Black Educational Leadership

From Silencing to Authenticity

Rachelle Rogers-Ard, Christopher B. Knaus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367466169
• eBook ISBN: 9781000197754
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book explores Black educational leadership and the development of anti-racist, purpose-driven leadership identities. Recognizing that schools within the United States maintain racial disparities, the authors highlight Black leaders who transform school systems. With a focus on 13 leaders, this volume demonstrates how US schools exclude African American students and the impacts such exclusions have on Black school leaders. It clarifies parallel racism along the pathway to becoming teachers and school leaders, framing an educational pipeline designed to silence and mold educators into perpetrators of educational disparities. This book is designed for district administrators as well as faculty and students in Race and Ethnicity in Education, Urban Education, and Educational Leadership.

1
Black Leadership within Anti-Black Schools

“It’s a war for the souls of our children.”

– André (High School Principal)

The scream-song sound of children playing in the school’s courtyard had slowly resided, as children reluctantly dragged their backpacks towards their parents’ waiting cars. One lone child remained behind, however, and Rosie ruefully shook her head, knowing the routine to come. As she rushed down the stairs to meet the child with open arms, the child, maybe eight years young, jumped to her. Rosie caught the boy, swung him in two full circles, and then landed him next to her while still holding his hand. She walked him into her office, where the principal chatted with the Parent Teachers Association (PTA) representative. Rosie walked past the two white women and guided the young boy into a chair in her office, then placed a book in his hands faster than the two white women could roll their eyes.

The only Black administrator—and just one of three Black people out of 37 employed at the 35% Black-enrolled elementary school—Rosie was used to adults dismissing children who sometimes did not have a family member pick them up on time. Rosie was also aware of the many systemic reasons that led to the children being picked up later than was convenient for the majority of white teachers and administrators, who rushed home as soon as possible after school. The continuously high unemployment rates, the history of redlining to exclude Black home ownership, the lack of a reliable mass-transit system, the gentrification pushing Black families farther from their children’s schools; Rosie knew well that poverty and racism directly shaped the reality that some Black parents were not able to pick up their children at exactly 4:30 each afternoon. But what frustrated Rosie the most was the rolling of the eyes, the white dismissal of children and families navigating a racist, unequal, often hurtful world by the very educators paid to support them.

This white dismissal of Black children had been built upon a foundation that Rosie had long been used to. As a self-identified Black butch queer New Yorker, Rosie had a rough landing in the Bay Area, which she had thought was progressive and more open to Black and queer people. But after a decade as an administrator in the whiteness of Bay Area schools, Rosie was burnt out. “I was just taking care of a lot of white teachers,” Rosie reflected, “and never fully taking care of myself, or even really the children, cause of what they had to face from their teachers.” Rosie had forged a culture of affirmation for the majority Black and Latinx students, but creating and maintaining a positive climate within a largely anti-Black staff and community took a toll on her health. Ultimately, Rosie decided that the toxicity of white-led schools was simply too much.

It’s really about being proactive and asking yourself, “How can I be my best self to serve?” And that’s a question that I’ve never asked myself because I was always good at it, so I just did it. But I didn’t ask about the self-preservation, I didn’t think about the longevity. Because I was like spoiled saying, “Man, I’m good at this, I’ve got this on lock, so I’m good, I’m just gonna keep going the way I’m going.” And then Bam! I’m in the hospital getting a foot chopped out of my colon.

Rosie spent much of her eleventh year as an educator laying on her couch recovering from stress-induced body trauma and corrective surgeries, which gave her time to think about being an educator in spaces designed to silence who and how she is.

“I think part of it, too,” Rosie reflected, “is that you keep looking for a silver bullet. I know that was part of my own ignorance. You’re looking for that school [that cares for children of color]. And it doesn’t exist.” Shortly after recovering, Rosie finished out her academic year and then stepped away from schools. She relocated back home to New York and spent a year re-evaluating her professional options. With 15 years of professional leadership that included being a school leader, Rosie had faced too much cumulative toxic stress. After years of being the only Black school administrator in a white-centric school system—which is to say, any public school system in the United States—Rosie’s body forced her to accept what she already knew.

