Radical Care/May 2021

Part Two of Final Course Project

Project Purpose/Author’s Statement: The purpose of this project is to prepare an editorial, in the form of an Open Letter to the New York City Mayoral Candidates, about the importance of continuing and expanding the Community School Initiative that was created and implemented by the de Blasio administration.  This initiative exemplifies radical care in action through its focus on relationships (a long-held mantra in community schools is that “it’s all about relationships”) and its careful attention to the voices of key stakeholders, including students and families.  Each community school conducts a thorough assets and needs assessment that employs surveys, interviews, and focus groups with students and families; actively listens and responds to the results; and recruits and engages community partners that bring needed skills and resources into alignment with the school’s instructional and other programs.  At its heart, the community school strategy is an equity strategy, consistent with the thinking of educational researcher/practitioner Jeff Duncan Andrade and other thought leaders who posit that equity means “you get what you need when you need it” (Duncan Andrade, July 18, 2017).  The work of community schools is also consistent with Rivera-McCutchen’s six categories of behaviors emerging from the research literature on care theory, including providing emotional and academic support, valuing parents as resources, and understanding the sociocultural and sociopolitical factors that shape students’ experiences with education (Rivera-McCutchen, 2012, pp. 658-659).

Course Organizing Question: This editorial responds to the course organizing question “What are strategies for decreasing the systemic aspects of lack of care in schools?” by focusing on a proven (Maier et al., 2017) intervention that can be implemented at scale, as New York City has demonstrated.  New York City currently has the largest community school initiative in the country, with more than 250 of its 1,800 schools identified as community schools and another 100 scheduled to be added to the initiative in FY 2022, per Mayor de Blasio’s proposed Executive Budget.

From Academics to Action:  I submitted the editorial to the Gotham Gazette as an Opinion article, and it was recently accepted for publication.   

The Editorial:

Community Schools are the Answer:

An Open Letter to the New York City Mayoral Candidates

Dear Candidates:

 Among the myriad issues you are discussing during public forums and interviews, none is more important than the education of the City’s children and adolescents.  You have responded to, and raised, several aspects of our educational landscape in these venues but we have heard precious little about whether you support expansion of the City’s community schools initiative, an effort that began in response to a de Blasio campaign promise in 2013—a promise on which he and his administration more than delivered.  Especially now, as New York City recovers from the COVID pandemic, voters want to know what you propose as viable strategies to promote health, healing, and learning.  In my view, the best answer is community schools. 

Community schools organize school and community resources around student success.  In 2013, Candidate de Blasio—as part of his equity agenda—proposed to increase by 100 the number of community schools in New York City.  By the end of his first term, the actual number had increased to more than 250.  City Hall and the Department of Education worked together to leverage leadership and funding that allowed these schools—chosen according to the level of unmet need among their students and families—to marshal additional human and financial resources.  In alignment with national best practice, each school conducted a thorough assets and needs assessment and then engaged community partners that brought the requisite skills, services, and supports into their schools on a consistent basis.

Even more important than the number of community schools are the results they have achieved.  A multi-year impact study of the New York City initiative conducted by the RAND Corporation reported a reduction in student chronic absence as an early outcome and, later, found an increase in academics and graduation rates for all students—particularly for students living in temporary housing and for Black and Brown students.  These results were achieved through the mobilization of community resources and their integration into the core instructional work of these community schools—resources like vision screenings coupled with free eyeglasses provided by Warby Parker; mental health screenings and services offered by a combination of public and private clinicians; afterschool and summer enrichment programs that provided child care for working families and extra learning opportunities for students; and a cadre of specially trained social work interns, sponsored by New York City’s six schools of social work, who assisted public school students living in temporary housing. 

A lesser-known part of the New York City community school story is the role of the Coalition for Educational Justice, a parent advocacy organization that identified community schools as a preferred reform strategy after surveying and consulting with families across the city.  As CEJ’s Natasha Capers has written, CEJ implemented a campaign in early 2013 to make improving public education a key issue in the upcoming mayoral race; this campaign included extensive family outreach and consultation over several months.  Capers noted that, with the help of a design team of policy experts, CEJ then issued a roadmap for the next mayor that highlighted all the top ideas, including community schools.  Parent demand as an instigator for this reform makes its continuation and expansion even more urgent because COVID has demonstrated that the supports and services offered by community schools are needed by New York City’s families now more than ever.

