Let me start with who I am. I am the director of school support for a network of private, faith-based, academically-rigorous high schools. For 19 years, I taught English at a school within this network, as well as was the assistant principal for staff development there. In the middle of my work, I served in a leadership role at our national network of schools, in Washington, DC. This network of schools has been my pipeline for success – helping me grow professionally and personally, helping me stay spiritually balanced, ensuring some financial security, and allowing me to be a more productive human being than I otherwise may have been: serving with and for others. Rewinding a bit, I graduated from the high school where I taught, and earned two degrees at a private, faith-based university. Later, in 2012, I earned a doctorate in education from a private university, with the financial help of my employer (the high school where I taught). I am male, and I am white. I have been given a lot despite some mistakes I have made along the way. Mostly, I have been in the right places at the right times. Luck has played a part along my journey. My gender and race surely have positively impacted my life. I don’t feel entitled, though I see a spirit of entitlement in others and in the world around me. I do have a sense of gratitude for the gifts I have been given – and realize those gifts are opportunities . . . that not everyone enjoys. Soon after I arrived at my current job in St. Louis, Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson – 5 miles from where I work. The impact of this shooting sent shock waves through our local communities and nationally. His death challenged educators in our schools to revisit social justice . . . this time hopefully with an even sharper focus on institutional decisions, racism, and its impact on students their achievement in school. How can schools look more closely at decisions as we examine racism related to student achievement? Approaching this work throughout my career – moving through my pipeline as a white educator – I have had limited experience. More times than not, others have lead me. Today I know that I don’t know what I don’t know. I try to be an attentive observer, a careful listener, and a reflective practitioner engaged in an active, diverse world. And, I find comfort in Teilhard de Chardin’s prayer for accepting the anxiety “of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.” In the fall of 2004, during my first year as assistant principal for staff development, I participated in an academic department chair meeting and wondered out loud, “How we could begin to look at student data – to disaggregate it by race so that we could objectively explore how we serve black students?” At that meeting my question was considered racist by some – mostly by those who perhaps failed to see own biases – personally and institutionally. A few years later, while I worked with the school’s first black diversity director to create programming examining race, which included beginning a Courageous Conversations About Race faculty discussion group, I was disappointed because our efforts were never authentically embraced and institutionalized. In the two years immediately after I left, the school moved through two diversity directors and a period of instability and mistrust – despite continuing to accept larger numbers of black students. I suppose that these diversity directors experienced similar school challenges: part-time administrator status with teaching responsibilities that did not allow them to be fully immersed in the work; isolation from being not fully integrated into the leadership team of the school and not regularly attending the school’s leadership meetings; and not enjoying a support network of colleagues to help them navigate in the school. So, while the school may have had noble desires and solid hires, there remained significant obstacles to success. Those directors both left . . . having not been able to make lasting changes. Today, the school is making slow progress, with a new director of diversity who enjoys the full support of the president and his team and initiatives in the building, not the least of which are uncomfortable conversations with adults. Perhaps this progress comes because of the tireless, messy work, and institutional mistakes of the past? At times, people comment that tensions which bubble up to the surface are indications of setbacks. But we know, surface tensions are true signs that the work is working – it’s impacting how people think and will ultimately impact how people act. Obviously, these challenges happen at other schools. As my work continues today, I witness schools budget for, accept, and support black students, while at the same time grapple with how a more diverse student population positively contributes to and enhances the school’s core mission and identity. I observe students of color attending our schools while struggling academically and culturally, when expectations are different. I see schools struggle to maintain and increase enrollment of black students so that their admissions demographics more closely reflect the community in which they thrive, even when financial resources for students dwindle. But, I notice best practices that work to ensure more meaningful relationships are developed among networks of schools. I know that schools work to guarantee that financial resources are appropriately allocated for greater student diversity. Finally, I see universities and colleges examining their histories and admitting the sin of the purchase and sale of slaves. During my doctoral work’s Urban education course, I participated in a Courageous