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You
are here: Leadership for Social Justice:
Envisioning an End to the Racial Achievement Gap
by Ed Taylor
I took my first course on the topic of leadership in 1985. Bill Foster, the professor, was a quiet, shy, erudite man. The course was simply titled: Leadership. We read the works of the day and learned that leadership was/is a term that is over-used and poorly understood. We struggled to define our terms in order to hone our philosophy of action. Each of us wrote of vision, organizational change, the creation of learning communities, and courage. At the end of the course I had learned a good deal; yet, I felt unsettled. How could I leave a semester long course and have more questions than answers? How is it possible that after nineteen years, and umpteen volumes, I am even less clear than I was at the beginning?
Only now do I understand that this disequilibrium is precisely what Bill intended. His point, I believe, was for us to think of leadership in critical terms and to be sure that our understanding of leadership went hand in hand with some understanding of justice. It is this notion of justice that remains at base unsettling. Social justice must do more than touch us; it is meant to move us. I'll get back to the difference between being touched and moved, but first, let me take a detour.
My intent here is to raise a few of the questions that come to mind for me as I think of leadership and social justice in 2003: Why is it that fifty years has passed since Thurgood Marshall successfully argued Brown v. Board of Education, schools throughout the United States remain largely segregated by race (which is getting more pronounced, not less) and by class? Why is it that despite decades of school reform efforts and increased attention to accountability and standardization that children of color and children of poverty under-perform in school and many face the possibility of non-completion?
During a recent visit to an Advanced Placement high school class, I sat next to (the only) two students of color who remained silent throughout the period. I wondered why they were so quiet, so guarded? Why does disaggregated school discipline data time and again reveal disproportionate discipline by race and gender? I look at test scores disaggregated by race and wonder why they follow such predictable patterns, themselves evidence of culturally scripted expectations that achievement will be racially ordered (Pollock, 2003)
I also wonder just what categories such as African American, Native American, White, and Asian American reveal about the students represented by bar-graphs, and, in turn, what it conceals. Innate ability? Genetic homogeneity? Immigration status? First language? Social class standing? Consider the diversity within and among some ethnic groups: Latino, for example, includes blue-eyed Spaniards as well as Guatemalans and Dominicans, who may both speak Spanish, practice Catholicism, and share deeply rooted family values. However, the first language of Guatemalans is often not Spanish, and Dominicans have an African background not shared by most Guatemalans.
According to 1990 census, 14% of the nation's school age children live in homes in which the primary language was not English. In addition to the increase of racial, ethnic, and language diversity among the student population, more and more students are poor. The percentage of children living in poverty rose from 16.2% in 1979 to 18.7% up 1998 (Terry 2000). The gap between rich and poor students is also increasing. What is not changing is the teaching force, which remains predominantly White, middle-class, and female. Consequently, a wide cultural gap exists between teachers and students. In view of the many gaps and tensions that exist in our nation's public schools, can we genuinely envision a school system that leaves no child behind?
The answers to these questions do not lie in schools alone; the etiology of the tensions not bred in schools alone. To wit, the resolution of these tensions does not lie solely in the hands of school leaders. Yet, there may be no other institution as able to resolve these tensions and create unity within diversity the way public schools can. No leaders who are positioned to create just and democratic communities in the way school leaders are. As John Dewey (1927) said " A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of communal experience."
Education for Equality and Inequality
Public education in colonial America did not aim to serve all children. The tax-supported schools begun in the early settlements were not intended to be universal or common. These public schools were 'common' only to the extent that they served colonial commoners, those who could not provide privately for their children's education. A strong case can be made that even as the common school became more commonly attended, it served best those whose educational needs and interests could well be served without it. Goodlad argues that nearly every reform aimed at improving schools has resulted, at least initially, in improving options for those already best served.
In fact, education for equality and education for inequality have been inherent in U.S. education since its inception, often articulated and promulgated by those who spoke passionately of the need for an educated citizenry. Who constituted the citizenry, of course, was narrowly defined, and changed only after considerable struggle. To understand American educational history is to recognize that within this democracy have always been classes of oppressed people and that there have always been indispensable relationships between the politics of education and the politics of oppression. According to James Anderson, both schooling for democratic citizenship and schooling for second class citizenship have been basic traditions in American education, both were fundamental American conceptions of society and progress, both have occupied the same time and space, both have been fostered by the same government, and both are often embraced by the same leaders (Anderson, 1988).
This paradox has long been recognized as undermining, even mocking, the promise of education in a multiracial democratic society. There is an inherent and continual need for a fuller realization and demonstration of our educational ideals. DuBois challenged the country 'to live up to itself' and denounced schooling for second-class citizenship:
"When we call for education we mean real education. We believe in work—we ourselves are workers—but work is not necessarily education. Education is the development of power and ideal. We want our children trained as intelligent human beings should be…not simply as servants and underlings, or simply for the use of other people. They have the right to know, think, to aspire." (1906/1975, p. 172).Leadership and Social Justice
School leadership rooted in social justice has, at its center, tension. Out of these tensions grow reform movements, initiated and instituted by those who live in this intersection of tension, who are able to embrace the dis-junction between ideal and reality, privilege and oppression, surface change and the dismantling of structural barriers. I contend that school leaders who hold a social justice agenda embody the compassion that allows them to be both touched and moved and the capacity to touch and move others.