Taken together, these factors—family demand, documented success, new post-COVID realities—make expansion of the community school strategy a no-brainer.  Recent action by Mayor de Blasio and the City Council will ensure continuation and growth of community schools through 2022, but advocates are rightly concerned about the future that lies beyond the current administration.  The City can use its experience over the past eight years in leveraging and making better use of existing resources while also tapping into new federal dollars, including those allocated for high-need schools in the American Rescue Plan Act.  In addition, the Biden administration has proposed expanding the Federal Full-Service Community Schools Program in the U. S. Department of Education from its current annual budget of $30 million to $442 million in 2022.  New York City should be first in line to capitalize on this national momentum.  But, to do so, we need a Mayor who believes in the idea of every school a community school. 

Sincerely,

Jane Quinn

Brooklyn, NY

Jane Quinn is currently a doctoral student in Urban Education at the City University of New York.  From 2000 through 2018, she served as Director of the Children’s Aid National Center for Community Schools. 

References Cited:

Capers, N. (2018). The school is the heart of the community: Building community schools across New York City.  In Warren, M. R. & Goodman, D. (Eds.), Lift us up, don’t push us out: Voices from the front lines of the educational justice movement, 64-72.  Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Duncan Andrade, J. (2017, July 18).  Equality or equity: Which one will we feed? Talks at Google. https:www.youtube.com/watch?V=ohT82Ph8jbg

Johnston, W. R., Engberg, J., Opper, I. M., Sontag-Padilla, L., & Xenakis, L. (2020). Illustrating the promise of community schools: An assessment of the impact of the New York City community schools initiative. https://www.rand/org/pubs/research_reports/RR3245.html.

Maier, A., Daniel, J., Oakes, J. & Lam, L. (2017). Community schools as an effective school improvement strategy: A review of the evidence. Palo Alto, CA: Learning Policy Institute.

Rivera-McCutchen, R. L. (2012). Caring in a small urban high school: A complicated success. Urban Education, 47 (3), 653-680.

The topic this week is “reimagining schools” and Sonya Douglass Horsford provided two powerful and thoughtful sets of ideas about the central issue of racial equity in education.  Horsford challenges the conventional (and failed) approach that views integration as the goal and that conflates desegregation with integration.  She also challenges the reliance on white scholars (even those who are allies) as the authoritative voices on how children of color should be educated.

I appreciated her candor in calling out the reality that far too many schools do not value the intellect, culture, or humanity of students of color—and in arguing instead for “schooling with dignity in environments that value and want them” (VUE, 2021, p. 21).

In her Education Week Opinion piece (3/17/21), Horsford observed that “we must first deepen our understanding of the great battle we are in.”  This quote resonated for me as I reflected on Mitch McConnell’s very public statements this week lambasting and grossly mischaracterizing Critical Race Theory—and observing that it has no place in public education.  Horsford notes that reimagining a new system “begins with actually asking people of color what they want and need and then listening to what they say.”  For starters, perhaps we should listen to Derrick Bell and not to Mitch McConnell.

I really appreciated the synergy and alignment of this week’s articles and videos, all focused on counter-stories as radical care. Tara Yosso’s article on “Whose culture has capital?” takes a strong and welcome stance that the community cultural wealth framework she developed is intended to counter the all-too-common deficit views of communities and students of color.  She posits, instead, the array of cultural knowledge, skills, abilities, and contacts possessed by socially marginalized groups and offers a compelling framework that outlines six kinds of capital (aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational, and resistant) that comprise community cultural wealth.  Yosso’s framework draws heavily on Critical Race Theory, including the work of Gloria Ladson-Billings, William Tate, and Daniel Solórzano.

