The Words I Needed to Hear

On March 31^st, my great-aunt Virginia Henderson died at the age of 100. Her funeral was held in Camden’s First Nazarene Baptist Church on S. 8^th St, the same church she’d attended for God-knows-how-long, and where her sister, my grandmother Louise Henderson Benson was a loyal attendee and Sunday school and Vacation Bible School administrator. At my Aunt Ginnie’s viewing, as she laid in her casket at the front of the church amidst a sea of pink flowers, on both sides of the church, two giant screens showed photos of my aunt in her younger years as gospel music played in the background.

            The pictures showed my aunt in various stages of her life. A significant amount of those pictures included her interacting with family and another notable amount included photos of my aunt at work as a physical education teacher in Camden’s public schools. She was a teacher in the city she grew up, and lived in, for nearly 40 years… Her sister, Dr. Lottie Johnson was also a teacher here in Camden where she grew up, and lived for a number of decades… Two of my aunts were teachers here in Camden where they grew up, and lived… One of my uncles was a teacher here of 28 years, where he grew up and where his four sons went to school… One of my much older second cousins who is much older than me, thus my “aunt”, taught in Camden where she grew up and lived… My maternal grandmom, Ms. “Keene”, taught in Camden for 42 years, and lived here for 20… My paternal grandmom, Louise Henderson Benson, taught in special education across the river in Philadelphia for about 30 years and retired… Both my mother and father grew up here, and attended Camden’s schools… All of my aunts and uncles, except one, grew up here and attended school here… My wife grew up here and attended school here until 8^th grade… My daughter, who is currently a senior, lives here and attended Camden schools since she was in prekindergarten… I live here, taught here for 14 years, and for four years have had the honor of leading our local union of educators…

            The legacy of public educators I come from, that is highly localized in one urban city, in my case Camden, is very special to my family, but far from unique. Without acdemic literature to cite, but simply knowing my people, here’s what I know: there are few Black persons around that does not have an aunt, grandmom, mom, or cousin who was, or is, in education. Not one. The history behind public education’s meaning to Black families is significant, and complicated, for a variety of reasons. Without going too deep in the historical aspects, I’ll endeavor to keep this part short. For centuries it was illegal for Black people to be educated, to be literate, in vast swaths of the country. For centuries. During Reconstruction, Black people who were fortunate enough to have access to a semblance of formal education, had to attend segregated schools that were supported by local “colored” residents, churches, and community organizations – that is until the 1954 Brown v. Board decision that dismantled de jure racial segregation from public spaces, including public schools. While by law, schools in America have been officially “integrated” for about 65 years, clearly gaps in equity remain. Ending de jure segregation of schools did not achieve educational parity in resources, access to opportunities, or even the assumed outcome of varying races attending schools together. Suffice to it say, we have a long way to go in that regard as the struggle to access the liberatory education we, like every student, deserve continues – still.

            What often gets overlooked in linking the importance of public education, location and Black families is how public education along with other public sector jobs, was the primary mechanism Black people used to secure access to the middle class and professional wages. In urban Black communities certain occupations hold historical prominence in shaping the neighborhoods and spaces we, our families, grew up, claimed, and called home. Barbers, hair dressers, funeral home directors, postal workers, bus drivers, trash collectors, owners of cleaners and laundromats, and teachers helped Black America carve out a slice of middle class living in the midst of rampant discrimination in private sector work and in America’s expanding suburbs.

            Teaching in urban public education, specifically, was one of the rare professions where Black people who earned a college degree could work, putting their education to work. Common it was then, for all the holders of the aforementioned occupations to live, work, and grow their families within the same community. Much has changed since then. Cleaners and laundromats, even in Black communities are no longer exclusively Black owned. Trash collection is no longer managed by cities’ Department of Public Works as privatization of public sector services has become the norm since the emergence of neoliberalism; thus, there has been a shedding of city workers in municipal trash collection along with decreased wages and benefits. Though funeral homes, barbers and hair dressers are still in urban America, collectively, those industries are not enough to sustain neighborhoods on their own. The profession that remained reliable for formally educated blue color urban Black people in terms of access to a decent wage for the practitioners and their families, was in urban public education (Kozol, 1991).

