(remarks made at 28th Annual MLK Day Community Celebration, Martin Luther King Coalition, NH, 2010)

What would MLK say about necessary equality work in education in the 21st century?

When I think of King, I think of marching in the street.

These are the images I have in my 38 year old brain, as a member of what some might call the “post civil rights” generation

(and what I call the “new civil rights” generation, because there’s still too much work to do to call it “post.”)

I remember, as a child, looking at my own Encyclopedia Brittanica, a kid version someone had given me and my sister.

I remember being mesmerized by pictures of King MARCHING. The crowds, the signs, the determined faces in the street.

Those pictures inspired me to work for racial equality.

My own background --from a family of Holocaust survivors and dead –

made it seem essential that I participate in some movement to treat human beings as equally worthy.

But those pictures of King inspired me with a vision of what “doing something” to fight injustice looked like. They inspired me to MARCH.

Since entering education, I’ve been thinking about when to march for what.

We still have a lot of things to march for in education in 2010.

Particularly regarding children of color:

We still have children without desks or books in this country;
going to overcrowded schools in shifts in LA;
sitting without permanent teachers, in basement rooms;
Spending their hours with teachers without any training;
Spending their hours with teachers who know nothing about them or their communities;
Overrepresented in special education without need;
Overdisciplined;
Lacking English language learner serivces;
**test preparation is shackling many teachers’ vision of what “education” can be (this is everywhere, but particularly with low income students).

BUT: the full 21st century version of “doing something” for educational justice may be in some ways less spectacular than a march.

The 21st century vision of a “just” society still needs to be as inspiring as King’s was –
That is, we still need to envision a society where every child is treated as if she is worthy, smart, as if she could cure cancer or stop global warming.

(This is the core of antiracism: treating all human beings as equally worthy and complex –

in person, and in curriculum when we learn about “other people” we don’t meet in person.)

But 21st century methods for creating a just society through our schools may be less spectacular than King’s marches!

*****Because there are problems in education 2010 that we can’t just march about.

I want to argue that 21st century methods of pursuing educational justice might include mundane, everyday, normal work:

Not just learning accurate history, learning about social issues, but also:

The work of paying very close attention to children and how they are doing;

The work of partnering daily in our communities to make sure every child becomes not only academically successful, but intellectually, creatively, practically, and civically engaged.

I want to suggest that in education we still need a “dream” on the scale of King’s.

But that some 21st century justice words in education are also more mundane: they are “everyday,” “communication,” “partnership.”

I’ve spent a decade and half doing research into unsuccessful efforts to serve young people, students of color in particular,

in schools, districts, federal government, university classrooms.

My work keeps coming up w/ the same punchline for 21st century equality effort:

the people sharing educational communities with young people need to work together to discuss, understand and address students’ everyday educational experiences as they occur.

This is my recommendation for justice work 2010: we need to make every member of a child’s community a strategist for young people’s success.

Take the example of dropout: (which some call the “civil rights issue of our time”).

There are race-class patterns in who drops out. Those patterns are in part the result of policy activity, past and present (Blank 2005). For example:

**In the 1830s, Horace Mann extended free public education proactively to Eureopean-American children. At the very same time, anti-literacy laws denied the right to read to African-American children of slaves.

Those actions had economic consequences over generations, as some got free public education and others no formal education (or wages) at all.

Further discrimination denied opportunity along the lines of race and created inequality of class.

** in 1900: black people were still arguing for extension of public education in the South!!

***In 1910, only 1/12 black kids of high school age in the South were enrolled in school!

****In 1930, 85% of Mexican-American children in Southwest were going to school in segregated environments, encouraged to drop out after elementary, tracked to vocational education.

→ Such discrimination had economic ramifications over generations.

A generation after post-war economic policies that distributed housing and college benefits preferentially to white people after WWII: (including my grandfather):

“African Americans whose parents came of age in the 1940s and 1950s will receive less than one-tenth the inheritance of their white peers.” 15).