In the article by Katherine Rodela and Claudia Rodriguez-Mojica, we find a rich application of the Yosso framework to a research study on educational leadership in a specific and changing context (the Pacific Northwest—Oregon and Washington State).  The case studies, which include extensive quotes from interviews with four Latinx educational leaders, illustrate the relevance both of counternarratives and of Yosso’s expansive view of community cultural wealth.  It is heartening to read how “They often saw themselves in the students they serve now” (p. 300) and equally disheartening to learn about the many obstacles these educators face in their struggles with white administrators as they pursue an equity agenda that is often misunderstood or trivialized. 

The videos (The Graduates/Los Graduados) illustrate every form of community cultural capital described by Yosso, especially aspirational and familial, and offer the viewing public very strong counter-stories to those portrayed by Fox News (and too many others) about Latinx students and their families.  From a programmatic perspective, I was particularly intrigued by the interventions that seemed to be making a difference, such as Reality Changers in the San Diego episode and the Peer Jury approach used in Chicago—good examples of care in action. 

Radical Care Week #8/March 25, 2021

This week’s reading on radical care in urban school leadership provided a richly detailed case study of one principal and his leadership strategies—all of which were coherent and many of which seemed completely innovative.  The coherence was centered on the five components outlined by the author (p. 7): embracing a spirit of radical hope; adopting an anti-racist, social justice stance; cultivating authentic relationships; believing in students’ and teachers’ capacity for growth and excellence; and strategically navigating the sociopolitical and policy climate.  Several of Principal Byron Johnson’s (pseudonym) innovative and strategic decisions stood our for me: using his budget to hire student support staff—counselor, social worker, parent coordinator—rather than an assistant principal; placing himself outside his office on a regular basis, where he could simultaneously observe the school in its daily interactions, build relationships, and model the school’s values for teachers and students. 

I was struck also with the emphasis Johnson placed on exposure as a force in his own life, noting that his childhood move from the Bronx to the Upper East Side afforded him an opportunity to observe wildly divergent social and economic circumstances.  In my view, exposure is an under-investigated phenomenon that is part of the opportunity gap.  I remember hearing a third-grade teacher in the Bronx reporting on a question in the New York State ELA exam that stymied her students because it talked about “stained glass windows.” While most of her students were quite able to decode the words, they had no idea what the phrase meant—since the churches in their community were located mostly in storefronts.  This anecdote speaks to the cultural bias in standardized tests, for sure, but it also highlights the role of exposure in rounding out the education of all young people, especially those growing up in marginalized communities. 

One final observation: I appreciated the role of reciprocity in this account—that the researcher and principal met when the principal supervised a leadership intern from the researcher’s university; that the principal served as a willing research subject over two years; that the researcher was able to assist the principal in planning and implementing a citywide conference.  Clearly, both parties (as well as the field of education) benefitted from the partnership. 

Radical Care Week #7/March 18, 2021

Of the many themes that emerged in this week’s readings, I want to explore—in this brief reflection—the role of parents in Critical (Race) Caring.  I started the assignments by reviewing the Parent Power video, which outlined the 15-year trajectory, including successes and challenges, of parent organizing in the Bronx, especially in District 9 through the Community Collaborative to Improve District 9 Schools. Despite some heart-breaking setbacks, including being rebuffed by then-Chancellor Harold Levy, the Bronx parents persisted and, over several years, were successful in generating reforms that included enhanced teacher development (financed by the district and supported by the United Federation of Teachers); citywide middle grade reform; and creation of new schools in high-need neighborhoods, among others.  Success factors included the energy and determination of the parent leaders and the supporting role played by the Annenberg Institute and by the non-profit community (e.g., New Settlement Apartments), serving as respectful allies who brought complementary skills to the collaborative table.

Parents make varied appearances in the readings.  Curry notes that parents are not included in the firewalk rite-of-passage ritual at a California high school, a decision that she analyzes at some length, weighing the pros and cons within the school’s context and observing, in her conclusion, that “when instituting such rites, practitioners may also want to address some of the tensions identified in this article, specifically the role of parents…” (915).   Rolón-Dow’s ethnographic study of Puerto Rican girls in an urban school presents some harsh and seemingly unwarranted judgments made by teachers about students’ parents—for example, Mr. Rosenfield’s beliefs “that students’ homes were bad and uncaring places,” which kept him from “joining in a collective effort to care for students” (97).  By way of contrast, Antrop-González & DeJesús cited examples of teachers and counselors reaching out to parents on behalf of students, enlisting parents’ help in keeping students on course.  As one student in this article observed: “They do that because they care about you.  They want you to succeed and accomplish all your work” (429).

