Reimagining American Education: Possible Futures

Centering equity in leading

In recent years, a growing number of districts have hired equity directors to lead the design and implementation of new policies, strategic plans, professional development programs, and other initiatives (see Irby et al., 2021). Such roles are an important way for districts to formalize their commitments and to dedicate time and human resources to stewarding equity-focused change. However, even equity directors with a great deal of professional expertise and political capital can face significant institutional challenges (Jones & Sutton, 2021). For one, most are women and people of color who hold an inherently paradoxical job, requiring them to disrupt the institution that employs them. For another, equity directors’ work within the system bureaucracy tends to afford them only partial understandings of the many complex ways in which district policies and practices shape the everyday schooling experiences of youth and families.

The people who have the deepest understanding of these impacts are the youth and families themselves.

Since the early 20th century, American education has privileged administrative and managerial expertise for leading schools. But decades of research and practice suggest that no single district leader, or administrative team, can accomplish the depth and scale of change required to cultivate equitable learning for all students. Though diversifying the ranks of the superintendency and redistributing job responsibilities to equity directors may be important steps, we should not expect those in formal positions of authority to lead transformative change in education all by themselves. Racially minoritized students, families, and communities are experts on their own learning, histories, cultural practices, and dreams. They possess crucial insights about inequitable schooling as well as learning and thriving in communities, in spite of institutionalized oppression. They represent a frequently disregarded but potent source of leadership in education.

Community-based leadership

In fact, all across the country today, young people and their families are using their voices, their feet, their art, and their organizing to lead school systems toward safety, dignity, racial justice, and well-being. Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and Pacific Islander youth, families, and communities have been pursuing fundamental shifts in schooling for decades — in some cases, for centuries. Such efforts grow out of African American traditions of education as a practice of liberation, Indigenous cultural resurgence, and immigrant community struggles for dignity and culturally affirming schooling.

For instance, in 2020, the Black Organizing Project in Oakland, California, convinced the district to eliminate its School Police Department and reinvest its $6 million budget in other safety-related efforts. In city after city — Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver, Chicago, and Madison — youth organizing has led to districts canceling their contracts with police and reinvesting funds (Advancement Project, 2021). Similarly, Black and Brown parent leaders with the organization CADRE (Community Asset Development Re-defining Education) were instrumental in the Los Angeles Unified School District’s move to change its student discipline framework, which contributed to reduced out-of-school suspensions. Youth of color have also played key leadership roles, alongside teachers, in the movement to bring ethnic studies to schools. For example, in Oregon, a youth-led coalition succeeded in passing state legislation requiring a K-12 ethnic studies curriculum for all schools in the state (June, 2017).

In addition to changing high-profile policies, minoritized youth and families have also led local schools and districts in making changes that affect their everyday lives. For instance, in Seattle, youth leaders supported by the organization Washington Building Leaders of Change (WA-BLOC) realized that transportation to school was a problem for many students, so they advocated for district and city officials to provide free public transit cards for all high school students. Elsewhere, parent and family leaders have created parent-teacher home-visiting programs, transformed the climate of their schools, developed after-school cultural programs, and collaborated with district leaders to reshape strategic plans, hire principals, craft family engagement policies, and reconfigure instruction to be more responsive to second-language learners. Right now, Black and Brown youth across the country are pressing their districts for more transparent COVID data, better safety protocols, and accessible COVID testing in their schools.

Systemic resistance

Yet, historically, school systems have tended to resist the leadership and advocacy of marginalized communities, in contrast to their marked deference to well-resourced white stakeholders.

Educators and systems often regard racially minoritized youth and their families as deficient, problematic, resistant, or “disengaged.” As I have discussed elsewhere (2020), there is simply no evidence that families of color are less concerned for their children or their education than white parents. But such assumptions reinforce racist and settler colonial rationalizations for educational inequities. As the writer Arundhati Roy (2004) reminds us, “There really is no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.” Even in districts with explicit commitments to equity, families and communities of color are generally considered peripheral stakeholders when it comes to the key decisions and work of schools.

But many educators’ experiences during remote learning showed them just how dependent they are (and have always been) on families to make student learning possible. Ongoing threats to the safety of young people — from COVID to gun violence, racialized bullying, mental health challenges, suicide, and more — have only heightened the connections among schools, families, and communities. Given these realities, we can no longer maintain the façade that families and communities are incidental to the core work of teaching and learning.

However, when we reimagine the relationship between families and schools of the future, we must be careful to specify which families and communities we are talking about. Recent news media reports reference “parents” taking over school board meetings with anti-mask protests, banning books, or working to pass bills to ban critical race theory. But those predominantly white, often privileged, parents have always exercised undue influence on U.S. public schools. Typical district-based community engagement activities, such as PTA meetings, town halls, and school board meetings, can become avenues for well-resourced white parents and community members to wield their disproportionate power at the expense of the voices, priorities, and leadership of racially minoritized youth, families, and communities (Sampson & Bertrand, 2020).

We have an opportunity to redesign our school systems to be answerable to the young people, families, and communities that our schools were never designed to serve (Patel, 2014). In sustained, equitable collaborations with youth and families, schools could begin to address the ongoing harm experienced by Black, Indigenous, and other students of color and cultivate more humanizing and liberatory learning.

Educational leadership reimagined

A growing number of educational policy makers and power brokers have begun to recognize that our commitments to educational equity cannot be realized without the voices, insights, and influence of those who have been harmed by systemic racism and injustices in education. In a reimagined education system, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, and Pacific Islander youth, families, and communities will play a central role in educational leadership. Rather than providing occasional “input” to educators and leaders, families will have meaningful influence on the major decisions that shape their children’s well-being, safety, and dignity — such as whether or not to keep schools open in a pandemic, how resources should be allocated, what measures should be used to assess learning, whom we should hire to teach children and lead our schools, and what futures we collectively aim to build.

