Racial Justice Cannot Be Opt-In

Findings

For this brief, we elevate two key related findings. First, teachers’ attitudes around anti-racist pedagogy were shaped by their personal and professional experiences and coalesced into three categories: true believers, emerging, and the disinterested. Second, teachers’ capacity to implement anti-racist pedagogy was a function of both their predisposition (attitudes) and the systemic resources, supports, and learning opportunities provided.

Echoing data from Education Week’s survey (EdWeek Research Center, 2020), teachers, when asked, indicated that they were inclined to incorporate anti-racist curriculum and/or pedagogy in their classroom. However, upon probing for details on what it means to incorporate anti-racist practices into their work, teachers’ commitment and depth of understanding varied widely. Based on the content of our interviews, we were able to classify teachers into three distinct groups: the true believers (n = 15), the emerging (n = 36), and the disinterested (n = 4). True believers were doing deliberate work in their classrooms and professional circles and tended to be already immersed in anti-racist practices both personally and professionally. At the other end of the spectrum was a group of teachers who were largely indifferent. These teachers expressed that this type of anti-racist work was not mandated, did not feel it was relevant to their content area, and/or was too political for the classroom. Most teachers, however, were clustered in the middle, which we classified as “emerging.” These teachers were eager to incorporate practices and curriculum that addressed increasingly apparent racial inequities but did not have the training, pedagogical content knowledge, or professional networks to aid them in this work. They were dependent on school-based and district-wide professional development, trainings, and policies (or lack thereof). In the emerging group, there was an additional subset of teachers who believed their efforts to diversify their curriculum was enacting anti-racist pedagogy. These efforts, however, were surface-level adaptation, such as incorporating Black historical figures more prominently in a lesson or selecting texts from more diverse authors. These teachers did not significantly engage in reflection and revision of their curricula and classroom/school-wide practices. As a result, their attempts at incorporating anti-racist practices were superficial. To illustrate how both teachers’ professional and personal experiences shaped which category they fell in, we have profiled three participants (see Table 1).

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Table 1

Profiled Participants

Renata (disinterested)	Renata is a high school math teacher. She describes herself as “not a political person” and “not an emotional human being.” She is aware of growing inequality in the United States and says she is trying to educate some of her family members who don’t think racial inequalities exist. Yet she shares that “there’re no opportunities [for these conversations] in a math classroom, you don’t have conversations with the kids . . . things are confined to the topics that you’re teaching and the materials that you’re teaching.” She thinks that English language arts and social studies classes are better venues for this type of student engagement because “I’d have to ditch my lesson to have a discussion like that.” She provides this explanation as a rationale for not “partaking” in anti-racist teaching. Renata perceived her role as a math teacher as separated from racial politics and the daily experiences of her students.
Cora (emerging)	Cora is a middle school science teacher who feels “a sense of responsibility [for] how [she] can incorporate more social justice and scientists of color into my curriculum” following the BLM protests and increased incidents of police brutality in 2020. Although her school has done little around this, as a member of Math for America, she’s done some workshops on incorporating social justice and racism into STEM. This leaves her feeling like doing this work is really “an independent effort,” and she has focused much of her attention on reading and finding examples of Black excellence in science that she can bring into her units. At the same time, she is beginning to reflect on how schools can and have been a place of harm, citing the example of controlling students’ bodies. “I can do my small part,” she shares, “through my curriculum . . . making students feel inputted and valued.”
Iris (true believer)	Iris starts off her interview noting that teaching is “a political act.” She acts on the conviction that pre-K students are exactly the right age to learn about injustice and difference before they are socialized to be prejudiced and discriminatory. Iris implements the Black Lives Matter Week of Action in her classroom. One parent got very upset, taking the story to the New York Post and outing both the school and Iris’s name. She stood firmly behind her decision, telling the father that it was “very important” that his daughter learn that “there is injustice in the world.” Despite some negative online commentary, the article only energized the school community’s commitment to anti-racist work and affirmed Iris’s pedagogical choices. As a result, she became a de facto resource for all the teachers in the school interested in incorporating anti-racist teaching in their own classrooms. Even so, Iris notes that she doesn’t “feel hugely prepared” even though she has done “a fair amount of work on her own” pulling resources from other activism work she participates in. Iris’s dedication to building anti-racist teaching “into the curriculum everywhere” and “really kicking it into high gear” remains largely an individual endeavor where she voluntarily adds to her workload with little supportive infrastructure from her school or district.

