Texas almost approved a school voucher program in the 1950s – to avoid desegregation, by Camille Phillips, Texas Public Radio

Drawing on Texas' own history surrounding vouchers, this piece is a good recounting of the motives behind Gov. Abbott's pro-voucher agenda despite evidence to the contrary as expressed herein:

It's clear that vouchers amount to a conservative agenda to divert hard-earned taxpayer dollars to private schools that—despite what proponents say—will still not be economically viable for low income families, especially since private schools are expensive, ranging in costs from $25-40K annually. Plus, as my colleague, Dr. Huriya Jabbar indicates, research overwhelmingly points in the direction of school choice exacerbating the very economic and racial/ethnic segregation that proponents falsely claim is mitigated by vouchers, ESAs, and charter schools. 

An apt sociological dictum applies quite well here: That which is good for the individual is not necessarily that which is good for the collective. And school vouchers and education savings accounts (ESAs) are terrible news for public education that the rights, including Gov. Abbott, have worked tirelessly to demonize, despite clear evidence to the contrary that Texas families with children in public schools strongly support public education. Accordingly, read "Connected Through Our Schools" [Report] on Strong Public Support for Public Education in Texas."

There is no independent funding source for either vouchers, charter schools, or educational savings accounts. All of it comes from the same bucket of money that we all, with our taxes, pay into.

Jaime Puente, with Every Texan, is very much on point on how Abbott's agenda is a fool's errand backed up by a large body of evidence. Accordingly, also read Puente's "Vouchers: The 'Lost Cause' Fight of our Generation," by Jaime Puente, as well as a recent, up-to-date piece authored by Dr. Huriya Jabbar et al. titled, "Will School Vouchers Benefit Low-Income Families? Assessing the Evidence."

Texans, let's not be fools. We must continue to oppose vouchers. Vouchers are tantamount to a robbing the public purse to subsidize the education of already wealthy or economically solvent parents and families. In short, vouchers and ESAs are  a rip off for the vast majority of Texans.

Read the Texas Public Radio (TPR) article below or listen to it here on TPR.

-Angela Valenzuela

Texas almost approved a school voucher program in the 1950s – to avoid desegregation.

Texas Public Radio | By Camille Phillips

Published May 11, 2023 at 5:33 PM CDT

Courtesy

/

UNT Libraries Special Collections

Henry B. Gonzalez filibustered for hours to block a vote on racial segregation bills on the floor of the Texas Senate in 1957.

Republican lawmakers in Texas have made school vouchers a priority during the most recent legislative session, and their prize bill will likely cross a pivotal hurdle next week.

On Monday, May 15, the House Education Committee will discuss passing Senate bill 8 on to the full chamber for a vote. The bill would essentially allow families to use public funds for private school tuition.

Controversial since their inception, school vouchers have been around in the U.S. since at least the 1950s, when Southern states used them as a tool to circumvent desegregation.

Texas nearly joined them.

Segregation vouchers

In 1957,the Texas House approved a bill that would have given any family that withdrew their child from an integrated school a “tuition grant” to attend a private school.

The bill was part of a package of legislation sent to the state Senate with one goal: keeping schools segregated by race.

According to historian Gregg Michel with the University of Texas at San Antonio, Southern states across the country passed similar bill packages after the landmark Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

“Taken together, they all were designed to really thwart Brown,” Michel said, “which is why by ten years after Brown, something like 1% or 2% of schools had made progress towards desegregation.”

Michel said keeping schools separate but equal was part of the Texas Democratic Party’s platform in the mid-’50s (Democrats were in power at the time). In 1956, Gov. Allan Shiverssent Texas Rangers to Mansfield, Texas, to block the court-ordered integration of a high school there.

“If the executive of the state is not going to enforce it, that creates a problem on the ground,” Michel said. “And so, there was very little political will.”

Shivers also appointed a committee tocompile a report on ways to avoid desegregation; many of their ideas were included in the package of segregation bills passed by the Texas House in 1957.

But a small group of state senators managed to derail the passage of most of the segregation bills — including the voucher proposal.

San Antonio’s Henry B. Gonzalez, Texas’s first Latino state senator, and Laredo’s Abraham “Chick” Kazen, the son of Lebanese immigrants,led the group in a 36-hour filibuster.

“A remarkable, at the time longest ever, filibuster on the floor of the Senate,” Michel said. “Gonzalez was particularly effective and spoke for more than 20 hours himself. The senators who supported the segregationist laws sought for ways to stop the filibuster, and they couldn't do it. And they eventually negotiated it and caved.”

