education practices in schools like PS25 in the Ocean Hill Brownsville District of New York City. In addition to pioneering bilingual education in the Northeast, the Ocean Hill Brownsville District was also the site of a very bold and racially provocative moment in U.S. history. One where Black and Brown educators daringly demanded community control, all pursued with controversial support, controversial decisions, and controversial opposition. Dana Goldstein breaks down the event. The backdrop through it was really the failure of desecrification in the North, and the intentional acts of policymakers in New York City, New York State, of Northern courts, of the Supreme Court, intentional acts on the part of the political and policy decision makers to not desegregate schools. And so, left with underperforming, underfunded, isolated, segregated schools like those in the neighborhood of Ocean Home Brownsville. Parents and philanthropies and activists and community leaders were looking for something else and this was around the time that the Black Power Movement was really gaining steam and there was the idea of community control that we should no longer, you know, look to integrate with white communities that don't want to help us and don't want to be in common with us. But we should instead take charge of our schools, we should have say over who's teaching in them and this was a big experiment in community control. I think, you know, one of the most controversial things about it was in addition to community control being supported by some civil rights activists, by the Black Power Movement, by, you know, real parents who I talk about and write about in my book, there were some conservative political and philanthropic actors who also supported community control and that has always caused a lot of the controversy to what extent was this an internal movement versus an extra-doll one. I went, what I came down to in my study with this is that it was both of those things simultaneously. It was an alliance between community activists and some very deep pocketed funders who were primarily white from outside. But when this neighborhood Ocean Home Brownsville in Brooklyn decided that they were going to have community control of their schools and they won that right from Mayor John Lindsay and from the state legislature of New York State. The superintendent fired or attempted to fire a whole group of white teachers and moved them out of his schools and reassigned them elsewhere in New York City and this was the triggering event that caused the longest and largest teacher strike in American history. The union led by Al Shinker, very famous of course, simply did not believe that a superintendent led by a community board had the right to just on one day get rid of 20 some odd teachers. All of the teachers who were being asked to leave were white. There were essentially no white students in the schools and the superintendent was black. So it was obviously an extremely racially thought moment in New York City and in American history and the outcome of the strike was that the union essentially won. The community control experiment was shortly thereafter sort of neutered and shut down and the strong tenure protections that exist for teachers. They buy a large, they do still exist and most of the democratic or blue states. It's not simple right and even with the strike that we just talked about which was so racially divided I mean there were many black teachers who were union members and who also didn't want to get fired at the drop of a hat and were participating in you know that strike on the side of the union and at the same time most of the replacement teachers who were hired to be part of the community control experiment were young white left leftist you know when when the superintendent and O. Brownville was looking to restart his schools those are the types of folks that he found to go into the schools during a strike and break the picket lines. So it was really complicated. Complicated indeed. I remember when I first read about this thinking wow firing all 20 of your white staff automatically I'm not sure if that's fair there may be white educators and educators of color listening that may also feel the sting from that decision. Discuss it as we must but let's make sure that that sting is also used to understand the level of fairness experienced by thousands of educators of color who lost their jobs and schools as a result of the Brown versus board loopholes. The truth of the matter is this fight and all the fighting for educational equality from the classrooms to the courts after Brown provide us with a set of questions we should ask in the pursuit of justice. When considering the law how do we neutralize hollow loopholes and maximize equity rich policy and legislation. When considering community-based advocacy for equitable teaching and learning how important is it to identify the difference between schooling and education. When it comes to outside organizations assisting black and brown educators and students is it because it is the right thing to do or is it because of interest convergence and perhaps most importantly how do we do all of these things without compromise or assimilation into the culture and constructs of inequitable practices. The answers to these questions have implications on the professional and personal trajectories of educators of color as they enter into post-Brown education in America. These experiences of oppression and resistance from educators of color further