I mean I know the academic side of it really well, I know the literature, I know the research, I live the experience. But to deal with that all, I really had to get spiritually zoned in, which is definitely a work in progress. It’s another reason why I’m moving home. My parents are very, very active in the Baháʼí community. And I’m going home to learn from them and heal, too.

We open this book on Black¹ educational leaders with Rosie leaving school administration to find a space of healing in order to thoroughly frame the impact of Black leadership within white-framed schools. Rosie did not leave schools until cumulative stressors and intersectional racism impacted her body to the point of debilitation.

While many teachers leave before this damage is done, recognizing the toxicity within their first few years of teaching, many who join the ranks of administration eventually internalize these racialized stressors in their bodies, hearts, and minds. Our focus is on Black educators like Rosie—committed to equity and justice, to culturally responsive approaches, to critical care of children and families of color—and also interested in leading effectively, in creating schools that help children learn how to navigate and transform society to address our environmental, social, economic, and violently destructive ways. And we begin with Rosie’s need for healing as a foundation to explore school leadership within a context of violence that specifically targets Black educational leaders.

Through our own professional and personal lived experience, we have come to know well how toxic educational spaces intentionally enact demeaning violence upon women, people of color, and most particularly, women of color. The African American and Black students who attend schools in large urban centers across the US are often mentored by the few isolated women and men of color who desegregate predominantly white faculties; these students grow up living violence as a normalized, othering everyday reality in schools. Black students are taught to embrace demeaning, dismissive values, to tolerate societal oppression, the violent devaluation of women of color, the violent policing of Black youth, all while being told to be strong, to excel, to rely on personal grit to overcome via a silent, subservient acquiescence to the day-to-day violence against young people’s humanity.

Yet this book is not a primer for well-meaning white educators, professors, or educational leaders. Indeed, our focus is not to help colleges of education more effectively prepare leaders to better manage Black educators. Our aim is not to encourage districts to offer more professional development or one-off speakers who challenge the mainstream on Friday afternoon from 3 to 4:30 pm, only to return to the same systemic silencing on Monday. To be sure, we ground our fundamental argument in the belief that school systems are designed to silence children and educators of color (Knaus, 2011). Thus, in order to survive the continual attacks against Black people, people of color, poor people, people with disabilities, the full spectrum of queer and trans communities, indeed, even against our planet, we must transform educational systems (Love, 2019). Since we have not yet transformed systems, though, authentic Black leadership within oppressive systems is not sustainable. This argument builds upon critical race theory’s notion of the permanence of racism, reflecting ongoing Black leadership that has continually challenged schools as intentionally maintaining whiteness that, in turn, is designed to silence Blackness (Capper, 2015; Khalifa, Dunbar, & Douglas, 2013).

We offer a challenge to the ongoing recruitment of Black (and of color) educators and leaders as necessary but insufficient, with a caveat on longevity and well-being of the educators being recruited into toxic, anti-Black systems. Because of the pervasive intersectional oppression that operates as the foundations of school and district practice, school systems are not sustainable for authentic, healthy Black educational leaders. In turn, this systemic critique poses challenges for district and college efforts for recruitment—for who benefits when Black educators are retained within systems that ultimately cause them harm? Indeed, what does retention look like when the longer one stays within a leadership role, the more racism operates like a cancer, causing real bodily harm to educational leaders of color, particularly Black women? The vast literature on Black women’s health disparities directly links racism and poverty to shortened life spans, and the socioeconomic benefits of climbing the leadership ladder do not seem to impact survival or health rates, as the pain of navigating racially hostile climates accumulates in Black bodies (Assari, 2018a, 2018b; Love, 2019).

Our focus centers the Black educators who continually recommit to nurturing a critical presence, to navigating the onslaught against their humanity. We center Black leaders to increase awareness of personal strategies to survive and transform societal attacks against Black communities. We highlight Black leaders who intentionally persist through the same violent anti-Black context specifically so that they can push back, create pockets of resistance, so that they can position themselves as change agents with what André’s opening quote names: the war for the souls of children. We center the experiences of critical Black leaders precisely because, like Rosie, such leaders are systematically silenced; many are pushed out well before they can become school leaders. The pushout process for many would-be educators and school leaders begins before school, in newly gentrifying communities that economically exclude Black families. And this process continues across the P-20 spectrum, culminating for many in high school, when students of color simply choose to no longer accept racism and sexism as the foundation for learning. We are thus concerned with and committed to Black educators who remain in their local schools despite gentrification pressures that geographically push them further from their children. In particular, we are concerned with those who move from classrooms to school buildings and district offices, in full recognition of the systemic nature of the war against the souls of Black children.