Touched, but not moved, is how Toni Morrison summed the long-term result of The Bluest Eye. Although the Academy praised her novels, "characterized by visionary form and poetic import, giving life to an essential aspect of American reality," and awarded her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, Morrison discloses a disconcerting reality. As much as she wanted to 'peck away at the gaze that condemns' black women, the fact is, she states, it didn't work. Many readers, she notes, were touched, but not moved. Her story lead readers to the 'comfort of pitying rather than into an interrogation of themselves.'
The achievement gap in schools in the United States begs the same question. Are we touched, or are we moved? To be touched is to be a sympathetic observer, to feel pity, to be a kind supporter, to be someone who has learned about and appreciated difference, and be grateful, of course, that they don't share experiences. To be moved is something else. Being moved requires taking a critical, systemic, and action oriented approach that not only interrogates social hierarchies but shows "how we might take action in our own lives and in coalition with others to effect positive social change" (p.2, Adams, 2000). It is those who argue explicitly and passionately that racial patterns are never natural orders, and that they thus can, and must be, collectively dismantled (Pollock, 2003). Reform efforts are as time honored as the contradictions and inconsistencies embedded in democratic education. What links them is a willingness to expose, even embrace, tension, and to explore, in that intersection, paths to effective action. New eras call for new reform movements, which are now due.
Multiracial Democratic Schools
To talk of democracy in the United States in the 21st century is to talk of pluralism and justice. To talk of using schools to foster democracy means that equity and justice must move to the very heart of the educational enterprise. There cannot be opportunity for descendents of Western European immigrants, and not for those from Ethiopia, Mexico, or Guam. There cannot be opportunities afforded to those families who have been here for generations and not for those who arrived in the past decade from so many parts of the globe, whether they came in chains or willingly. Of the highest goals set by school leaders in the United States is the one to look clearly at the diversity of peoples who inhabit our schools and set high standards for performance. Increasing diversity in our schools presents both a challenge and opportunity for public schools is to forge a common community, culture, nation, and destiny from the ethnic, cultural and language diversity that exists within our schools.
A Microcosm of our Nation
What we need to imagine are schools and classrooms in our nation in which these disparate backgrounds can be embraced, and whose dreams cannot just be encouraged, but achieved through academic content knowledge:
· An orphan from Liberia—whose adoptive parents are white and middle class—whose aspirations are to be a physician in his native Liberia.
· A great grandchild of enslaved Africans who plans to go to college and eventually own her own business.
· A child whose rural parents are currently serving prison time for methamphetamine abuse, who hopes to be a social worker.
· A child whose family obtained political asylum from the conflict in Bosnia, who wants to be a medical translator.
Leadership for social justice imagines that this classroom does exist and can create a school culture in which the success of these children can become a reality. Philosopher Maxine Greene articulates such a vision:
We need spaces . . . for expression, for freedom. .. a public space. . . where living persons can come together in speech and action, each one free to articulate a distinctive perspective, all of them granted equal worth. It must be a space of dialogue, a space where a web of relationships can be woven, and where a common world can be brought into being and continually renewed (1984).Last year, I received a message from a colleague that Dr. Bill Foster had died. His class left me with many questions. I realize now I was moved, not just by his teaching, but by a life guided by principle, courage, hope, and yes, leadership.
References
Adams, M. (2000). Readings for diversity and social justice: A general introduction. In M. Adams, et al, (Eds.), Readings for diversity and social justice (pp. 1-4). New York: Routledge.
Anderson, J.D. (1988). The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Dewey, J. (1927) The public and its problems. New York: Henry Holt.
DuBois, W.E.B. (1906/1975). W.E.B. DuBois speaks, Vol. 1, Speeches and addresses, 1890-1919. Philip Foner (Ed.). New York: Pathfinder Press.
Goodlad, J. (1994). Common schools for the common weal: Reconciling self-interest with the common good. In Access to knowledge: The continuing agenda for our nation's schools. New York: The College Board.
Greene, M. (1984). Excellence, meanings, and multiplicity. Teachers College Record:86(2).
Morrison, T. (1970/1993). The Bluest Eye. Penguin: New York, New York.
Pollock, M. (2003). How the question we ask most about race in education is the very question we most suppress. Educational Researcher, 30(9), p. 2-12.
Terry, D. (2000). U.S. Child poverty rate fell but is above 1979 level. New York Times, p. A 10.
Dr. Ed Taylor is Co-Director, Center for Educational Leadership, University of Washington. He is also an Associate Professor, College of Education, Educational Leadership and Policy Studies. He can be reached at edtaylor@u.washington.edu.
© August 2003 New Horizons for Learning
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