confirm a personal truth that in order to become a change agent for educational equity we have to know three things. One we have to know that we are part of an educational system that upholds policies and practices that are historically and inherently racist. Two we have to know that being in this system means that we are participants in it and are therefore accountable for our contributions and most importantly three using our systemic awareness coupled with a strong knowledge of self, students, content, context and instruction will not only allow us to be non-complicant participants in the system but change agents from within it. As we go through this history we will see that this is not easy work but we will also see how this work is not only possible but necessary. For part six of this series we'll explore the experiences and challenges educators of color face during post-Brown America. In between now and the next episode we invite you to open your communities up to discuss this history and its connections to our perceptions of education in America. How does this history make you rethink your current practice? How does this history make you rethink how you interact with both white students and students of color? How is your current education system like the one described in this episode? How is it different? How do we demand accountability from second class integration initiatives in a manner that prompts accountability that doesn't condemn the efforts to equitably integrate? What new legislation and/or policies could potentially correct the under-explored impacts of Brown versus Born? And in this COVID virtual learning era what does teacher anti-racist activism, resistance and resilience look like? Reflection and discussion about our past and present can produce the most fruitful future. I would like to thank Professors Victoria Amarilla McDonald, Kofi Lomontay, Songi Douglas Horsford, Vanessa Siddler Walker and journalist Dana Goldstein for sharing their time, wisdom, and embracing their cultural inheritance of having the duty to share knowledge holistically, intergenerational and community. Until the next episode I wish you all their learning journeys. Peace and progress. We hope you enjoyed this podcast which was brought to you by Unbounded. Where we seek to serve educators and students across the country by keeping our work and learning grounded within the intersection of equity, instruction, content and standards. For more about our work please visit Unbounded.org for resources such as our free high-quality curriculum and the bias toolkit, a three-part guide for facilitating conversations about race, bias and privilege among teachers and leaders. We also encourage you to go deeper into equitable instructional practices by attending one of our new interactive virtual summits. You can also visit unbounded.org/virtualsummit to learn more about how you can bring the experience straight to your school, district, organization or entire state. If you want to expand your content knowledge on the topics we've just explored, we strongly recommend diving into these texts. Latino education in the United States, a narrated history from 1513 to 2000 by Victoria Maria McDonald. Silent Covenants, Brown vs. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform by Derek Bell. The lost education of Horace Tate by the Necessito Walker. Learning in a burning house, educational inequality, ideology and disintegration by Sonya Douglas-Horseford. There's the Negro Need Separate Schools by W.V. Du Bois. Sailing against the wind, African Americans and women in U.S. education by Kofi Lomote. Teacher Wars, a history of America's most embattled profession by Dana Goldstein and a broken pipeline. Teacher Preparations Diversity Problem by TNTP. We'll see you next time on the next episode of the Complexion of Teaching and Learning. Welcome to the B-side conversation of the complexion of teaching and learning, where we have focused conversations with one educator of color to discuss both their unique and common experiences exploring the navigation of and contributions to this American education space. Our B-side conversation guests today is an instructional curriculum force to behold. She is currently the director of P-12 Practice and Education Trust for Ed Trust for short. She is a Mother. holds her doctor in curriculum instruction. She's an equity advocate, and she's been a leader in the classroom at district levels and currently at the national level. She walks that walk, talks that talk, plus she's a Delta, Dr. Tansi Marshall, how are you? - I am fabulous, and I keep looking around my office going, who are you talking about? Thank you so much. - So one of the things I didn't mention in that intro is the fact that you are a triathlete. I only recently have found some level of consistency and exercise, and that's for like 25 minutes, maybe like five days a week, but you've managed to be a full-time educator, family leader, and be a triathlete. So I guess for me personally, how did you balance that? And but also on topic with what we're supposed to be talking about, what parallels could you or have you established between that devotion and the devotion to educational equity? - Yeah, I thought about that question, and when I read it, I was giggling. I think the piece about being a triathlete is this balance of the triangulation of the sports, because each of them is an individual sport, and you have to have levels of mastery at each sport in itself. And then you've got to figure out how