Winsome Waite, The Opportunity Institute & Rachel Mayes, Southern Echo
In Mississippi, as in much of the United States, the re-opening of schools has been a study in contradictions: bus driver shortages amid huge federal investments in public education; bitter and uninformed backlashes against vaccination policies and “Critical Race Theory” amid broad consensus that students need positive and supportive learning environments. Recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results showed Mississippi’s commendable gains in reading and mathematics but lost their shine with the familiar and persistent race-based disparities reflected in those scores.
With the highest overall poverty rate in the nation, familiar divides persist among the wealthy and the poor in Mississippi. More politically connected communities thrive while lower-income areas worry whether the electrical grid will hold up to the first freeze, or how much longer their children will have to drink lead-tainted water. To be fair, much of this can also be seen at a national level: even in the worst of the pandemic, while poorer communities of color struggled to keep the electricity on, the national economy was busy minting new waves of white billionaires. Some billionaires even decided to shoot themselves into space to keep busy.
The Hard Truth about Progress in Education
Back on earth, those of us who sat through webinars and presentations watched a bevy of national experts, better known for giving sound bites about “transforming education” than for offering much in the way of actual help, talk briefly about the depth and reach of race-based entrenchment and inequity before quickly transitioning to easy platitudes and truisms. The mind boggles to consider what would happen if they and the Rocketeers got together to focus on the real-life challenges of providing just and equitable learning opportunities for all children.
In reflecting on inequity, it is worth remembering that our collective “mixed bag” of school reopening experience is not by accident – it is by design. To change the design will require a good deal more than merely writing, delivering remarks, and pushing reports and toolkits out to those who have the responsibility of “doing.”
It's not just the experts on webinars, either. Far too many education and government leaders continue to believe that simply making funds available for impacted communities will be sufficient to “fix” longstanding inequities. Particularly in COVID-ravaged communities, there is no question that federal rescue funding through the American Rescue Plan, the CARES Act, and related legislation was essential. There is also no question that inadequate attention has been given to how this funding can be used to uproot racial inequalities by strategically addressing the full range of needs of young people in places like the Mississippi Delta.
Of course, there was insufficient time, given the urgency and lethality of the pandemic and the tight timeframes in which districts had to develop plans for use of the federal Elementary and Secondary Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds, to strategically target the use of these funds on eradicating the various pernicious manifestations of American racism. Still, a good portion –most, even most of this failure is attributable not to the urgent timeframes of the pandemic but to ongoing, built-in systemic factors.
When those in charge of allocating resources are those who have benefitted personally from the uneven playing field, it is hard to envision funds being used to comprehensively support low-income communities of color. While there are indeed leaders willing to undertake the challenging work of advancing equity in underserved communities, they are working amid great and urgent need, with severe time constraints, limited staffing capacity, and intractable state and federal bureaucracies. Most do not last long in their positions.
This is why, as we say in our work, “it takes a village”: more people in positions of power, those with knowledge, expertise, and resources, must undertake the difficult work of more actively supporting the implementation of policy. Even those in research must begin to connect more deeply with the work in school districts and communities. We must get beyond merely talking about breaking down silos; we must collaborate as a community in the actual doing of the work.
A More Equitable Path
Even well-intentioned policy and ample funding, when disconnected from local priorities and knowledge of actual conditions and practices, do not create equitable change. Our states and localities are littered with examples of good policy gone stale due to lack of attention to people and practice.
The work of Southern Echo and the Opportunity Institute in Mississippi is to bring together policymakers, education leaders, and community to better connect broad-scale work with local needs and assets. “Transformation” in public education is indeed possible, but only with a deliberate focus on money, mindset, and movement.
Listening Carefully to Community
Over the past few months, our organizations have engaged in a series of listening sessions with families, youth, community members, educators, and businesses in Sunflower County. From this work, we are learning what individuals at a local level are prioritizing with regards to education. They want closer partnerships with schools, more resources within the community, opportunities for workforce training and sustainable employment, and a major focus on adolescents and teenagers – those in school and those that have dropped out. They want to center equity in all of this to ensure schools do not return to the old ways that did not work for many of their children.
The basic idea of “whole child” education – that the success of the system is tied to meeting the full array of students’ learning and developmental needs – is the essential premise of our work. We are excited to be partnering with superintendents, school administrators, community, and business leaders in Sunflower County to support the “whole child,” and aim to do the same with other low-income school districts in the state and elsewhere. The alternative —empty platitudes—should no longer be an option.