While the daily management of schools would still rely heavily on the professional expertise of administrators, answerability to minoritized communities would be baked into every aspect of the system. Relationships, communication, influence, and decision making with those youth and families would be embedded in cultural norms, expectations, and commitments as well as formally institutionalized in organizational routines, policies, and resource allocations.

Every school in this system of the future will provide educators with time and organizational routines for building relationships with families, cultivating the leadership of students, and enlisting the expertise of community members to improve teaching and learning — sharing anything from their experiences of living through local history to cultural practices from their community. In such schools, students will learn not just in classrooms but also in public spaces, in homes, outdoors, and in workplaces. Trusted adults from students’ own communities — “aunties and uncles” — will be present in every school as supporters, allies, listeners, problem solvers, and advocates for students. And as a rule, teachers and leaders will have the capacity and preparation to lead efforts to sustain racial equity work and to work in solidarity with Black and Brown communities.

Glimpses of these possibilities already exist in schools. For instance, a handful of schools in rural Washington partner with their tribal communities for students to learn cultural practices from elders and integrate them into their literacy learning and everyday school routines. Another project, Learning in Places (http://learninginplaces.org), regularly brings teachers and parents together to design new science learning opportunities that build from young people’s experiences and the communities where they live, to ask profound questions about the world as it is and might be. In the Children’s Defense Fund’s Freedom Schools, Black students and families participate in joyful culturally affirming relationships and practices as they learn to read and lead change in their own communities (Davis et al., 2021). In one suburban district I studied, the superintendent regularly convened a leadership team that included not only other district administrators, the school board president and the head of the teachers union, but also the lead organizer from a Latinx immigrant parent organization.

In a reimagined school system, decision-making processes will look dramatically different as well. Examples of what we call solidarity-driven codesign are emerging through our work with the Family Leadership Design Collaborative (https://familydesigncollab.org). For instance, families in West Salt Lake City codesigned and piloted strategies with educators to reimagine a school budget-allocation process in schools serving predominantly immigrant communities (Kuttner et al., 2022).

Students and families of color in this possible future will also have a say in the curriculum and who to hire as teachers and leaders. In one California elementary school I studied, prospective teachers shared their teaching portfolios and approaches with small groups of immigrant Latinx parents, who then convened and deliberated with other teachers and the principal about which person to hire. And in an urban district in Washington, groups of predominantly Black students and families joined racially diverse teachers in designing their own interview questions and deliberating with district administrators about which principal to hire (Ishimaru, 2020).

Finally, because schools and societal contexts are constantly in motion, this more expansive approach to leading will necessitate new and different forms of data to inform ongoing efforts to learn our way toward a just education. Youth and families historically marginalized by the system bring crucial insights to collaborative processes for identifying, collecting, and using metrics that matter to them more than standardized accountability assessments (that have too often been weaponized against communities). When families and educators lead transformative change with data, they may seek out more meaningful measures of student learning experiences, agency and self-efficacy, cultural thriving, critical civic engagement, and collective well-being and self-determination. For instance, in Providence, Rhode Island, youth and parent leaders with the Center for Youth and Community Leadership in Education (CYCLE) are developing a tool to shift the lines of accountability for school improvement to become community-driven, collaborative, and equity-oriented.

Implications for formal leaders

The idea of inviting youth and families into leadership strikes fear into the hearts of many administrators, conjuring worst-case scenarios involving power struggles and chaos. In fact, research has shown that principals tend to perceive greater power on the part of parents as a loss of their own control (Crow, 1998). But these fears derive from an all-or-nothing, zero-sum view of hierarchical power, often fueled by racialized narratives. The argument for collaboration does not mean formal leaders must give up all their authority or relinquish their professional expertise as educators. Rather, the call to partner with nondominant youth and families invites superintendents and other formal leaders to change their practice in light of what they already know: They are not prepared to meet the complex challenges of leading toward more just and equitable school systems alone. Only outmoded, heroic conceptions of leadership stand in the way of them benefiting from more equitable collaborations.

As for the fear of ceding control, this notion presumes that superintendents and district leaders possess complete authority. But the limits of formal authority are among the first lessons of leadership in practice. An honest look at the current politics of public education in this country suggests that districts are already subject to a great deal of influence from a vocal subset of the community. White, middle- and upper-middle-class parents and community members banning books and resisting equity efforts “are not just advocating for their own children. They are also advocating for the maintenance of the structures of inequality that facilitate their advantage” (Lewis & Diamond, 2015, p. 156). And when administrators choose to be responsive only to those dominant voices, they exclude community voices and actions seeking educational justice.

Civil rights leader Ella Baker reminded us that movements become powerful when people lead themselves. A crucial role of formal leaders in this possible future will be to cultivate the conditions and relationships that enable the leadership of others, particularly the students and families who have been least well served by our current system. In essence, formal leaders will shift their practice to prioritize community concerns and become more like organizers who work behind the scenes to enable teachers, other educators, students, families, and community members to realize the just futures they desire.

Stepping over the threshold

As soon as schools began to reopen this year, the “rubber band” of status quo approaches snapped back into place, from remediating so-called “learning loss” to imparting information to families about school-driven agendas and even to reinstating standardized testing and accountability policies. But if the response to the pandemic has demonstrated one thing, it’s that the entire system of education is capable of dramatic change. We have an opportunity to step over the threshold of clinging to outmoded, individualistic leadership, to stop pretending that schools are race- and power-neutral, and to become intentional about collaborating with the students, families, and community leaders whose expertise is crucial for realizing an equitable education for all young people. How might we seize this opportunity to fundamentally reshape our relationships and our systems to lead with — not simply for — youth and families of color?