That nearly 75% of our teacher participants felt largely unprepared and/or unexpected to address racial inequity in their classrooms is a result of a cascading set of factors. One participant remarked quite bluntly that she would “be thrilled to have a conversation about abolitionist teaching. But no, this school is definitely invested in maintaining a plantation mentality.” Unlike this teacher, most reported support, but only tacit support, from their administrators and district, whose messaging and actions appeared as virtue signaling or lip service. This remained true across the range of teacher attitudes toward anti-racist teaching. As one pre-K teacher explained, “I would say so far I don’t feel like my administration has like actually provided it [training and resources]; they’ve just kind of like endorsed it.” In the cases where administrators did try to promote anti-racist practices more actively, they still tended to do very little heavy lifting. For example, in one school, they provided each teacher with Kendi’s (2019) How to be an Antiracist, but as one secondary teacher explained: “I don’t know who read it, I don’t know who cracked it open. . . . We never had a book talk about the book; the title has not come out of anybody’s mouth.” Even more serious, committed administrators did little more than provide some resources and a training or two. They never interrogated school or district policies, curriculum, or pedagogy that reinforce inequality, leaving true believers with limited autonomy to authentically engage in anti-racist practices. One secondary teacher expressed her dismay at the lack of serious action:

I feel that way about the principal because she is disempowered in her own role, and not willing to take risks, and break the rules for children, when clearly the rules themselves need revision. We need to make a little good trouble. The ways in which my principal is not willing to make good trouble, I find disappointing and disheartening.

In addition, without access to comprehensive training and support, multiple teachers expressed concerns about their ability to authentically adopt anti-racist strategies. Teachers reported feeling ill-prepared and overwhelmed due to the pandemic and virtual schooling, leaving little capacity to effectively engage in anti-racist work on their own. Ultimately, this meant that most teachers who undertook the task of learning about anti-racist pedagogy took advantage of what was provided, such as book clubs or affinity groups (see Supplementary Materials 2, available on the journal website). Some teachers, however, were able to push harder and engage more deeply with anti-racist pedagogy with other educators from across the district and nationally. However, the combination of weak institutional support and little guidance for interested but underprepared teachers resulted in the adoption of practices, such as multicultural curriculum and asset recognition, that do not meet the threshold of anti-racist pedagogy.

Implications

These findings have implications for relying on social zeitgeists to motivate and change practices and more importantly, for who shoulders the burden of equity- and justice-driven practices when leadership is not invested in building support structures and sustained resources. Nearly 93% of the teachers participating in this research either were deeply committed to or interested in implementing anti-racist practices in their classroom. However, based on their accounts, they lacked coherent and structured supports for implementation at both the school and district levels. As a result, and despite teachers overall positive attitudes, anti-racist and abolitionist teaching appeared inconsistently across classrooms and was dependent on unevenly distributed and accessible external resources and professional learning opportunities or in-school, ad hoc learning communities that are additional to teachers’ standard responsibilities. At a moment when teacher buy-in appeared to be high, schools and districts were unable to capitalize.

Administrations’ failure to take the lead in adopting anti-racism as a guiding framework has significant impacts on the effectiveness of its implementation. First, districts and schools’ noncommittal stance against racism perpetuates the status quo. Second, without guidance and strategic planning from leadership, implementation varies from classroom to classroom, leaving the application of anti-racist practices to each teacher’s level of interest and discretion. The absence of a mandate allows teachers to simply opt out, creating mixed messages for students and derailing the systemic changes anti-racist work requires. Finally, without adequate resources and support provided by administrators, teachers are not able to engage in the difficult and nuanced work that anti-racism requires. This is further highlighted by the fact that this study examines a relatively liberal area of the country, where teachers and school leaders might be more interested in and motivated to enact anti-racist practices than more conservative areas, but the lack of meaningful progress here suggests that more than motivation and belief in anti-racism is likely needed. Simply implementing a more responsive curriculum without addressing the larger context informing students’ daily educational experiences and outcomes does not meet the objectives of anti-racism. We need to note that districts, administrators, and teachers have been negotiating extraordinary circumstances that have stretched their capacity. This helps provide a possible or partial explanation for the half-measures employed despite the strong interest expressed by educators and administrators. Ultimately, this study highlights that despite increased attention to racial inequality and surface-level adoption of anti-racist language and practices, very little has changed in our participants’ schools. This call for action becomes even more pressing as backlash grows in state legislatures and at school board meetings. Leaders who care about implementing anti-racist practices in their schools and districts can better move these implementations forward by maintaining active engagement in the process, providing the support and resources teachers need, and leading from the front, as opposed to merely endorsing or providing lip service to such reform.

Since 2021, 44 states have introduced and 28 have passed legislation or executive orders to restrict and/or limit how teachers may discuss or teach about race, gender, and sexual identity (e.g., Alexander et al., 2022). A report released from RAND highlighted that due to the legislation, in-service teachers reported infringement on their instructional autonomy and pressure to consider the perspectives and directives of multiple stakeholders (Woo et al., 2023). Most strikingly, the report found that 25% of the teachers surveyed altered their content to avoid pushback from parents or officials. As these bills continue to proliferate, the introduction and incorporation of these practices will only become more difficult. It should be noted that this study did reveal the presence of true believers in anti-racism, who are doing what they can at the teacher level to enact such practices. Further political waves drawing the public’s attention may enhance the number of these individuals and their fervor for this change. However, our findings suggest that although these teachers are carrying out this work in their classrooms and undoubtedly making some difference, true systemic change will require investment and engagement by school and district leaders to support and solidify such efforts.

Supplemental Material