Rivera-McCutchen uses “valuing parents as resources” as one of six basic categories of behaviors identified in the research literature on care theory that form the conceptual framework for her research at a small urban high school in New York City.  Her research documented a mixed picture on this aspect of the work: on the one hand, staff members made a critical effort to engage parents in the school experiences of their students; on the other hand, because the “teachers’ expectations for students were fairly low, they failed to capitalize on the parental relationships they had cultivated to create a stronger academic environment for their students” (671).  She goes on to observe that caring teachers must go beyond simply making connections with parents; they must seek to create relationships that “harness the families’ existing funds of knowledge as a building block for more traditional forms of learning” (671). 

This week’s readings provided an opportunity to learn about the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire from several perspectives—including Freire himself, a colleague who studied and interacted directly with Freire (Antonia Darder), and several scholars who applied Freire’s teachings to the practice of urban school leadership (Peter Miller, Tanya Brown, Rodney Hopson, and Rosa Rivera-McCutchen).

Freire shows great respect and high expectations for teachers in his letters “to those who dare to teach,” communicating his empathy for the difficulty of their under-valued labors while also providing encouragement and advice.  He speaks clearly about the characteristics needed by educators engaged in the struggle that is public education: “humility, lovingness, courage, tolerance, competence, patience-impatience, and verbal parsimony” (p. 212).   I found his frequent use of the literary device oxymorons (for example, in “uncertain certainty” and “insecure security”) somewhat distracting; at least for me, these phrases called attention to themselves served to undercut the power of his overall message about the urgency of educators addressing oppression in all its forms and about the centrality of love in the enterprise (“without which their work would lose its meaning”). 

Darder’s personal reflections about her work and friendship with Freire over many years add important detail to his interaction with and influence on scholars of U.S. education, including herself.  Her description of their disagreements about the importance of racism “as the major culprit of our oppression” (p. 501) is timely and compelling.  Darder takes particular note of Freire’s concept of armed love, observing that “If there was anything that Freire consistently sought to defend, it was the freshness, spontaneity, and presence embodied in what he called an ‘armed love’—the fighting love of those convinced of the right and the duty to fight, to denounce, and to announce” (p. 497).  Rivera-McCutchen demonstrates the contemporary salience of this concept by applying it to an analysis of two educational leaders in New York City—Jamaal Bowman and Jill Bloomberg—who actively resisted oppressive policies that stood “in the way of access to high-quality educational experiences and opportunities” (p. 238) for Black and Brown students in the Bronx and Brooklyn. 

I was happy that I decided to tackle this week’s readings on the Black principalship and culturally responsive/relevant leadership in chronological order, from Lomotey (1993) to Khalifa, Gooden & David (2016) because this approach allowed me to see the tremendous growth in the depth and breadth of the scholarship on this important topic.  The Khalifa et al. article drew on and cited the other readings and appeared to be exhaustive in its purview (with over 200 citations in the bibliography).  But, in addition to being comprehensive, its analysis was clear and practical.

Regarding clarity, the decision to frame the discussion of Culturally Responsive School Leadership (CRSL) around four strands—critical self-awareness, CRSL and teacher preparation, CRSL and school environments, and CRSL and community advocacy—helped focus the reader’s attention on the most salient issues emanating from the extensive literature.  Regarding practicality, the authors paid careful attention to the behaviors entailed in effective CRSL.  This strikes me as incredibly useful and reminded me that, just last week, I read that 10,000 people had signed up to participate in a Edutopia webinar on project-based learning—one that included an array of videos demonstrating this pedagogical approach in action.  In a similar way, the attention paid by Khalifi et al. to CRSL behaviors helps the research-based concepts come alive and become translated into action.  The effects are far-reaching.  As the authors note, “we choose to describe CRSL behaviors…we highlight practices and actions, mannerisms, policies, and discourses that influence school climate, school structure, teacher efficacy, or student outcomes” (p. 1274). 

