Does Injustice Begin in Schools?
In more ways than one, it’s a time of reckoning for American education.
Just as the COVID crisis has forced us to re-consider the very structures of learning in the US, citizens have taken to the streets in frustration with systemic power relationships.
What role do schools have in engineering power hierarchies?
Caroline Hill works with school systems at the intersection of education, innovation and equity. Through design thinking, she helps education leaders to question relationships between the powerful and the powerless, engaging marginalized stakeholders as agents in their own transformation.
If our school systems and our education system is supposed to feed our democracy, or become a microcosm of it, then what is it that kids need to learn and be able to do?
I think there’s some implicit silent thread throughout our entire culture that says it’s more important to get ahead than it is to get along.
And I think explicit instruction around community is needed…to prioritize getting along more than getting ahead…or at least figure out a way to pair them. I think we’re smart enough and we have enough wisdom and knowledge and ingenuity to figure out how to do both so that the way that we live doesn’t have to hurt other people.
That’s the opportunity that education has in this moment to really push students and think about:
What is the right way to live?
How do we do it?
And how do we do it in a way that doesn’t hurt or rob the dignity of other people?
And then, working backwards form that the desired outcomes…what do we need to learn about the natural world, about mathematics or other subjects to make those things happen? What new ways of working or new technologies might we need?
It’s not an either or.
It’s a both and.
And then, forward thinking, what is the future that we want to see?
What is the future that is bold, that is exciting, that is invigorating…that we might not have seen before at a grand scale in this country?
And, then, what does the school have to look like, sound like, feel like to get students there?
I think that we have a kind of a cultural mantra that says “you know and then you do.” But I think in this moment we should think: we do to know.
How do we start doing things on a small scale, with reduced risk, to learn and to know?
I think that what I’ve seen is when the risk to fail or the permission to fail is giving people feel that they can try new things.
I was a school leader in a time of the big charter movement in Washington DC. I think the folks who were spearheading that movement at the time, we all had really big ideas about transforming the lives of young people.
But as a principal in real time, I realized that the schools that were being designed — and I was guilty of this — were for people like me, not necessarily the kids who we were working with. That was both an intellectual and spiritual and professional reckoning for myself. So, I started on this venture about how then do we help people redesign schools actually for the kids that are in the schools?
And then what I noticed was, in order to do that, we have to change our position as leaders, we have to be proximate to those who have been historically excluded and marginalized, we have to design schools with them andnot necessarily for them.
What it looks like, on the ground, is building the capacities of those people who think they don’t have any capacity, reminding them that they have the power and the privilege to lead in their own way. They have voices that need to be heard.
And I think that this is an important time and space. While I understand and know that the fear and uncertainty can make people say we’ve got to be super rigid in standards…I think this is also a time and space to say we’ve never been here before, we know that our collective intelligence will help us figure it out, we need to, one, democratize that and allow everyone to help figure it out and do small things and kind of create schools as labs.
What did we learn?
What do we want to scale up?
What do we want to trash?
What do we want to tinker with?
Have that be the way we develop knowledge — by actually doing things.
But doing in a way that the risk is minimized, so you have more people who are able to take on the risk.
I think for the folks who are in power and privilege, whether you are a school leader or a superintendent, it’s how you walk with them…
How do you give people space and a chance to administrate their humanity and their dignity? Ultimately, its the work of the people with the most power and privilege, not those without. It’s getting the powerful folks to understand this is the impact of your behavior. I know it’s not your intent but it’s the impact. So, let’s take some small baby steps to change your behavior and then let’s see what happens…having school leaders, and people in schools, get close to the most marginalized and excluded and silenced students, understanding their experience and trying to figure out:
What has to be true for it to change?
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