1957 Filibuster. Filmed by WBAP-TV in Fort Worth, Provided by UNT Libraries Special Collections

Modern race-based arguments

Decades later, voucher supporters’ arguments have flipped. Instead of helping white students leave an integrated public school, modern private school choice advocates like Derrell Bradford say vouchers give students of color access to private schools that can better meet their needs.

“I went to half of middle school and all of high school at (a private) all-boys day school on a scholarship, and it was the most important thing that ever happened to me,” said Bradford, president of 50 CAN, an organization that supports local groups advocating for school choice.

“I want every kid to have the same kind of opportunity that I had,” he said. “Sometimes it's your neighborhood school, and that's great, and sometimes it isn't. And the color of your skin and how much money your parents make and where you live shouldn't be the things that determine that.”

Bradford prefers a popular modern twist on vouchers called Education Savings Accounts, which give the funds to parents rather than private schools. He thinks it gives parents more power to choose the best form of education for their child.

However, opponents of vouchers and Education Savings Accounts, or ESAs, say they hurt students of color.

“There's no civil rights protections,” said Jaime Puente with the left-leaning think tank Every Texan. “If you’re a special-needs student, if you learned that you had some kind of learning disability… you're on your own.”

Puente said he understands wanting Black and Latino students to have access to prestigious private schools — he went to a Catholic boy’s school in Houston. But he doesn’t think vouchers or ESAs will give them that access because they don’t cover the full cost of tuition.

“$8,000 wouldn't have done anything for my family,” Puente said. “We still would have had to make sacrifices. These schools cost anywhere from $25,000 to $35,000 — almost $40,000 a year … And so, that's never going to be an option for the poorest student with the voucher.”

Puente thinks that money would be better served supporting public schools.

“It's ridiculous that we are having these conversations about vouchers and spending this amount of money on a tiniest fraction of the state when we should be talking about investing in the system as a whole so that we can lift everyone up,” Puente said, adding that the state has long underfunded public education.

Bradford argues that an ESA worth $8,000 would make it easier for a private school to raise scholarship money to cover the rest. He thinks private-school options are needed because public schools are highly segregated, and that makes them inherently unequal.

“We have a system of public schooling in this country that is based on place, and we have a system of place in this country that is based on race,” Bradford said.

He said ESAs can help level the playing field for low-income kids of color by giving them access to an education that isn’t based on where they live.

Choice reduces diversity

Research shows that school choice hasn’t lessened segregation. In fact, it's often made it worse.

“Initially there was some hope that choice, because it breaks up these ties between where you live and where you go to school, that there could be a potential for greater desegregation. But we haven't seen that happen,” said Huriya Jabbar, an education policy professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Jabbar said the robust research on the impact charter schools have on segregation is clear: “Individual charter schools are generally more racially segregated than the traditional public schools in their area,” she said. “School choice tends to, on average, increase or at least reproduce the segregation in public schools. It's not mitigating that segregation.”

Even though public schools are often highly segregated by race and income, Jabbar said they’re still the best hope for integration.

“We lose the potential to (integrate schools) if we give up on public schools,” she said.

She said it’s important to keep working to increase school diversity because research has shown it consistently improves student outcomes.

“We don't have evidence of another policy solution that can make schools equal and high quality on such a large scale,” Jabbar said.

Jabbar thinks ESAs and vouchers will most likely also have a negative impact on school diversity.

But Bradford isn’t concerned by that prediction because public schools are already segregated. He said segregation caused by school choice is “less pernicious” because it is not government-mandated.

“It is instead things like Black families wanting to be in an environment where they feel like their kids are going to be affirmed, and, not for nothing, their history not erased in a public policy fight,” Bradford said.

Avoiding “woke agendas”

Public-school advocates argue that people who want to erase Black history do so by promoting vouchers.

“Vouchers have been, and continue to be, a product of white supremacy,” said Jaime Puente with Every Texan during public testimony for SB8, the voucher bill.

Puente said the fight against vouchers and its racist undertones decades ago has re-emerged as a new battle – over books and curriculum.

Distrust of public schools is a key part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s argument for using public funds for private schools. At rallies for ESAs this spring, Abbott repeatedly claimed public schools are “indoctrinating” kids.

Jabbar also sees parallels between the push for segregation vouchers in the 1950s and the language voucher advocates use today.

“It's not surprising that those same types of policies are emerging right now, given our current social context, the racial reckoning the country is having, these attempts to stifle discussions around race and racism in schools,” Jabbar said.