            For two decades, public education in urban America, the largest employers of Black educators, has been under attack thanks to ultra-rich white ideologues who aspire to remake public education and its purpose to fit their whims; and now additionally, a new era of Black education reform cheerleaders. Given America’s disgusting past dealing with non-white populations, specifically in this case, Black people, I can understand and almost expect white people with power working to pick apart one of the remaining avenues of Black access to middle class living. But for the life of me, I can never understand why this new breed of corporate Black reformers would join in such a traitorous act. Sure they have the language, verbiage, and look of people sincerely concerned with Black children and the education they receive in schools, but upon a cursory analysis of who’s message they are forwarding, how that message is subsidized, who are their detractors, and who is hurt by their advocacy, a disturbing picture begins to emerge. For a moment, let’s suspend what we already know about how urban public schools protect low-income residents INCLUDING STUDENTS, from gentrification and displacement; the deep connections communities have with their public schools as generations of families, literally, have passed through the same hallways and had the same teachers; let’s look exclusively at the impact education reformers, including the legion of Black trumpeters has had on Black educators.       

Black teachers, today, make up 7% of the teacher force nationally, with Black men comprising a scant 2%. Most Americans go their entire schooling career never having a Black teacher. Soon after the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision mandating the desegregation of the nation’s public schools, over 38,000 Black teachers and administrators, primarily in the segregated South (Oakley, Stowell, & Logan, 2009; Thompson, 2019), lost their jobs in the single largest event leading to the loss of the Black educators until 2005 – a half century later (Mitchell, 2015).

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans killing and displacing thousands of primarily Black residents and crippling the city’s municipal infrastructure, including its school system. In the days immediately following Hurricane Katrina making landfall, the Louisiana state legislature, advised by the Heritage Foundation, convened and executed legislation that closed nearly all of New Orleans’ public schools and converted the entire public-school system to a Recovery District under state control. This act led to the firing of all of New Orleans’ public schools’ 7,000 teachers; 78% of whom were women and 71% of whom were Black with an average of 15 years teaching experience (Carr, 2015; Felton, 2017). At the time, New Orleans School District had the highest percentage of Black teachers in the country. Corey Mitchell, in “‘Death of My Career’: What Happened to New Orleans’ Veteran Black Teachers (2015)” writes:

Dolce taught at the former Colton Middle in the city’s Faubourg Marigny neighborhood. A community art center in the storm’s aftermath, the campus now houses a Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, charter school.

For thousands of teachers like Dolce, the decision to lay off educators was a financial blow and a deep insult to one of the pillars of the city’s Black middle class. The mass firings—dealt in large measure to African-American women—continue to infuse the debate over the future of public education in New Orleans with a particular bitterness.

Similar events were repeated in other urban public-school districts around the country, but without a catastrophic hurricane prompting such actions.   

In Washington D.C., under the District’s stewardship of The New Teacher Project (TNTP) founder Michelle Rhee, a TFA alum and staunch supporter of both corporate charter schools and increased teacher accountability through mandating increased performance in student test scores, Rhee enjoyed considerable national acclaim for her reformist actions. As schools Chancellor, Rhee appeared on the cover of Newsweek (2008) and Time Magazine (2008) standing in a classroom with a broom in hand, reminding the nation of how she rid DC schools of “bad teachers” who accepted student failure. Rhee also appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show twice in 2010 extolling her radical approaches to boost student achievement and the turnaround she achieved in DC schools by raising expectations and getting rid of bad teachers. The majority of the teachers fired by Rhee were Black women who, in fact, served the school district long before Rhee’s tenure began and were, like in New Orleans, subsequently replaced by predominantly less experienced, white teachers (Turque, 2011; Gathright, 2019).