As someone who is embarking on a literature review as part of my upcoming Second Exam, I also appreciated these authors’ lucid description of how they went about conducting their literature review, including the challenges they encountered, how they overcame potential obstacles, and how they avoided specific pitfalls. 

I could not help wondering, when I read that “Over the last 15 years, educational researchers and theorists have decried the lack of caring in our schools” (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002, p. 71), to what extent this concern about an apparent dearth of caring was part of the aftermath of the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk.  Knowing that context is always important in education, I tried to surmise what was happening in 1987, politically and socially.  Ronald Reagan was President then, serving his second term.  These questions: Was the concern about lack of caring in schools justified? Was it a long-term phenomenon that was only recently discovered? Or did it have something to do with specific policies and politics? might be worth discussing in class.

I found the four readings useful, compelling, and inspiring.  Written over a 13-year period, they provided several reinforcing messages about the role of caring among exemplary Black female educators (teachers and principals) in promoting social justice and educational equity.  Wilson’s definition of critical care as “embracing and exhibiting values, dispositions and behaviors related to empathy, compassion, advocacy, systemic critique, perseverance and calculated risk-taking for the sake of justly serving students and improving schools” (Wilson, 2015, p. 1)—although written last—provided a clarifying lens for reviewing all the articles.  Several of the authors offer a convincing argument that the life experiences of Black women, deeply rooted in the intersections of racism, sexism, and classism, often result in a “particular vantage point on what constitutes evidence, valid action, and morality” (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002, p. 72).  Discussions here and in the other articles of this unique and powerful perspective are reminiscent of, and perhaps draw on, Du Bois’ notion of double consciousness.  Bass (quoting Larson and Murtadha, 2002) points out that “the experiences that African-American women have with the intersecting systems of race, gender, and social class oppression contribute to their ability to understand and negotiate issues of difference in diverse school communities” (Bass, 2012, p. 74).  The discussion of religio-spirituality as an additional root of caring and empathy was a welcome focus in two of the articles, which gave voice to this under-investigated aspect of human experience in informing professional judgment and motivation.

One additional thought: as a community school practitioner and advocate, I kept thinking that Wilson’s principal—as competent and caring as she is—needed some community partners to help respond to her students’ needs.  Knowing that, in most urban schools, one-third of students fail school-based vision screenings, I worried that the one child she was able to help obtain glasses may have represented scores of others equally in need.  Where are the Lions Club or Warby-Parker in this scenario? 

Radical Care Sp21

The combination of the two articles—the 1995 (master)piece by Ladson-Billings and Tate along with the 2018 article by Dixson and Anderson—helped me to make a connection between two ideas that I had previously seen as separate: the seminal notion advanced in Critical Race Theory of whiteness as property; and the pernicious role of the property tax as the basis for school financing in this country. 

When I first learned how schools are financed in the U.S., I thought the system seemed strange.  Why, I wondered, are schools financed in such a different way than any other public good?  It took me a while to figure out that all the rhetoric about the democratic ideals of local control as its basis was really a cover for something that is neither democratic nor ideal.  Using the property tax as the basis for school financing results in inequities that privilege the wealthy and starve the less affluent.  Right here in New York State, we see the results: that schools in Scarsdale spend $31,118 per student while schools in Utica allocate only $17,128.  Many advocates, including Michael Rebell (who has led the fiscal equity court cases in New York State over the past several decades), view our current system as racism-in-action—not as a by-product or unintended consequence but, rather, as a system that was designed to do exactly what it does, which is to discriminate on the basis of race and its intersectional neighbor, class.  A second response I had to this week’s readings involves the question posed by Dixson and Anderson in their title, Where are We?  I appreciated their explanation of the double meaning of their query: “On the one hand, it references the mapping metaphor we have adopted to explore the existing literature and to ‘draw’ boundaries around CRT scholarship in education…But what has been the impact on schools and communities of color?  Notably, several CRT scholars have called for critical race theory praxis—an engaged approach to CRT that move from campus to community” (129).  This call to action/application has the potential to address issues of radical transformation and care that are the focus of our course.