Camille Phillips

Camille Phillips can be reached at camille@tpr.org, on Instagram at camille.m.phillips and on Twitter at @cmpcamille. TPR was founded by and is supported by our community. If you value our commitment to the highest standards of responsible journalism and are able to do so, please consider making your gift of support today.

See stories by Camille Phillips

Some admixture of hyper-individualism, systemic white privilege, and real stigma that exists for high-diversity low-income schools helps explain persistent divisions and polarization in our society.  

According to recent research by Weissbourd and Torres out of Harvard, "white, affluent parents  value school quality more than integration and view integrated schools as 'educationally inferior.'"  These researchers further found that school quality itself was evidenced by these same parents in the extent to which children of white, affluent parents send their children to a particular school.

"The survey findings – namely, the hesitancy or refusal of white, middle- and upper-class parents to actively choose integrated schools even when they say they value them – speak to why so few school districts have successfully tackled integration and expose the biggest sticking point in the dozens of schools districts currently trying to tackle the issue: the intransigence among many white families."

The short of it is that school integration is a great idea in the abstract, but not an attractive proposition where the rubber meets the road of actually enrolling one's child in a racially and ethnically diverse school.

A deeper analysis of the underlying governing dynamics would take a look at Cheryl Harris' notion of "whiteness as property (Harris, 1993, 2003)."

-Angela Valenzuela

Harris, C. I. (2003). Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review, 106(8).

Harris, C. I. (1993). Whiteness as property. Harvard law review, 1707-1791.

White, Affluent Parents Like the Idea of Integrated Schools – But Not for Their Kids

Lauren Camera • Feb. 7, 2020, at 2:54 p.m.

The vast majority of parents – regardless of political affiliation, race, class and where they live – strongly favor schools that are racially and economically integrated. But when it comes time to enroll their children, white, affluent parents who actually have a choice often choose schools based on the number of white, affluent students enrolled.

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[ READ: Report: School Borders Remain Divisive ]

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"Despite parents' espoused support for integration, in districts where parents are actually given greater opportunities to choose schools, schools appear to become more segregated," Harvard University researchers concluded in a searing new report that strikes at the heart of the contentious integration and school boundary debates roiling school districts across the country.

Researchers at Making Caring Common, a center housed at Harvard that focuses on the moral and social development of children, conducted a survey of more than 2,600 parents, individual interviews and focus groups to explore whether and how much parents value school integration and other factors that shape their thinking about sending their children to integrated schools.

The majority of the people who participated, 73%, identified as white and most of them were also middle- and upper-class. The majority, 60%, also had a child enrolled in a traditional public school in their district, while 21% had a child enrolled in a secular private school, 7% in a religious private school and 6% in a public charter school.

The researchers' findings confirmed well-established research: Most parents agree that, all things being equal, racial and economic integration is important, and they say that they would prefer that their children attend schools that are "substantially integrated both racially and economically."

That preference holds, they discovered, for both men and women, Democrats and Republicans, and people of all races and levels of education and income levels.

"I did not expect the level of in-principle support for integration," says Richard Weissbourd, director of Making Caring Common and co-author of the report. "I knew from other research that we cite that parents tended to support integration. But, you know, they tend to support it across the political spectrum and they tend to support it at high levels. I was not expecting that."

According to survey results, 81% agreed that it was important for students of different races to go to school together and 63% said that low-income and high-income kids going to school together was important.

When asked specifically about sending their children to schools with differing levels of socioeconomic diversity – a school where 10% of students are poor, for example, or a school where 90% of students are poor – most parents said they'd be most comfortable with a school that is comprised of 50% low-income and 50% more affluent students and for schools that served an equal numbers of white students and students of color.

Yet, when it came time for parents to enroll their children in school, competing priorities – things like a school's academic profile, it's safety record and location – tended to outrank integration as a priority.

"Very few people rank it high," Weissbourd says. "In a way, the support is broader than I thought and also less deep than I thought."

When asked to select the top three features of a school that were most important to their decision about where to send their children, parents overwhelmingly chose academic quality and school safety as the top two most important features, with 81% picking academic quality and 70% picking safety. Meanwhile, just under 10% picked racial and economic diversity in their top three."In some ideal sense, the great majority of parents do want to send their kids to integrated schools," says Eric Torres, a doctoral student at Harvard's Graduate School of Education and co-author of the report. "But when parents are faced with choices that they feel pit these priorities, they tend to choose the things that they believe are most important for the success of their own children."

