While there are mounting challenges facing urban school districts across the nation, there are also some productive outcomes and solutions. Some of those best practices were on full display at the 5th Biennial International Conference on Urban Education held in Cancun, Mexico.
Sponsored by The Urban Education Collaboration, led by Dr. Chance W. Lewis at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, this year’s theme “Urban Excellence: Building Communities and Unlocking Opportunities,” drew more than 700 participants for three days of sharing and strategizing.
The convening took on a greater sense of urgency, following Tuesday’s election of Donald J. Trump, with speakers saying that urban educators must ready themselves for the assaults to education that will likely come under a second Trump presidency.
Dr. Leslie T. Fenwick
Dr. Leslie T. Fenwick, dean emeriti and professor of education at Howard University delivered a rousing keynote, detailing the fierce resistance and opposition to the historic 1954 U.S. Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education ruling.
“Blacks did not leave the education professions after Brown, the professions were taken from us purposely,” said Fenwick, who chronicled the history in her award-winning book Jim Crow’s Pink Slip: The Untold Story of Black Principal and Teacher Leadership. Fenwick noted that before Brown and white resistance to it, in 17 states, 35 to 50 percent of the teachers were Black.
“Today, no state approaches these percentages,” she said. “In fact, less than 7 percent of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers, 11 percent of our 90,000 principals and less than 3 percent of the nation’s 13, 800 superintendents are Black, even though Black educators are the nation’s most academically credentialed.”
Fenwick said that the historical purging of these teachers and principals who strove to create integrated schools, has to be replaced with a new commitment aimed at repairing “this historical breach as well as to dismember the outcomes of that breach which are modern day education policies that have us ideologically and financially disinvesting from Black and other children of color and from those families experiencing poverty.”
Fenwick called for the removal of “past deficit perspectives and research about Black and other students of color,” to create “teaching and learning environments that affirm the intellectual capacities and cultural heritages of all students.”
Diversifying the nation’s teaching force, Fenwick added, is essential to racial and ethnic integration of American society.
“Racial equity and educational equity are cojoined goals and it’s unlikely, I believe, that either will be achieved without the other,” she said. “Our way forward must reflect, despite the current circumstances, an abiding belief and dedicated adherence to the democratic, not market principles as the path to change and improve and it must reflect our will to make it so.”
That call to action rallied conference participants who said that they’re willing to push forward despite the challenges. On Wednesday, presenters shared best practices and offered advice on how to replicate successful educational models that have yielded positive outcomes for minoritized students and teachers.
For example, during one workshop session, administrators shared details about a social justice academy in New Jersey that has successfully provided anti-racist training to more than 200 teachers and those enrolled in teacher-prep programs.
BOLD Leadership Network, headquartered in Greenville, S.C., provides community support and resources to advance equity and the opportunity for all students and communities to thrive. Formed in 2020 by a group of Black male principals and assistant principals from the upstate of South Carolina, the organization started as an opportunity to fellowship and celebrate the success of one of the men but has since morphed into a full-fledge nonprofit that provides an array of mentoring and other professional development opportunities to help nurture Black school teachers and administrators and to promote the ABCs: agency, belonging and connection.
For 14 years, Dr. Margarita Bianco, a professor at the University of Colorado, Denver created Pathways2Teaching,® a unique Grow Your Own program designed for high school students to earn college credit while exploring teaching and related careers through a social justice and equity lens. Since its launch, the program has become a national model, serving students in a number of U.S. cities including Denver and New Orleans.
“I wanted to develop a curriculum that speaks to young people of color,” said Bianco, adding that the high school students who complete the three required courses earn 9 college credits and a paraprofessional certificate, all while exploring teaching careers through a social justice and equity lens.
“Teachers of color enter the field because they want to make a difference,” said Bianco, who said that she’s working to cultivate a “new generation of equity-minded disrupters” who will fight to improve their communities.
Dr. Daniel Jean, associate provost for educational opportunity and success programs at Montclair State University shared positive results from the Male Enrollment and Graduation Alliance (MEGA), an ambitious wrap-around initiative designed to strengthen the high school-to-college pipeline and to provide a platform for current male college students of color to engage with each other, faculty, and staff.
“What’s great about this conference is that it’s going from K to 20+,” said Jean. “It’s allowing folks from the K-12 space to interact with the folks in the higher education space to really identify and develop strategies to improve outcomes for all urban scholars.”
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