In what comes next, we clarify how US schools perpetuate anti-Blackness as part of the fabric of education. We then analyze racism along the pathway to becoming teachers and school leaders, framing an intentional educational pathway designed to silence and mold educators into perpetrators of an educational war against Black children and communities. We apply a critical race theory approach to overview Black school leadership within the everyday operation of colonial schools, illustrating how critical race theory can be applied to shape conversations around authenticity within racially hostile school systems. We then situate Black educational leaders as intellectual guides and critical voices in the fight against schooling as the primary method of sustaining intellectual, cultural, and social white supremacy. This chapter thus aims to provide intellectual hope for explaining and responding to Rosie’s prioritization of her health and survival, and offers a shift from her leaving the field after over a decade as a clarion call to transform school systems immediately. Until we transform the way the US thinks of schools, educational leaders will remain predominantly white precisely because of the toxicity Black children and Black educators face as they simply survive within school systems that value, affirm, assert, and normalize whiteness.

US Schooling as Anti-Blackness

To clarify the complexity of Black educators who intentionally occupy leadership roles in opposition to the colonial intent of US school systems, we begin with the historic purpose of schooling in the US. The enslavement of millions of Africans at the hands of intentionally oppressive European settlers provided a foundation for recognizing that, to the US government and wealthy whites, the existence of Black people has been framed as an economic benefit to white people (Dancy, 2013). Indeed, Black people were brought to the US to serve white people, so that white people did not have to work as hard for dramatic economic benefit, and ultimately, schools were created to teach this subservience (Freire, 1970; Woodson, 1933/1990). While many have argued that the United States has not spent sufficient time engaging in honest reflection on the lingering problem of racism (hooks, 2003; Taylor, 2016), this lack of thorough engagement reflects an intentional outcome of formal education in the US (Macedo, 1994). Schools in the US were founded upon the socially constructed principle that white people, and particularly white men, are far superior to everyone else, and far superior at just about everything (Dyer, 1997; Lipsitz, 1998; Mills, 1997). This notion of white supremacy has been implemented as an ideology through US schools (Epstein, 2008; Macedo, 1994; Valenzuela, 1999); indeed, we take as a central assumption that without schools, racism would not have been justified and implemented so effectively, across the past several hundred years and into the foreseeable future. In short, the colonial purpose of schools, resisted across untold classrooms and communities, retains an intentional fostering of white supremacy and anti-Black racism (Love, 2019).

The white supremacy upon which the US was founded similarly remains the foundation for public schooling within the United States, shaping curriculum, pedagogy, school design and scheduling, and processes for professional certifications needed for entry and career success (Au, Brown, & Calderón, 2016; Knaus & Brown, 2018; Sleeter, 2012). Thus, the dramatic, sustained educational inequalities and inequities in the provision of all aspects of schooling, despite continued documentation raising alarms over the past centuries, aligns with the white supremacist purpose of schooling (Spring, 2018). The US has historically excluded those not socially or legally defined as white from schools across its history, including Italians, Jews, Polish, Irish, and especially indigenous, Latinx, African Americans, women, those variously defined as poor, and a host of children often derisively classified as students with disabilities (Lipsitz, 1998; Spring, 2018). Individuals and communities have fought for access into these racist school systems, knowing full well that school success increases opportunities for economic wealth, even if such wealth is limited in comparison to whites (Lipsitz, 1998; McLaren, 1999).

As some racialized groups were eventually granted inclusion into schools, and, in turn, were re-constructed politically to be considered white, African Americans, however, along with indigenous communities, have not been fully integrated into the scope and sequence of public education (Ignatiev, 2009; Sleeter, 2012). Indeed, schools have intentionally maintained a colonizing mission. The first schools served as the primary method of enforcing intellectual, cultural, linguistic, and social acquiescence to whiteness, with indigenous nations (including Mexicanos in what was then Mexico) being violently forced to tolerate colonial schooling, with rape, molestation, and torture a daily part of attendance (Adams, 1995; Spring, 2018). Meanwhile, Black people, enslaved to provide the economic foundation the US continues to thrive upon, were forcibly kept from participating in early colonial schooling systems, instead resorting to clandestine classrooms, hidden from the white people who would otherwise punish Black learning (Williams, 2005). The US justified this differential access through the continual need for free (and later, cheap) labor, demonstrating a commitment to ensuring Black people not be included in the American project (Singh, 2004). Thus, schools were assimilationist tools, intentionally melting all cultures into one—focused on capitalistic greed and individualism framed as freedom (Macedo & Bartolomé, 1999).

