Fighting for Fair Education

Banner photo by Aedrian on Unsplash

When schools rushed to switch to remote learning in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, students struggled to adjust to the new normal of learning via Zoom and Google Classroom—that was, if they were able to even access those platforms.

Many US students, a disproportionate number of whom are students of color, lack computers or the internet at home. And while some schools have loaned devices or assisted families with securing internet access, many children are still without essential technology nearly a year later. In December, the Boston Globe reported that about a quarter of the 16,000 students enrolled in Boston public high schools didn’t log in to their courses at all in the fall, and subject failure rates among Boston’s middle and high school students spiked almost 6 percent, with the biggest increases seen in Black and Latinx students.

“The pandemic has highlighted the inequities that we have long had in our society and in our education systems,” says Colin Rose, who cofounded BlackPrint, a Massachusetts-based education consulting company that provides training and resources to districts, schools, and other educational organizations to help them promote equity for students of African and/or indigenous descent. Before starting BlackPrint in 2019, Rose (’01, COM’03, Wheelock’05) spent four years as an assistant superintendent in the Boston Public Schools (BPS) Office of Opportunity Gaps.

“We are saddled with education systems that weren’t designed for the diversity that we have in this country,” he says.

In Boston, more than 60 percent of teachers are white, while the student population is more than 80 percent Black, Latinx, and Asian. Rose says he has often observed signs of “a cultural disconnect, a lack of understanding,” from faculty and staff toward students, manifesting itself in biases brought into classrooms and structural oppression built into grading systems, lessons, and learning materials. Those problems are compounded, he says, by a lack of funding for schools in low-income communities.

During the pandemic, all of these issues, and the racism that underlies them, have been laid more starkly bare for school districts across Massachusetts—and the country. Rose is fighting to fix them by helping schools improve their cultural awareness.

Relationships Matter

Although Rose cofounded BlackPrint in December 2019 with the goal of effecting change beyond Boston’s schools, the coronavirus pandemic kept him at BPS a few months longer than planned as he helped it navigate a period of unprecedented disruption. Many BPS schools faced the same problem in the wake of the pandemic: they didn’t have contact information for families and knew nothing of their students’ living situations. He says those schools had failed to forge necessary connections with their students’ families. If building those relationships was important before the pandemic, it’s become especially important in the context of it.

“The schools that had already done the work of relationship building in their communities I think have fared a lot better during the pandemic, being able to make important connections and continue their relationship with parents and students. So, the pandemic, if anything, kind of reinforces the importance of the work we’re doing.”

Pushing schools to make those connections is work Rose is continuing at BlackPrint. The first contract he landed was with the commonwealth of Massachusetts to work with leadership teams from 16 school districts to develop policies and structures that create equitable learning environments.

Rose, who grew up in Rockville, Conn., a working-class mill town where he witnessed racial and socioeconomic inequality, says educators need to think beyond the classroom and get involved in their students’ communities. He recommends they reach out and meet with parents, ask questions to get a better sense of where their students come from, the needs they have, and the strengths they bring.

“Maybe it’s a case where you finally get devices to students, but then those students don’t have high-speed internet,” he says. “It’s layer upon layer of barriers for children.”

Since September, Rose has been taking those 16 Massachusetts school districts through a professional development program he and BlackPrint founder Hayden Frederick-Clarke, a former BPS colleague, created called the Culturally Responsive Practice Leadership Academy. The academy lasts three years, with year one dedicated to identifying and meeting smaller, more quickly achievable goals, such as examining curricula for bias, and building the districts’ capacity to take on their longer-term goals. Those longer-term goals include creating systemic plans to help faculty and staff enact culturally responsive practices.

They also help them navigate school and district bureaucracies—something Rose often found himself battling when he pushed for change during his teaching career.

“In my experiences at BPS, both as a teacher and in the central offices, the structures often aren’t there in the districts,” Rose says. “Folks who really want to do the work, and even attempt to do the work, sometimes they’re ostracized, sometimes even marked down because they’re not necessarily in line with the status quo nature of central offices and strategic plans.”

Rose says the program begins with helping participants understand systemic biases before tackling personal biases. The professional development topics they cover range from the different forms of bias, the construct of race, and intersectionality, as well as an introduction to tools that help facilitate equity in planning and execution from central offices to the classroom.

When Rose landed in the central offices of BPS, he found deep-rooted issues—even the name of his office, previously called the Office of Achievement Gaps, was problematic.

“I think ‘achievement gap’ points a finger on the students,” Rose says, “but it’s really the opportunities that we give them that will determine whether they’re successful people.”

His first act was to change the department name. Rose, who previously taught for 10 years at Lewis Middle School in Roxbury, Mass., grew the Office of Opportunity Gaps from “an army of one. It was me and a computer, and practically no budget,” he says, to a fully staffed unit with more than $10 million in funding. He also developed Opportunity Index—a tool to measure which schools are in greater need of financial support—and a set of competencies called Culturally and Linguistically Sustaining Practices. Those measures guide faculty and staff in considering their students’ diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences, and in using that knowledge to inform their everyday actions and forge stronger relationships with students, their families, and communities.

Increasing that cultural awareness is something he’s continuing to emphasize to his BlackPrint clients, who also include individual schools and nonprofits.

In Lawrence, Mass., BlackPrint is working with the public schools on culturally responsive practices with English Learners (ELs). The goal is to help end the cultural disconnect between a predominately white teaching staff and a majority minority student population by building EL curricula that are more responsive to the students and their cultures. That begins, Rose says, with understanding, connecting with, and respecting the communities the students come from. Hiring teachers who reflect the communities the schools teach is important, too.

“There is a lot of research on the impact of having even one teacher that looks like you on a student’s performance,” says Rose. “You’re one-third more likely to graduate high school just from having one teacher that looks like you. It’s a major issue that we were working on in Boston, and it’s going to be a major issue for all these districts. We are thinking about how you bring in more teachers that share the experiences of the students.”

Define the Work, Do the Work

Rose says that he and Frederick-Clarke are trying to leverage the momentum from last summer’s so-called racial reckoning, characterized by protests against police brutality toward people of color in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. “We’ve been here multiple times in our history, where there have been awakenings, then there’s been reaction, and eventually people get ‘fatigued,’ but we are definitely trying to build off of it,” he says.

Part of that is working with school districts to help them understand what it means to be antiracist.

“Just because you have the want to be antiracist doesn’t mean you have a grasp of what that actually means,” Rose says. Noted scholar on antiracism Ibram X. Kendi, BU’s Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, defines the term in his book, How to Be an Antiracist, as “one who is expressing the idea that racial groups are equals and none needs developing, and is supporting policy that reduces racial inequity.” Antiracist practices, Rose maintains, can be worked into any curriculum.

“It’s showing students how the world works, how we got here as a country, as a city, bringing in the understanding of the kind of power dynamics in our society. Those are all things that we could connect to any content in school, from mathematics to history.”

That’s a concept he tried to push at BPS, and something that he’s now emphasizing to districts around the state.

“We’re looking at the curriculum, trying to make it more culturally responsive, or antiracist—whatever you’d like to call it,” says Rose. “I don’t necessarily subscribe to one definition. What’s important is that folks adopt a definition, understand its groundings and why they are using it, and then get to the work of operationalizing it in their context. The work we’re doing with these school districts is not easy. If it was easy, then people would be doing it. So, let’s just define it and take action.”