Project Overview

_{The Education for Liberation Playlist is a lyrical and visual exploration of what education for liberation can look like, feel like, and sound like. Both a personal reflection and an invitation, the project uses song lyrics and collage to explore the ingredients of liberation and how they might manifest in various educational spaces. The goals of the project are to:}

• _{Discuss what it means to be a liberated person along with what factors and experiences contribute to liberation}
• _{Explore these concepts through song and visual arts, specifically the art of collage} 
• _{Invite others to engage with these concepts through reflection, discussion and art-making}

 The Process

_{Choosing the Ingredients}

_{The initial list of ingredients came from personal reflection on how I defined liberation and what factors and experiences contributed to being a liberated person. These initial reflections were expanded through conversations with community members and reading the works of educators, researchers, and activists focused on issues like care, hope, justice, and liberation in educational spaces. I also found that as I went through the process of choosing songs, listening and creating collages, that additional ingredients emerged along the way. The creation process itself revealed new ideas and considerations.}

_{Creating the Visuals}

_{I began work on each ingredient with a vocalization and visualization exercise. I recorded myself speaking the ingredient over and over again, while imagining colors that I associated with the words. Using a soundwave app, these recordings were converted into the soundwaves that you see at the start of each ingredient. I then manipulated the shape, size and color of each one. To create the collages, I listened to each song multiple times for meaning, points of connection and to visualize. I built the visuals along the way, starting with the background and then layering with images, photos and finally a sample of the song lyrics.}

The Components

_{The Playlist- the public Spotify playlist consists of 31 tracks reflecting the 9 ingredients explored in the project}

_{The Flipbook– the flipbook serves a visual playlist and is composed of original collages for songs that were selected for each ingredient.}

_{The Companion Guide– the companion guide provides discussion questions and activities to support engagement with the flipbook and the central questions of the project.}

_{The Instagram Page- the IG page is an additional tool for public engagement. It serves as an additional space to view the collages and a space where folx can tag their own explorations and creations.}

https://www.flipsnack.com/trenee/education-for-liberation-playlist.html

Radical Mapping to Locate Critical Hope, Love, and Care

Keywords and colors: travel from JFK to Burlington International Airport (black), purple bus line (purple), Church Street Marketplace (mustard), street, coffee shop, and bench (gray), disrupting injustice (yellow)

Self-Reflection: How can we use art to increase critical consciousness, hope, and collaborative action in our schools and communities?                      

Collective Action: Later this month, I will co-facilitate a map making workshop with a group of teachers, staff, and administrators who form part of anti-racist professional learning communities (PLCs) in one school district in Vermont. Aimee, the facilitator of these groups, explained that participants gather to examine their own identities, positionality, and teaching practices as they strengthen their own skills and understanding as anti-racist educators. The educators in this group self-identify as white, which is in line with the general population of this area whose racial composition is 96% white. During this workshop, I will share map-poem #10 to talk about calling out and disrupting racial injustice.

As an arts-based inquiry, participants will have the opportunity to engage in critical map making of their own to locate “brave or safe-enough” spaces in their communities. In this context, brave spaces, understood as spaces where one feels “safe enough” to intervene and take action to disrupt racist policies, practices, and actions inside and outside of schools. Then, to use these maps to share their stories and plans for next steps. This engagement with art and mapmaking as tools for doing anti-racist work will lead into a broader discussion of all of the factors, resources, and conditions that make this work possible beyond these PLCs. Our hope is that we will walk away from this session with a new understanding of how art and critical map making can serve as tools for increasing hope, love, and care by helping us surface and share our transformative stories and plans for action.

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.

I want to start off with this quote, “To truly transform education, we must first deepen our understanding of the great battle that we are in. This begins with actually asking people of color what they want and need and then listening to what they say” (Horsford, 2021). My question now is, how do we do this? How do we make this happen? This article made me think about the recent Diversity Plan to desegregate schools in District 15. This heated debate, that was based on the premise that “all” (code for Black and Latino) families should have access to the “best/top performing” schools in the district, raises so many other questions! Why does increasing access to quality education need to come at the cost of leaving your own neighborhood? And, armed with the knowledge we have, that wealthy parents essentially run and subsidize their own local public schools, why don’t we start our analysis here?