So, there are hundreds of years of race-class context undergirding some families’ wealth, others’ poverty, and affecting who drops out.

Today, unequal opportunity also accumulates across domains: for example, issues in housing and health combine to create dropout:

Rothstein: if you don’t have glasses because you don’t have health care, you can’t see board. . .you fail the test.

SO, history and policy:

Constrain whose parents have college degrees and can help with homework,

Whose parents don’t make a living wage and need them to drop out to work,

whose neighborhoods have which social services available;

and which neighborhoods have overload of financial need

(all of this is material today’s young people need to know!)

SO: we know that people “from above” need to make policy decisions that support the success of children,

So there are still many things we can march for! We can engage our young people in this.

BUT WE ALSO KNOW, If we think about it just for a second,

that each child’s dropout happens OVER TIME,

**** through EVERYDAY INTERACTION w/ people right around them.

As teachers react to parents and children,

parents react to schools,

students react to peers, parents, and teachers,

some children end up on the graduation stage and others don’t.

(we call this the “pipeline” to college; even the “school to prison pipeline.”)

(Think about all of the people involved in any child’s dropout:

(think of all the people who were involved in YOUR SAT score!);

****And it’s that everyday process that we can’t just march about.

We can march against dollars spent on prisons rather than schools, or against the death penalty, but we can’t march against the full process that is the school to prison pipeline.

Marching won’t fix the process through which some children emerge from school inspired, skilled, and empowered, their identities and motivation reinforced,

And other children disengage from specific schools, educators, altogether.

In MA, we have even students who ARE passing tests dropping out b/c they are bored –

Or because no relationship has become tight enough to keep them in school;

Or b/c no one knew how to engage them in learning, or b/c no one knew what struggles were going on their family life.

So, remedying dropout requires the people right around students to work together to support every student along the way.

That may be crucial “justice” work in the 21st century:

“everyday” communication, and partnership about supporting young people.

In my books, I’ve called this work “everyday justice,” and “everyday antiracism.”

These are versions of asking, “which everyday activity by me would support this young person?”

Of acting as if every young person is a human being worthy of very detailed attention.

In 21st century communities, we need EVERY PERSON to be a STRATEGIST for young people’s success.

We need to act as if every student can become successful if we work together to make it happen.

If a given population is absent from school a lot, we need to come together as a community and ask: why, and what can we do together to remedy this?

If a given individual is starting to disengage in the classroom, we need to come together as a team around that young person and ask together, how is he doing? what specifically can we do to engage him?

**We’re not that good at doing this in 2010.

I used to work at the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Eduation –

We saw complaints from diverse communities where people were NOT partnering, NOT successfully communicating ---

So much so, that complains about young people’s everyday experiences of discipline, harassment, Special Education placement, English language learner service, treatment of families, ended up in the federal government to be debated by lawyers.

Too rarely do we make it normal, in schools, to listen to stakeholders with ready ideas for improving students’ schooling experiences.

Particularly resisting input from the very people supposedly served, Americans too often sit idle on remedying the core educational problem that dropout reveals: too many young human beings, particularly young people of color, are having uninspiring, dissatisfying, and inadequate experiences in their local schools.

So, this is my own plan for my 21st century justice efforts:

having written many books, I’m now producing tools to support people who share schools, neighborhoods, towns, and cities,

to work together across boundaries of language, race/ethnicity, and income,

to collectively improve local young people’s educational experiences.

the Haiti disaster drives home the need for communication and partnership. Where I live, in Somerville, MA, we have a very big Haitian community –

We had a community meeting several days after the quake.

After checks are written to organizations, the real work begins:

all the everyday work it will take to support actual Haitian children in our community, together.

It’s going to take joint thinking and action by educators, plus families, plus young people themselves, plus mental health, plus jobs, plus afterschool. . . .