Some of the resistance to integrated schools relayed to the researchers from white, affluent parents focused on whether students in schools that serve large numbers of poor students might come to school hungry or from a traumatic home life – introducing into their classrooms problems that could overwhelm teachers. Other times, white, affluent parents said they were simply constrained by their district's complicated school assignment and choice policies, which, for example, may not allow them to send their children to a school that they both think is a good fit for their child and that is substantially integrated.

However, the most common reason researchers heard from white, affluent parents about why they tend to pick whiter and more affluent schools is because they value school quality more than integration and view integrated schools as "educationally inferior." In fact, many white, advantaged parents, the researchers found, appeared to determine school quality by how many other white, advantaged parents send their child to a school.

"Simply the presence of substantial numbers of black children in a residential area appears to affect white parents' assessment of school quality," Weissbourd and Torres wrote in the report.

"Making matters worse, because white, advantaged parents may use the number of white, advantaged parents at a school as a measure of its quality and avoid schools with large numbers of children of color, their choices become self-fulfilling," they wrote. "These parents add to the number of white, advantaged parents at these schools, which simply attracts more white, advantaged parents (and on and on)."

White, affluent parents also expressed concern that their children might be a minority in a school, the survey showed.

"Many white parents favoring integration don't seem to think twice about expecting black and Latinx parents to send their children to schools where they are the minority, but they don't have that expectation of themselves," they wrote.

The survey findings – namely, the hesitancy or refusal of white, middle- and upper-class parents to actively choose integrated schools even when they say they value them – speak to why so few school districts have successfully tackled integration and expose the biggest sticking point in the dozens of schools districts currently trying to tackle the issue: the intransigence among many white families.

Those debates are playing out in real-time in communities big and small all across the U.S.: in places like New York City, where students are walking out of classrooms to protest the segregated nature of their schools; in places like Howard County and Montgomery County in Maryland, where parents erupt in heated town hall meetings about proposed changes to school boundaries; in places like Fairfax County in Virginia, where even the suggestion by school board members to study its boundaries caused panic.

So what can be done?

For starters, Weissbourd and Torres urge parents to stop relying so heavily on academic ratings, school report cards and levels of proficiency posted to school websites. Metrics like average test scores aren't helpful when attempting to gauge quality, they underscore. White, affluent parents especially need to step outside their social circles, which keep them insulated in information bubbles rampant with bias and rumors.

"Those perceptions aren't really based on much," Weissbourd says. "They're often developed in a bubble, among a small circle of friends. And if you're a white advantaged parent, you're probably only talking to white advantaged parents. Rumors spread and we live in a country where we have our biases." 

Instead, they say, parents need to physically go to their available schools to evaluate for themselves if they are a good fit – talk to teachers, principals and other parents whose children are enrolled there. School districts and schools themselves must play their part, too, by marketing themselves better, showcasing to parents the things they do best.

"It's unlikely in any wide scale way we would get parents to shift this hierarchy of priorities," Torres says. "But what we can do is remove perceptual and real barriers. In part it's just a matter of encouraging people to go and check out these schools and see that they are of adequate quality for their children."

Excellent opinion-editorial by Stephanie Hawley, AISD's new Chief Equity Officer. Racism is indeed in the very DNA of our country.  Scroll below to view Hawley's proposed antidotes to what she terms," the cancer of educational racism."

-Angela Valenzuela

From Denial to Diagnosis: Curing Racism in Public Schools

• Published on September 3, 2019

Stephanie Hawley

Chief Equity Officer at Austin Independent School District

“There is separation of colored people from white people in the United States. That separation is not a disease of colored people. It is a disease of white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it.” --Albert Einstein, The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein

As a Black woman, mother, teacher, administrator, racial equity advocate and inclusion strategist, I have been asked more times than I can remember by well-meaning White teachers, leaders, and politicians, "How can you help close the racial achievement gaps?" The question in and of itself assumes that "I," as a woman of Color, may have the cure for the cause of the racial equity gaps in education-- that devastating centuries-old global disease of racism.

Racism is in the very DNA of our country birthed in the bloody legalized genocide of Indigenous people, nourished and gorged for centuries on the "human capital" of enslaved Indigenous people and enslaved Africans and currently sustained by the exploited labor of people of Asian and Mexican descent.