As a former District 2 parent, I am intimately aware of this problem. Within this system, wealthy parents can weigh their options between private and public because they know that their local public school is not “like the rest” in the city. This gives these PTA parents a lot of power and control over what happens in these schools. Including what antiracist books are being purchased and discussions are being developed. I bring this up because this was part of the reasoning behind the District 15 Diversity Plan. A plan based on wealthy Park Slope parents spreading their “cash and cultural capital” throughout neighborhoods like Sunset Park and Red Hook. There is so much implied and problematic here, the idea that primarily Black and Latino schools must wait until wealthy white families arrive to be “invested in.” Then, once these school begin to change and improve, improve for whom? I’ll end with Horsford’s reminder that, “What is good for the oppressor is typically not good for the oppressed” (2021).

In a nation divided by race and reality, efforts to advance anti-racist, culturally responsive, and equitable approaches to education face great opposition from an emboldened coalition of white militants, conservatives, and conspiracy theorists who perceive race-conscious policies as anti-white, and thus, un-American. White liberals, on the other hand, continue to promote diversity and integration in urban communities—championing visions of equity and inclusion yet to be endorsed by the people of color they claim to support. Under the guise of school improvement and education reform, the 21st-century white architects of urban education have effectively defunded traditional public schools to finance their own top-down vision of how and for what purposes low-income students of color should be educated.

Horsford, 2021

I found this quote from the Horsford piece particularly interesting given a few experiences I had this week. This past weekend, members of local CECs, BLM at School, CEJ, AQE, Teens Take Charge, MORE, parents, students and community members came to together to hold a counterrally in East Harlem in response to a rally being held by the #KeepNYCSchoolsOpen group at a Harlem Jets event at Wagner Playground. The latter, a group of mostly white parents that has consistently advocated for the full reopening of schools, chose to hold their rally in East Harlem in partnership with mayoral candidate Andrew Yang, using a local community event with the Harlem Jets as a photo op and platform to tout the importance of reopening so that kids could have access to activities and team sports. A few issues here:

1. These folx are NOT from Harlem
2. Most of the families that we engaged through the counterrally had no idea that this group was partially hosting or holding a rally at this event. So essentially the families were tricked into being there and then used as props.
3. They largely ignore the data that shows that 60% of families in that district (mostly Black and Latinx) voted to remain remote through the end of the school year.
4. Most of the schools are, in fact, open, just not at full capacity. These moms are arguing for full opening so that their kids can benefit. They are using equity as a smoke screen. They never cared about access to activities or sports in Harlem before, but suddenly have become advocates.
5. This group has aligned with other parent groups in NYC that have pushed back against the fight for anti-bias, anti-racist, and culturally-responsive curriculum and instruction.

This group both clashes with and reinforces Horsford description of the white liberal. On one hand, these groups have gone into Black and Brown communities, decided what they needed and wanted despite evidence to the contrary, failed to partner with any local groups that have been working on the group in these communities since forever, and chose to be the voice of a community they do not belong to. This aligns with Horsfords’ description. On the other hand, they have actively worked against equity, anti-racism and culturally-responsive education rather than pushing for it-a departure from Horsford’s characterization. These are some of the same groups that pushed back on city-wide pooling of PTA funds for equitable redistribution and efforts to undo discriminatory school zoning and testing practices. These are the white liberal parents of NYC.

Another example came from within my own organization as the fight to promote programs that support the mostly Black and Brown children that we work with through joyful, meaningful and developmentally-supportive activities came up against white funders and senior leaders desire to prove “impact”. Impact being growth and achievement on assessments that long since been highlighted as biased and inequitable. Again, others have decided what success looks like for our kids, what kind of programming they need and determined that this needs to be proved through quantifiable measures that produce “compelling” results.

I have to start my response to the work of Sonya Douglass Horsford with a short rant that speaks to my experience with the quote, “even on issues of race and equity, white allies are the experts, taking up space in the margins with what they believe the education of Black and other historically disenfranchised children should look and feel like.”  I thought instantly about the dynamic in the school in which I teach.  My school, like many majority white schools, has taken a half-hearted attempt at equity and inclusion.  I was asked to join the committee, and as the only teacher of color in the middle school, I decided to do so.  During the committee meeting, which only met TWICE, I was forced to listen to the high school history teacher talk for about 20 minutes about how he teaches about redlining.  This is the white who also spearheads the social justice club, the mindfulness meditation club and has written a book on meditation in schools.  I could not believe the lack of self-awareness that this man shows on the regular.  