to move your body from one sport to the other sport. And for me, I always say, "I used to swim, I used to cute swim," right? And enough swimming so I didn't, I didn't drown. But now it's not just a cute, it is the technique. It is the breathing, it is the arm stroke, it is the kick stroke, it is how you get from one end of the pull to the other end of the pull. And for me, particularly in the winter, I train indoors, but a lot of the sport, when I do the sport, I swim outdoors. So how do you transition in context? Right, so it's really about the context of them. And how do you transition quickly between a swimming context and a biking context? Right, and because your overall time from a sort of ranking standpoint is eaten up by the transitions between two things, between swimming and biking and biking and running. And then how do you get your body ramped up between biking and running? And so when we think about education, there is this triangulation, right? We've got standards, instruction, and we've got assessment. And you've got to transition children between each of those as you build technical skill as well as knowledge, right? So I have to have some swimming knowledge, right? Then I have to have some swimming technique. And as a lidhead person, we think about disciplinary literacy. I have to speak the language of each of those three in real time, so I don't hurt myself, right? So I've got to know the difference between my clip-ons and my running shoes, right? And I've got to know the difference between the gears on my bike, so if I'm going uphill, I'm in the right gear so that I don't overexert myself. But then when I come off the bike, I have to make sure that I'm not running in my biking shorts because the way that they fit on the body is different than the way you're just running shorts fit on the body, but then how much time do I have between biking and running? So there's a lot of transitional languages, a lot of skill development and refinement, as well as this knowledge building, right? There are these sentiments out in the world that say teachers don't necessarily have to have a whole lot of content knowledge. They just need to have passion, right? And as long as you've got passion, you can figure out the content. Okay, all right. But do I want a passionate doctor who skill set isn't quite bear yet? Is that who I want? Because you're super passionate? No, I don't want that. You know what I mean? And you heard me say this, Brandon, you giggle the last time when I said it. I was like, you know, I had two children. I had 26 collective hours of labor. I had four epidurals and I had two C sections. I didn't care about people's passion. I wanted them highly skilled. Now, it was great that they were passionate about their content. But in the absence of their passion, their content knowledge and their skill superseded it, right? And so in education, particularly education of black and brown children, I always question that person who raises passion above content and skill. Because in and of themselves, particularly the world in which African-American children find themselves, they have to have content knowledge that is indisputable. They must have skills that are irrefutable. And the idea that passion alone and passion above content knowledge building and skill development that supersedes that to me as a black educator who's in the classroom for a really long time who taught a lot of black and brown children, I find it offensive. And so I want the educator of black and brown children to absolutely take their content knowledge high. And I want them absolutely skilled on pedagogical process that knows how to tap into the desires and the interests of every child who sits in front of them, but specifically, the perpetually marginalized of whom black children unfortunately still tend to be. And so I call all of that into question and think through the lens of being a triathlete in that way, like high skill development in all of those areas and the passion to do them well. - That's right, that's right. That's pretty heavy. And I can see that and I imagine a amount of discomfort that has to take place in order to successfully achieve such a complex and heavy goal. But a rewarding goal though, and a fulfilling goal though, right? That allows you to participate in your purpose and to use your passion effectively. And actually here you talk about this triangulation between standards, instruction and assessment. You were talking about how passion shouldn't be, it shouldn't be deified as the thing that lets us know whether or not you can work with black and brown kids. It makes me think of another triangulation of passion, which is important but not everything. Skills and content, which what you were talking about, which is baseline and then mindset. Because you know, a passion and mindset can be different in themselves, right? Because you can be very passionate but not have the right mindset to understand that passion isn't everything and that your passion has to be temperate or like regulated by skills and content. But you might need the right mindset for that. And that intellectual insistence and that demand on the intellect of the child is I don't know something that a lot of people put in place, particularly for African-American children. You know, where I feel as though sometimes the call for Dr. Billion's work on culture relevance, people are not understanding the academic achievement side of it. Like that was huge, right? She set those up as an equilateral triangle. That's