From the inception of schools, those excluded by law or by practice were framed as uncivilized and uneducable (Spring, 2018; Woodson, 1933/1990). Today, students who remove themselves or are removed by educators are discussed in similarly dismissive language, with exclusion from schools justified by zero-tolerance disciplinary policies meant to police Black behavior that does not reinforce whiteness (Caton, 2012; Love, 2019; Payne & Brown, 2010). For many students of color, particularly African Americans, leaving school before graduating is frequently due to the simple reality that they do not have positive experiences in school (Goodman & Hilton, 2013; Knaus, 2011; Rumberger, 2004; Vega et al., 2012).

The sinister intentionality of the US purpose of schools is thus an intentional denial of cultural history, language, oppression, and ultimately, humanity for all but those socially, legally, and politically determined to be worthy, which is to say, accepted by whites (Epstein, 2008; Woodson, 1933/1990). This denial has directly tied to early definitions of educational and intellectual success, which frame just about everything white as good and everything Black as negative (Dyer, 1997). Let us be clear—challenges to the globally oppressive nature of whiteness are not new. As Richard Wright (1956) argued over 60 years ago,

The systems and the manners of it have varied, but there has not been a Western colonial regime which has not imposed, to a greater or lesser degree, on the people it ruled the doctrine of their own racial inferiority.

(p. 151)

It is no coincidence that the first feature-length film in the US, The Birth of a Nation, depicted Black people in horribly offensive caricatures, just as the nation was implementing what became known as public schools. Thus, while racially privileged, segregated schools were created to instill racist beliefs in white children, less-resourced schools—equally segregated—were created to instill internalized racism into Black children (Watkins, 2001). Meanwhile, the nation touted efforts to keep whites adhering to white supremacy, in part through stereotypical Black images, conjured for the sole purpose of convincing white people that they are, at a minimum, better than Black people (hooks, 1996). While corporate mass media has continued its anti-Black mission, schools have been implemented as the default societal tool to ensure adherence to what Mills (1997) refers to as the Racial Contract, the social commitment to dolling out economic, housing, food, and health supports only when in the service of white supremacy.

James Baldwin (1985) further argued, “ . . . the history and the situation of Black people in this country amounts to an indictment of America’s legal and moral history” (p. 13). Our purpose is not to clarify this indictment in full, as that has been done comprehensively elsewhere. Our focus instead is to frame, as a foundation, the role of schools in the US as the central means through which whiteness has developed in direct opposition to Blackness. This foundation has led to the implementation of measurements of success at school that intentionally align with white, middle-class linguistic codes and norms, extending the Eugenics movement through the arm of schooling designed to convince multiple language speakers, recent immigrants, and in particular, indigenous and Black people that who they are, how they think, and why they even exist should be challenged by the day-to-day of what is commonly referred to as schooling (Au, 2009; Delpit, 2012; Rogers-Ard & Knaus, 2013).

A tangible result of this intentional dismissal of Black thought, language, experience, and reality is systemic silencing of Black people through legally enforced participation in schools. Indeed, public education in the United States was designed to question the very existence of African American thought, thus requiring a curriculum, pedagogy, and school design that systemically silences Black children and educators alike (Knaus, 2019). Thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figure and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword: Black Leadership in the Uncertain Time of Now
• Introduction
• 1 Black Leadership within Anti-Black Schools
• 2 This Is Who We Are
• 3 But I Don’t Want to be a Principal: Intersectional Racism and Black Leadership Pathways
• 4 They Don’t See Our Babies
• 5 They Don’t See Me: Coping and the Double Duty of Authenticity
• 6 This Is How We Do: Authentic Leadership
• Epilogue: Where Are They Now?
• References
• Index