When I ask questioners, "What do you think is the real problem causing the racial achievement gaps," individuals inevitably point to a myriad of stereotypical factors (that often also apply to millions of White students): Black, Brown and Indigenous children's lack of motivation and preparation, poor parenting and most often labels are affixed including economically disadvantaged, in poverty, traumatized, etc. While these descriptors of the conditions with which children of Color (and White students) may live might be accurate, rarely is there a mention of the strengths, resourcefulness, resilience and creativity Black and Brown students bring to the public school learning experience. Most often, well-meaning educators with deficit mindsets about the children, recommend additional supplementary grant-funded programs or extended time with the same failing curricula and the same teachers who are under prepared to support students of Color. Few, if any of the questioners, profoundly and consistently interrogate a public school system perfectly designed to predictably fail students of Color (statistically speaking).

The American public school system is where racism insidiously metastasizes without detection, intervention, and treatment because we've been "schooled" and socialized NOT to examine the system. Antiracist educators are stepping up to transform White cultural conformity in schooling to racially and culturally inclusive learning experiences for all students.

Individually and collectively, we educators may be in denial that we are the system and we are the disease that tacitly and blindly normalizes, centralizes and prioritizes the thinking, needs, values, history, culture and fears of White children and White families. We have been "schooled" to do so. 

Even in the face of alarming data for decades, educators continue to assume the achievement data gaps are telling us how broken the students of Color are, but in fact, the achievement data tell us how well the system is working for White students and how poorly it is designed to serve Black and Brown students. Educating Diverse (including White) students is not about choosing one group or the other, but using researched-based strategies that promote the learning and flourishing of all students.

Educators who are growing in racial and cultural consciousness sometimes shield White colleagues from words like, "antiracist," 'White fragility," "White privilege," "White supremacy" and other terms that might upset their sensibilities and shut down their amygdala for fear they may tune out/run away and never come to the table for courageous conversations and accountable actions to address individual and systemic racism in classrooms and schools. While empathy is critical, coddling and protecting fragile colleagues to the detriment of students have created and sustained an environment that is toxic and unacceptable.

As awakening individuals and those desperately trying to remain racially and culturally conscious in school systems, we may continue to silently wait at the speed of comfort for White educators and administrators who have been schooled and socialized to avoid conversations about race and racism.

While we are patiently waiting for White leaders and educators to "elect" to confront racism and engage in the necessary and uncomfortable ongoing conversations and training needed to be held accountable for taking direct action for change, disproportionate numbers of Black children languish in detention, suspension, and Special Education. The children are predictably placed on the conveyor belt from frequent suspensions to juvenile detention and on to for-profit prisons. This is a hard truth from which we too often protect White privileged and fragile educators whose daily decisions as early as pre-k are one of the determining factors in the fate of Black and Brown children.

Systemic Diagnosis & Systemic Cures

Racism is a disease that takes on many forms and avoids the light of analysis while it benefits, privileges and profits all systems: health care, city governments (gentrification), insurance, housing, collegiate sports, banking, tech, law enforcement, entertainment, the multi-billion testing industry, for-profit prison industries and yes, public schools.

No child in America should be segregated by low expectations, imprisoned by illiteracy, abandoned to frustration and darkness of self-doubt. . . .Now some say it is unfair to hold disadvantaged children to rigorous standards. I say it is discrimination to require anything less -- the soft bigotry of low expectations. . . .

-George H.W. Bush, 1999 Improving Education Speech

Denial about racism (a common symptom of the disease) is so deeply entrenched in the individual and collective American psyche, many educators and administrators truly believe ourselves to be innocent and unaffected by racism because we are not directly involved in overt and intentional acts of hate. By focusing on our intentions instead of looking at the serious and daily impact and damage of individual and systemic decisions and policies that routinely exclude and criminalize children of Color, we educators, leaders and politicians believe our hands are clean. Racism is insidious and can be difficult to detect if educators are enmeshed in the traditional time constraints of schooling, focused on bureaucratic routines, and initiating the latest "quick fix"interventions.

Certainly, more questions could be asked to detect the cancer of institutional racism, but those below are an introduction to compassionately interrogating the system and are worthy of discussion with elected officials, families, colleagues, principals, board members and the community:

1.Are the system's annual measurable achievement goals lower for Black and Brown students than those established for White students?

 2. Are Black, Brown and Indigenous children disproportionately placed in suspension, detention, mental health facilities, alternative learning environments and Special Education?

3. Are Black, Brown and Indigenous children consistently "missing" from gifted and talented programs?

4. Are the system's most experienced teachers placed and/or allowed to select teaching assignments in predominantly White schools, historically supported by strong leadership, rigorous programming and modern facilities?