right. Right? Like it was an equilateral, it was equal. Each element is equal, right? The academic achievement is equal to the self-awareness. It's equal to the sociopolitical consciousness. They don't stand in levels of hierarchy. They're not hierarchical. They are equal and important and value. And we keep trying to like, well, which one comes first? No, they all come together together. So, you know, I think sometimes our African-American children and I'm resting on that, you know, get the short, they get short-script because their intellectual capacity continues to be devalued and under-appreciated. And it all goes back to that triangular thinking, right? Because you're talking about a situation where you have these high academic demands, which is that academic success piece, right? But then you also have those other two pieces that were going on, which is like the cultural knowledge and sociopolitical awareness as GLB describes it, right? And they're also teachers. When I hear us talking about this, it makes all the sense in the world, because I understand it's like a complete triangular thing. But then there are teachers who have academic success, which is part of the high expectations piece, but then leave the other two out, or don't have the other two, and then leave the academic like you just talked about. So it goes back to valuing all three of these things evenly as intellectual triathletes, right? That we have to be an example. education and speaking of triangles actually which clearly it's destined for this to be an ongoing motif just to use some more ELA neural language right with the standards have this three-part triangle around text complexity and there are also three shifts too right and the third shift is building through to be building knowledge through content rich nonfiction and the pursuit of all things equity and through instruction I have to ask are there potential Eurocentric pitfalls when trying to build knowledge through content rich nonfiction which we all know the research shows is important right but then we also have to consider whose knowledge and what knowledge do we build on and expand on all right so are there potential Eurocentric pitfalls and if so how could they be avoided I think it's more the American ideological framework rooted in Western thought so it's more like the Americanization of the Western thoughts I would go in that way personally I think I think the knowledge that's being built is around helping not helping around laying down an American ideological epistemological framework is what we're building knowledge around the pitfall of that is it's an idealized identity of America and a matter of that that is the pitfall and the rub becomes what does it mean to help young people under live inside the tension between the American ideal and the American truth and sometimes they live sometimes they're the same and a lot of times are not the same so how do we help students understand to be an American is to live in the constant tension of who we say we are and how we behave in the world right how we behave in the world internally and externally those are pitfalls the way to get around not even to sort of we have to get into the business of disrupting them that becomes the space of curriculum and that is you know I'm working on a lot of that in a lot of different ways a lot of many fronts that is a huge piece of the puzzle right because it is building knowledge through content rich non-fiction texts well there's a lot of content rich non-fiction texts question is who's is it right what what are they saying who are they saying it about do they have insider baseball knowledge or do they have spectacular knowledge if they have spectacular knowledge are they sharing that knowledge through an absolute respect for those about whom they're reporting or are they living inside their own unrealized biases and prejudices about that group right how are we deciding you know let's just take Woodrow Wilson you know he's touted as a person for freedom right well you go ahead and kick some tires you're gonna find a whole lot of other information right we know the rub between Susan B. Anthony right on one level she was a freedom fighter right you know staunch advocate for women's rights well go kick some tires you're gonna find out she had some pretty challenging ideas about women and who was actually a woman right so she wasn't talking about women who looked like sound like me she was talking about women who looked like her and she was not advocating for women like me you know she and Alice Paul you know we're really working to ensure people like me were not part of the conversation right you know holding us to alleyways and you know you sat out to my son or as you've always done before is you know we were out there like no we will not be in some alley we will march in here you know I'd be well showing up you know actually on at the women's march back in 1913 right saying no I'm not gonna be relegated so she was so we how much tire kicking and looking under hoods are we willing to do to build knowledge and you raised a question whose knowledge what right that's the question and how do we construct because I do believe that there is some cultural understandings about your country you have to know right like you have to know that the United States became a thing in 1776 but you also have to know that while they were fighting for independence from this country they were simultaneously holding an entire swap of people enslaved to foster their own