To be Liked or Unliked? That's No Longer the Question.

“You’re going to get BURNED. Are you ready?” This - from a close colleague of mine when I reached out for her input on bringing race and bias training to our staff. Am I ready to get burned? Hell, no! I have worked so hard over the past six years to be respected by my staff. I fell into my leadership position by default, did not interview and had absolutely no previous experience to do the job that was asked of me. I’ve worked day in and day out to prove myself to the school, trying every day and with every project to put out my best work so that I can earn their respect and their trust. So that we can all believe I belong in my position.

But now, apparently, I am about to blow that all up. Why? Because, as Ed Catmull says, “If you don’t try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead”. And I am about to dive deep into the world of unconscious bias, whiteness, race and all that that entails in order to uncover the unseen forces that I feel are holding us back from truly making the impact we want to.

My school is a dropout recovery high school. All of our students have attended at least one school before ours and sometimes many more. Many times, we are their last chance. For many years, we gave students packets to recover their credits but over the last five years we’ve undergone a massive shift - what we liken to turning a battleship around. Slowly but surely, we’ve brought in new curriculum to replace our decade old textbooks and supported our teachers in their ability to provide relevant and engaging direct instruction. And now we’re stuck. Not everyone is using the curriculum. Not everyone is providing direct instruction. And many students are still doing packets. So, I’m diving into the why. What are the unseen forces keeping our teachers from engaging with their students?

I think there are many reasons. For one, I think teachers are scared. I think they’re scared to know who their students truly are and what their life experiences have been. I think they’re scared to have controversial conversations with them because they think they won’t know how to respond (white savior mentality here) or the class will get “out of control” (white power structure here). For two, I think our teachers simply want what our students want - to get their credits and their diploma and move on with their life. I don’t argue with this. What I argue with is that we can engage students’ hearts and minds in topics that matter, support them in developing critical skills and push them to believe in themselves in ways no one has ever done for them and still allow them to get their credits and move on - to possibly bigger dreams than they had when they came to us.

And also, I think there are racial, gender and socioeconomic biases (plus others) that are the undercurrent of every expectation we set for our students. And if we don’t address these, we will stagnate as a school, our retention rate will remain at 60% and our students will continue to believe that school is not for them and only holds value so long as they get their certificate. If we settle for this as educators, we are not being true to ourselves or to our profession.

So, maybe I’m about to get burned. Maybe I’m about to get unliked. Maybe all the work I’ve done to build up my reputation will be trashed when I move people into uncomfortable, painful identity work and discussions. But I’m almost 40, which means I’m old enough now to recognize that this isn’t about me. It is, and always has been, about our students. And our students represent the most underserved and oppressed factions of our society. If I don’t make this move to help our teachers recognize and dismantle their biases and understand the role their race plays in how they set expectations for students, then I will continue to be a player in the racism of our society, benefitting from my whiteness and my privilege to not do anything. I don’t want to be anyone’s white savior. I want to be a part of creating a more equitable society in which our students can rise up to make change for the future because we have believed in their fullest potential, which means we have held them to high expectations and helped them succeed. Let the burning begin.