Further, in a classic case of interest conversion, the school has not at ALL shifted programming that has proven to harm the few students of color in our district, such as tracking and lack of teachers of color.  It is true that “those closest to the problem are closest to the solution,” as stated in the article, however, from my experience in a white-dominanted school, many “allies” have no real interest in any type of solution.  

In the second article, about integration in schools, I was really taken with the idea that resources should be redistributed “with less concern on the ‘separate’ and a greater focus on the ‘equal’…”  In fact, the focus on Brown vs. Board of Education reminded me of the fact that the NAACP did not originally focus on schooling at all, but instead began as an organization committed to ending lynchings.  It was not until white donors pushed to fund equality in schools that the NAACP even set its sights on the integration of schools.  As an educator, I think about this a lot.  In my heart, I feel that education, especially the education of the oppressed, is the pathway to true change, but at the same time, I worry that this is a false narrative.

I felt the two readings this week deeply.  In particular, this line stood out to me in the second article: “King argued that Meier had “failed to comprehend the difference between integration as the demise of separate Black institutions, and desegregation, namely, the overthrow of the regime of racial subjugation defined by the exclusion of Black people “from access to power, wealth, education, status, and dignity” (pp. 19-20).  Integration has never served in any capacity as an “overthrow of the regime of racial subjugation,”  and her quoting of this statement called to mind for me two other pieces – Malcolm X’s 1963 speech “The Race Problem” and the Black Power manifesto written by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton.  In both cases, they write about the fact that both segregation and integration are controlled by whites and whiteness, and therefore neither gets to the heart of any fundamental shift to a violent or oppressive system.  

In the manifesto, Carmichael and Hamilton write: “‘integration’ as a goal…, is based on complete acceptance of the fact that in order to have a decent house or education, black people must move into a white neighborhood or send their children to a white school.  This reinforces, among both black and white, the idea that ‘white’ is automatically superior and ‘black’ is by definition inferior.  For this reason, ‘integration’ is a subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy’” (p. 22).  Similarly, Malcolm X told us: “This new type of black man, he doesn’t want integration; he wants separation….To him, segregation … means that which is forced upon inferiors by superiors. A segregated community is a Negro community. But the white community, though it’s all white, is never called a segregated community. It’s a separate community. In the white community, the white man controls the economy, his own economy, his own politics, his own everything. That’s his community. But at the same time while the Negro lives in a separate community, it’s a segregated community. Which means it’s regulated from the outside by outsiders. The white man has all of the businesses in the Negro community. He runs the politics of the Negro community. He controls all the civic organizations in the Negro community. This is a segregated community.  We don’t go for segregation. We go for separation. Separation is when you have your own. You control your own economy; you control your own politics; you control your own society; you control your own everything. You have yours and you control yours; we have ours and we control ours.”

I am left thinking about Douglass-Hosford’s final call in her first article – “rather than continuing to produce and consume research that “discovers” the inequalities every person of color already knew existed, I wonder if we might instead envision a system of education where everyone is free.”  

This weeks’ materials were very validating for me because I have been skeptical of integration for quite some time. I don’t trust it. At least not at face value. It has to prove itself more if I am going to trust it. I was a young person of color who attended a mostly white high school (that had only recently started to begrudgingly let students of color from around the city attend). So my lived experience will tell ya that integration can be shit. Like yeah I got good at school, but the racial trauma of being at an “integrated” school is NO JOKE. So I really appreciated that the Whose Integration article complicated this idea of integration as panacea. We must shift the metrics that we use to to define success in school. Sure, test scores increase when we integrate schools. But are we checking student well-being? Are we checking care and teacher relationships? Are we measuring student comfort and school climate? Not as much as we should be. This article added even more nuance to this discussion though. We also can’t just pretend the world is not multiracial, multiethnic, and global. It wouldn’t make sense to have single-race schools either.

Both of our readings this week have me thinking about the future of schools. What are the next steps to implementing radical care in schools across the country? From the young boys in the hood to the country boys on the farm. Can integration lead to radical care for all? What more does integration need to be what we want it to be?