5. Are students of Colors historically and disproportionately zoned and assigned to old buildings that are in disarray, unattractive, poorly maintained and plagued by high teacher absenteeism and new, failing or developing leadership?

6. Are administrators, staff and teachers allowed to "opt out" of ongoing cultural proficiency, culturally responsive teaching, racial equity and inclusion training because they are "good" teachers, don't appear to be racist or simply express discomfort with the topics?

7. Are cultural proficiency and antiracist training experiences such low priorities in the system that when training opportunities emerge throughout the year, funding is difficult or impossible to secure?

8. Are antiracist teachers and administrators ostracized, silenced or isolated for speaking up about race, racist policies and differential treatment and outcomes for students of Color and students belonging to other historically marginalized groups?

A "yes" to even one of the questions is a sign racism is alive and has infested the district, school, program, department, and the classrooms.

Fortunately, we have had the cure for racism in education for many decades. Unfortunately, individually and collectively, we simply lack the political will to do what we know we must to bring about racial equity. We often blame the children, funding and politics (code for fear of making White people in power uncomfortable) for our individual and collective failure to do what we know works for Black, Brown and White children.

Over many decades, thousands of Black and Brown families and children have told us what is needed through interviews and research studies. What is needed to close the gaps is no mystery. It requires belief in our collective ability to transform the system with daily courageous action.

First steps with antidotes to the cancer of educational racism include several do-able actions:

1. Ensure all leaders, board members, administrators ad community partners are engaged in ongoing training and development sessions to build relationships and community to establish and monitor the achievement of realistic equity goals.
2. Ensure all Black and Brown students are taught and supported by excellent (experienced, culturally conscious and antiracist) teachers, staff and administrators with high expectations.
3. Ensure curricula and teaching materials are culturally responsive, rigorous, relational, inclusive and affirming with positive images of students and achievers of Color and support varied approaches to critical thinking and interactive instruction.
4. Ensure buildings are modern, clean, and well-lighted; make certain external and internal facilities are welcoming and reflect respect for the culture(s) of the community.
5. Hold all leaders i.e. boards of trustee members, superintendents, and principals accountable for allocating the appropriate funding and developing policies and strategies to recruit, hire, develop, retain and reward excellent (experienced, culturally conscious and antiracist) teachers and staff.

The actions above are a mere primer for beginning the work to interrupt racism to close the racial achievement gaps. All actions require the "grit" constantly demanded of students of Color and students who have been impoverished by multiple racist systems since birth. Taking action to interrupt racism requires consistent courage and commitment to "unlearn" years of unconscious and conscious socialization and conformity to domineering White cultural norms in the P-16 system.

Public education is by design and default deeply and unconsciously racist as evidenced in the enrollment and academic outcomes data and the continued acceptance of the dominance of White cultural norms, segregated and low performing schools and poor building conditions for students of Color. I've been told many times over the years that teachers' unions, individual White educators, White parents, the nation, the city, the county, school districts, and school cultures are just not ready to accept responsibility for engaging in and benefiting from racism, let alone curing racism-- even when presented with evidence and tools to interrupt the privileges and damages.

Civilly and relentlessly examining interactions, policies, practices and communication that exacerbate and feed racist outcomes is only the beginning. Collectively, we can and will heal racism in public schools with a systemic commitment to lifelong "unlearning" of our socialization and public schooling that has had no time for self-diagnosis or the meaningful inclusion of the history and strengths of all cultures and races. The healing of educational racism will begin when politicians and educators actually engage in culturally proficient leadership, assure culturally responsive teaching for all students, and when immersing Black, Brown and White students students in inclusive and affirming learning experiences is the only way schooling is done in America.

The question from White politicians, educators and administrators will no longer be "How can you (Black educator, administrator and equity strategist) close the racial achievement gaps," but the core question will be,"What am I doing with my power as a White person to individually and collectively identify and eradicate the malignant disease of racism that creates racial equity gaps in education?"

While heralded as an antiracist by many African Americans, Einstein himself, struggled with deeply racist views of people of Asian descent as reported in his own diaries. However, like Einstein, educators cannot "be quiet about racism" and like Einstein, we all have unexamined racist beliefs and values that have yet to be addressed and transformed. The time is now for us to begin to heal ourselves individually and collectively so that we can cure a racist educational system that disproportionately wounds Black, Brown and Indigenous children daily.

How are you engaging in self-reflection, community-building and direct action to eradicate racism in public education? Let's chat! Contact me at convergenceconsulting3@gmail.com