It’s going to take partnership and communication, across barriers of language, technology, experience.

(right now, we are working together on a blog for the Haitian Coalition, to address basic communication and partnership issues -- making sure people in the community know about family location sites on the internet; who can volunteer where; which community groups are doing what. This is 21st century community organizing.)

Back to my point about communication in education: really serving young people requires very detailed attention to their everyday experiences:

Not just a general will to assist young people, but detailed attention—

How is she doing on specific skills?
How are things going with her family?
How are her relationships with her teacher going?
Is she engaged or not engaged in her learning?
**Does she feel valued, safe, listened-to, understood, as an individual and as a member of a racial/ethnic/language group/national origin community?

So, in the 21st century, we’ve GOT to assist people who share schools, neighborhoods, towns, and cities to work together across boundaries of language, race/ethnicity, and income to improve young people’s educational experiences together.

As I saw working at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in between 1999 and 2001, advocates for students with disabilities (predominantly white students!) were particularly successful at OCR because law offered them a clear process for evaluating and addressing student needs on a regular basis.

Like it was normal to ask: how is Johnny doing? How could he be given a better education?

It may well be that a particularly expedient tactic in American education will be to install processes and tools for analyzing student pathways and necessary opportunity provision all the time, and perhaps even to require that ongoing analysis for every child.

I have thus been designing tools to help make opportunity analysis by multiple stakeholders an ongoing, matter-of-fact, everyday part of educational communities, rather than analysis pursued only at moments of crisis.

My own major effort at this: The OneVille Project in Somerville:

a partnership with the schools, city and community of Somerville

we’re trying to create a tool that uses common social networking technology to get a very diverse community of people communicating daily about how kids are doing.

Trying to actually coordinate a village – a PARTNERSHIP – to serve every child!

To make it normal to ask: how is Julio doing? How are Haitian families here doing? As if every child can be supported to succeed.

I also am working on a design for A NATIONAL INQUIRY NETWORK:

Where Somerville folks can reach out to people in Austin, San Diego, Tucson, Harlem –

(in Manchester, NH!)

To ask, “what are you trying?” “how’s it going”? “What have you figured out about serving young people better?”

Imagine if we could share successful tactics BETWEEN our communities,

Working together as a nation to improve the learning experiences of all of our children.

(Conclusion)

So this to me is one key aspect of 21ST century justice work in education:

We need to figure out how to communicate and partner in our communities, particularly diverse communities (where partnership is both less common, and particularly invigorating) to improve children’s everyday educational experiences together,

As parents, teachers, young people, service providers, and community volunteers.

This still requires inspiration. I think King clued us in to what education is really about:

Treating human beings as if every person is equally worthy of effort, attention,

As if every young person could cure cancer, or save the Earth.

I want to tell you the most inspiring definition of education I’ve heard in a long time:

It was made in an antiracist moment.

In 1865, black delegates in Charleston, South Carolina called for a human right not typically stated in public documents:

'the right to develop our whole being, by all the appliances that belong to a civilized society.' "

→ I find this an unusually inspiring description of what education is supposed to be about.

I think that was King’s vision and what we’re still in for today.

But how do we do this? I say everyday communication and partnership.

Paolo Freire (1989) terms this kind of inquiry and action praxis: which he defines as “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.”
This inquiry is more important than ever today –

b/c you can march for health care but you can’t march so easily against dropout or disengagement.

This may be perhaps the ultimate realization of King’s vision:

To create communities across the country where people are asking, “how can we help every young human being in this community reach his full potential?”

And working together to make this happen.

As a child of a family decimated in the Holocaust, I believe strongly that:

Racism, or sexism, or language discrimination, homophobia, or classism,

Are all at root about not taking people’s potential seriously enough.

I think we will know that we have “won” the civil rights struggle in education in part when people are routinely working together to pursue every young person’s human potential.

When it normal, not radical, to pursue a great education for every child,

As if every young person is worth the effort.