While the New Jersey Department of Education was run by Broad Foundation alum Chris Cerf, a Governor Chris Christie appointee, both Camden and Newark’s schools were under state takeover. Newark and Camden are urban cities predominantly inhabited by lower-income Black and Latinx residents. During Christie’s time as governor of New Jersey, both cities’ state-appointed superintendents were TFA alums; Cami Anderson in Newark, and Paymon Rouhanifard in Camden. Both served in Michael Bloomberg’s New York City Department of Education under then-chancellor Joel Klein (Benson, 2018). A similar course of events unfolded during their respective tenures in charge. Both superintendents implemented a “common enrollment” system empowering a pro-corporate charter third party organization to artificially cap individual public-school enrollment capacity while guiding students to “available seats” in charter schools through a proprietary software algorithm provided by SchoolMint (Weber, Baker, & Oluwole, 2015). Both superintendents facilitated the sharp increase of corporate charter schools within their districts, as well as the closure of many long-serving neighborhood public schools attended near exclusively by low-income Black and Latinx students (Mooney, 2015). Finally, both districts under Anderson and Rouhanifard saw the jettisoning of primarily experienced Black teachers who had connections to the community either through current or familial residence. Teachers in Newark and Camden, much like those in New Orleans and Washington, D.C., were replaced with younger, whiter, recent college graduates with far less teaching experience (Bonamo, 2014; Danley, 2018; Weber, 2021). Newark went so far as to establish a “Teacher’s Village” in downtown Newark for its arriving corps of TFA members serving in Newark’s public and charter schools (Portlock, 2019). In Camden between 2013 and 2017 under Rouhanifard, 64% of Camden City School District staff who lost their jobs, were black or Latino (Weber, 2021). 

            Dixson, Buras, and Jeffers (2015) point out that many urban charter schools replacing urban public schools employ high numbers of young white college graduates, and white outsiders from TFA, New Leaders for New Schools, and TNTP. Leslie Fenwick of Howard University writes, “These schemes are not designed to cure what ails under-performing schools. They are designed to shift tax dollars away from schools serving Black and Brown students; displace authentic Black leadership; and erode our national commitment to public education” (Fenwick, 2018). Such a radical departure in staffing approaches in urban school districts specifically, has negatively impacted the experienced Black teaching force, and by extension, swaths of the Black middle class upon which the profession secured for generations of college educated Black Americans. Further, the forced departure of Black educators in primarily Black schools explicitly suggested that Black people are unfit to govern and teach local Black children (Dixson, Buras & Jeffers, 2015; Saltman, 2012) .

            Through the education reform movement’s desire to close “failing schools” and weaken teachers unions, it was experienced Black teachers who bore the brunt of their contradictory advocacy which has only gained in strength and diversity that now includes the socially liberal persons of color. And while some critiques of urban public schools are accurate and warrant decisive systemic corrective action, it is simultaneously accurate that the single demographic most impacted by the policies advocated by today’s reformers, both white and Black, are Black educators; specifically, Black women. The systemic shedding of Black teachers from urban public schools, in concert with the rapid proliferation of corporate charters in urban neighborhoods and public school closures, has been referred to as an “educational assault” executed by wealthy white edupreneurs, philanthropies, politicians, and now more recently, the Black education reform cheerleaders, upon low-income minorities with little political power or allies to effectively resist.

Despite the recent advocacy for more teachers of color in America’s classrooms by this new wave of minority education reform advocates, as exemplified through the nationally recognized Sharif el-Mekki, a former Philadelphia Schools principal at and principal at Mastery Charter School in West Philadelphia, and current director of the Center for Black Educator Development (operating under the Black Male Educators for Social Justice whose partners include corporate education reform partners like Relay Graduate School, Mastery Charter School, the Kaufmann Foundation, Rowan University, and Teach for America) neglect to ever connect how their advocacy for education reform policies initiated and exacerbated the hemorrhaging of Black teachers for the past twenty years.

Why the silence from Black reformers on education reform’s role in removing Black teachers from the profession?

Why is this truth so hard to reckon with forthrightly?

Why ignore foundation and philanthropies’ roles in dismantling urban schools where Black teachers work, primarily? Is because those same philanthropies and foundations “cut yall’s checks”?

When are Black reformers going to confront this truth? Or are we supposed to just stay silent and look away as if we don’t know history?

Before I left my late great-aunt’s viewing, one of my “aunts” who I hadn’t seen in years and taught in Camden’s schools for nearly 30 years says: “I’m praying for you and those schools. (Our superintendent, following the footsteps of our prior superintendent, is choosing to close three public schools and displace 1100 elementary students even though our District is getting an additional $175M next year!) You have a legacy to carry on”.

Her words were touching, and she was right. The legacy of Black educators and communities connected to urban public schools is absolute and authentic. I don’t expect some people to “get it”. I don’t expect some people to understand. But this is a legacy we’ll have to fight for and a legacy worth fighting for… and it is confoundingly frustrating that some of our “own people” are part of those who are trying to dismantle it.  

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