Education After COVID-19 Cannot Be Reimagined Without A Racial Justice Plan

With schools across the country finishing the academic year remotely, there is little consensus about what schools should look like in the fall. It is highly unlikely that there will be a vaccine or cure that will mitigate the risks of COVID-19 infection in time for the upcoming school year. Understandably, every stakeholder group in K-12 education wants to know what the plan should be and wants to have some input on the plan. This conversation ramped up after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released their considerations for schools earlier this month. The CDC’s suggestions included spacing student desks at least 6 feet apart from each other, discouraging sharing, and procuring massive amounts of soap, hand sanitizer, and supplies to clean and disinfect frequently-touched surfaces. But, even with every stakeholder group from parents to teacher unions chiming in with their own ideas about how the school day should be structured and what safety measures should implemented, an important piece is missing.

This piece was missing long before the COVID-19 pandemic dismantled our notions of how we do school and highlighted the deep inequities of our school systems. In his 1967 “Where Do We Go From Here” speech, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lamented at the reality that Black students in our school systems “lag one to three years behind whites” and receive far less funding. Closing these gaps, which still persist today, are often deemed an appropriate, righteous, and sufficient strategy to create opportunity for groups who have been systemically denied access to opportunity. But what if part of the stubbornness of these gaps comes our failure to consider educational equity as anything more than an academics-only endeavor?

Without a plan to achieve racial justice in schools, any post-COVID-19 plan for reopening schools is inherently flawed. The lived experiences of Black students stretch beyond our schools. They live in our country, where a white woman walking her dog, without a leash, in violation of park rules, feels entitled enough to call the police on a Harvard-educated, avid birdwatcher and stickler for the rules who calls her out - and who also happens to be a Black man. Speaking of a college education, our country’s reality includes the fact that Black college graduates are disproportionately likely to carry burdensome student loan debt. Speaking of disproportional, in our country, Black children in preschool are more than twice as likely to be suspended or expelled than other children.

Students and teachers live in a country where the question of whether #BlackLivesMatter is still an open inquiry. It is impossible to separate the urgency of improving education outcomes for Black students from the realities these same students face in their day-to-day experiences. W.E.B. Dubois published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, where he pondered on the question of blackness in this country by asking “how does it feel to be a problem?” Black students, more than 100 years later, often know more than they would like to about what it means to be a problem. In their lifetimes, they have ample evidence to show them that simply existing can be a threat. Black high school students have seen enough to understand the deadly risks of mundane experiences. Because jogging, asking for help after a car crash, playing loud music, or even just being a successful college graduate relaxing in your own home can be a death sentence for you if you happen to do these things while also being Black.

Education exists within our country’s unjust realities. But without an intentional plan to boldly pursue racial justice, our education systems do not just reflect the broader injustices of society, they exacerbate them. In our education system, a 6 year old Black girl was arrested and put in handcuffs after having a temper tantrum. This sparked widespread outrage, but it is a well-documented pattern for the treatment of black girls in our schools. According to Monique Morris, author of Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, although they are only 16% of girls in our schools, Black girls represent 42% of girls receiving corporal punishment, 45% of girls with one or more out-of-school suspensions, and more than one-third of girls arrested on school campuses. Advocates for increasing closing racial academic achievement gaps cannot close their eyes to the urgent need for racial justice in our schools.

Practically speaking, prioritizing a racial justice component as part of the plan for returning to school in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic is not going to undo centuries of oppression. Still, school systems can make tremendous strides toward racial justice by rejecting a mythical colorblind approach in favor of an approach that is intentionally color-kind. They should recognize the disparate impact of school closures on student subgroups who faced tremendous equity and access issues prior to the pandemic and ensure that whatever plans they are drawing up address this reality. Before they think about reimagining the way students engage in school, systems leaders should overcome the issues of racial justice that lead many educators to act as if they can work around low income parents of color instead of working with and through them. Returning to school with racial justice as a key aspect of a new “normal” does not just mean that leaders should hold more diversity workshops or implicit bias training. It also means that educators must answer the question of how they are explicitly biased and learn how to change this.

This is not to say that urgent efforts to improve educational outcomes for racial subgroups with persistent academic gaps should play second fiddle. A focus on true racial justice recognizes that as unfair as it is that poor, students of color still need to often work twice as hard just to get half as far as others, it is a reality nonetheless. The conversation about the important role academic success plays in breaking cycles of poverty, the disproportionately beneficial impact of a college degree for students of color, and the decreased risk of unemployment and susceptibility to COVID-19 for college graduates is a crucial part of the overall conversation on racial justice, not a counterargument.

The majority of public school students in the United States identify as students of color. Yet, only 7% of Black students attend school systems where the number of Black teachers equals or exceeds the percentage of Black students, a ratio that drops to 4.5 for Asian students and one-tenth of 1% for Latino students attend school systems where the number of Latino students equals or exceeds the percentage of Latino students. Study after study confirms the benefits of diversifying the teacher workforce. Diverse leadership matters too, but 80% of school principals are white compared to just 10% who are Black, 7% who are Latino and higher on the leadership ladder, only 6% of district superintendents identify as leaders of color. Our country’s mostly white educator workforce must have the tools, skills, and mindsets, to help them achieve racial justice through their work. Sending teachers back to school with a racial justice plan can finally help us cure the centuries-old pandemic of educational inequity.