Conversations About Race adult discussion group, based on the Singleton and Linton text. Regularly, there was a deep divide among black and white educators in class, because we did not know how to process traumatic experiences of conscious and unconscious racism, along with unresolved feelings that the conversations produced. And despite her best intentions, the professor was unsuccessful at facilitating dialogue. When I return to today, I consider that I work for an organization whose makeup is predominantly male, predominantly of European (Caucasian) descent, and whose primary focus has not been on exploring issues of race, but whose focus is one of a commitment to justice to serve with and for others. So, we collaborate with race experts locally and nationally to create a school survey tool that helps leaders identify patterns and perceptions about decisions and identify components as they relate to race and student achievement. And while the initial draft was wonky and therefore not well received by leadership in our schools, we keep moving ahead – imaging a different iteration of this tool, with broader input. In addition to trying to rework the survey with a group of national diversity directors and aside from scaling down our expectations that schools approach this work wanting to see results of disaggregated data by race to help them understand the experience and the achievement of all students, we continue to be engaged – at the grass-roots level – aiming to built a support system for those working directly with diversity, equity, and inclusion in our schools. We continue to be engaged, despite fumbling and making mistakes that occasionally push us back. Building on the success of participation at conferences nationally and regionally, for the past few years our school directors of diversity support one another during monthly conference calls. And now, in year two, we are engaged in a pilot project of adult Courageous Conversations about Race. But, the excitement I felt earlier in the year about a Courageous Conversations About Race regional conference calls in our province has been tempered a bit recently because of a decrease in participation. Something happened between January and March. Perhaps because it’s springtime and we can’t seem to agree upon a time to have a conversation. Unfortunately, few people in our discussion group wrote race autobiographies (our homework from February), which is a time-consuming, emotionally-draining, and daunting task. And frankly, after talking with people in our group, I realize that uploading these autobiographies to a shared folder online and exposing them to others in the group is difficult. Doing so, we are vulnerable because we get real about our experiences with race . . . perhaps revealing embarrassment, humiliation, anguish, and trauma. This is tough – to be fully present and human (sins and all) with one another. We continue to make mistakes. However, last week I had a glimmer of hope when five of us from across the region did in fact gather by conference call to re-start the conversation, pray with one another, reflect on our overall experiences in the group, and identify the group’s possible obstacles. That day, we spoke more deeply about our written race autobiographies – the processes we used, along with trends we noticed, and conscious and unconscious racism within our narratives and lives. Two take-aways for me, from that discussion are:
I suppose these are truthful insights and reflections from our work. We challenged one another to move from exploring race in our own lives to agree to some data collection points for looking at students by race, in our schools – to keep the spotlight on race (Singleton). And, as Singleton and Linton suggest, we resisted the “natural inclination to move away from the conversation . . . to disengage” (60). We practiced, as they suggested, “being absolutely honest about your thoughts, feelings, and opinions, and not just saying what you perceive others want to hear,” striving to realize that the “solution is revealed in the process of dialogue itself” (64). Leaving the conversation, we agreed to collect student data by race: GPAs, ACT scores, and discipline records (detentions). After collecting that data, we are going to practice looking at it and develop summary statements to share with our group. It’s a start. And perhaps our efforts – though slow and sloppy – provide some insight into how things can unfold with hope, toward change in the future. Here are five key take-aways that could be helpful for any group engaged in conversations about race and student achievement in schools:
Despite obstacles along this journey, I finally take comfort in the prayerful words of Thomas Merton when he writes, “I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.”
1 Comment
Laurie Kohler
4/3/2018 08:19:51 pm
I am surprised and happy to know that a group is still struggling through and yet using Courageous Conversations About Race. The work is slow and humblingly painful. I found the hardest part was to accept the fact that I am learning such impactful things (unconscious bias for one) about myself, when I felt I knew myself pretty well. I still have my race autobiography and every now and again I read it to remind myself of where I came and how those experience are still a part of me - I know I need to make a conscious effort to walk in the opposite direction of where the existing and convenient escalator is set up to take me. I desire for my heart to be pure.
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Pete MussoAssistant Principal, Curriculum & Instruction Archives
May 2022
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