economic social progress right and you were displacing an entire people to ensure your own so you how do we build knowledge that's intention with each other becomes a question that's content rich and then what questions are we willing to ask students that requires the kind of content rich non-fiction that raises those tensions that's the thing that's the disruptive work and who's willing to lose your job over it because I'll promise you you gonna lose your job or if not outright lose your job your job's gonna be held in tensions for you because when you start stepping when you start stepping into that you then bump up against every the systems which are people in a very real way yeah you know tackling subjects with nuance that's actually what this latest episode has been about like in terms of trying to look at Brown vs. board from a multi-faceted multi-perspective and multi-dimensional viewpoint right it's building that house on one hand yeah like you know the NAACP and all these lawyers Thurgood Marshall um Candace Baker Motley I think that's her name Candace Baker Motley uh you know became big leaders in that remodeling I think um you know because that extraordinary team of lawyers like made something happen that was arguably impossible right straight up in it and it opened the door for the courts to be a tool to seek educational justice and equality and fight for civil rights outside of education right which is very important and then on a flip side though right there's also a lot going on right like the Cold War civil rights in terms of the US looking crazy and the highs of the world and so you know part of this might have been because of the interest convergence that Derek Bell was talking about right you know that fact that you know we're already all the cases that were being built up prior to Brown vs. board um you know while these other cases are just as important um right and also thinking about like the backlash and knowing brown one and brown two um which had the loopholes that would allow for you know all these what we called the ethno professional cleansing uh of the profession of teaching to take place right like so what you can't discredit brown either right and then the the knowledge and the expectation that the constructors of brown placed on black teachers to be sacrificial lands for this so they knew it was going to happen right but they knew that and so within the movement itself there's tension right and we tend to elevate the plus side and to use your moniker we don't talk about the b side right because go to the whole like record analogy right the a side it was the one but sometimes you got your biggest your biggest aha in the record on the b side right so you know I used um you used to teach a lesson on the civil rights movement and I used to ask my students well how civil was it and what's the role of women when you raise up and you sit them side by side you know we tend to think of what what Rosa Parks did was organ it was not organic it was a deliberate action it was just a matter of what day it was going to be it was orchestrated it was designed it was you know she was chosen for very specific reasons she looked the part she was older she had the education you look at Claudette Colvin her age let's let's be clear put our cars on table face up she had that colorism dynamic going on her economic status at the time of her parents who she happened to have been you know on her way to becoming an unwed mother so we had some respectability politics going on That's made. Those are parks more suited. as an example, as a case, then Claudette Colvin was, right? And the fact that Claudette Colvin was in an interesting relationship that created this, so there's like how civil was it? Are we willing to raise tensions, right? To really not tensions, meaning tense, but the tensions between that which is good and that which may have been questionable. That's the tension. But how do we help? We talk about, oh, we want kids to be critical thinkers. No, we don't. Like, no, we don't, right? Because it's like if we did, then we would put on the table, the idealized versus that which should be problematized. And then you create the space in the middle for kids to become the thinker you say you want. That's how you do it. But we want that because that's hard. And that creates our own, it creates challenges to our own sense of understanding about these movements and these pieces of our own identities as American citizens and citizens of the world. They'll take more than passion to do that. Please, yeah, yeah, we'll take more than passion. Imagine that. That's right. So for those who only see it in books, please know it's very achievable. It's very achievable. Just keep looking at it, keep looking at yourself in the process and making sure that you are valuing your skill and content as much as your passion for advocacy for equity for students. You cannot be advocating for equity and not know your content. Shut up. I'm sorry. No apologies necessary. And y'all, that was not the warm demander, but the hot scolding demander right there for sure. Dr. Barchard, I just want to thank you. Thank you very much for engaging with me in this conversation. It's always an honor and pleasure to just learn from you and soak up some jewels and gems. And I also want to thank all our other guests and remind everyone that justice is found in the details of teaching and learning. If you like what you heard today, please like and subscribe so we can continue to teach and learn together. Peace.