“You need to ignore what people are telling you about integration and do the work, young man. You need to believe better for your kids and provide them the education they need, regardless of circumstance.”
I didn’t ask my question to Howard Fuller at this recent town hall with the expectation that I’d get fussed at. A local organization in Little Rock was hosting a forum for leaders invested in the idea of school choice. So after a day at the day job (I am a middle school principal by trade, writer by passion), I came down to the Mosaic Church on Colonel Glenn Road. It was a mixed crowd of state politicians, curious citizens, and educators from traditional public schools and charter schools.
As an educator, I am interested in the role public education plays in shaping black personhood. I feel that American pedagogy often communicates segregation at its most pernicious in schools. I grew up with the sepia pictures of black people being assaulted at lunch counters; black people entering movie theaters from the Colored entrance; black people dancing to blues in all black clubs. But the images that animated me the most were the photos of the Little Rock Nine, flanked by American agents of the state. I am living through an age where black men are routinely killed and abused on the street. It has never truly ended. But there was also a time where a president—the leader of the most powerful political and military machine in the known universe— was willing to use military force to counter school segregation, the most mundane form of white supremacy.
Parts of the past are still around, on our streets and in my school’s hallways. I am an educator in a city where educational outcomes are deeply segregated. Two years ago, the Atlantic published an article detailing the quest to desegregate Little Rock’s schools, and the lawsuits that followed when such a goal proved elusive. Indeed, you can predict the academic outcomes purely based on what part of the city you reside in. Like all American cities, we are segregated.
As an educator who has spent his entire career in the charter industry, I have always struggled with the role I play in public education and segregation. Years ago, I heard Nikole Hannah-Jones speak at a KIPP Summit and she made the point that integrated schools was the only institution that research shows best educates black children and lifts them out of poverty. Her words inaugurated a conflict within my professional ambitions. I can count the white children I have taught on one hand and only end up using only half my fingers. I have had to do great things in a segregated schooling environment.
I now think heavily on how working and educating in segregation shapes both my personhood and the personhood of the boys and girls—and adults—I have worked with throughout the last decade. All of my pondering lead to my question to Dr. Fuller: if we know integration provides the results we seek for underserved black and brown children, how ought the charter industry respond to criticisms that we actually entrench segregation within the communities we serve?
The briefness and confidence of Dr. Fuller’s answer shocked me; a solipsism on my part, I guess—I think I had wanted his answer to acknowledge my curiosity and thoughtfulness. I got a call to do the work instead.
It took me a weekend of rest to understand why his response to me was so brief. This nation has not settled the politics of race—and by extension, the practices of segregation. Ending it will require a political solution. The practice of educators, however, is not as driven by the ballot box as many think it is. It requires that men and women of reasonable industry show up everyday and focus their performance solely on student learning. A color line should not determine the effectiveness of the most impactful teacher in the classroom—the teacher.
My questions on black personhood—and how teaching in segregated schools has shaped my personhood, and the personhoods of the children I have worked with in the past decade—are unanswered. And maybe that is the point of the blog. To keep exploring.
