Acknowledging a Crisis BY DECOTEAU J. IRBY/School Administrator, April 2022

Decoteau Irby, an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of Stuck Improving: Racial Equity and School Leadership (Harvard Education Press, 2022). PHOTO BY OCEOLOA MUHAMMAD

In Milwaukee Public Schools, the push to expose people to leadership for equity started in earnest in 2016. At the time, Latish Reed, Milwaukee’s professional development manager and an adjunct professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, was the district’s first equity specialist. She developed the district’s equity policy and implementation procedures and revised its non-discrimination policy to be gender inclusive.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic two years ago, she has seen more equity leadership in action than ever before. “In the five or so years before the pandemic hit, it was about understanding and learning,” she says. “We did a lot of trainings. The pandemic ripped the Band-Aid off and shifted us into practicing equity.”

Paying closer attention to students’ experiences and considering the people behind the numbers has been important to the district’s efforts.

“It’s about responding to people’s conditions,” Reed says. “Saying our district has a large number of free-and-reduced-price lunch-eligible students is different than acknowledging that families don’t have a way to get meals. When schools closed, we served families. … I witnessed a spirit and practice of compassion toward children and families that exceeded compliance.”

She adds: “Before the pandemic, it was a lot of debate in our district. People said things like ‘we can’t let students take home our technology. The equipment is going to get messed up.’ Some people said this or that couldn’t be done. Or that it shouldn’t be done. Well, we immediately put plans into place to ensure students had a device to learn at home.”

How might education leaders ensure the many things that people have said couldn’t or shouldn’t be done in the name of racial equity persist beyond the pandemic?

Acknowledging Certainty

In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the challenges of virtual schooling sank in and educators prepared to extend shutdowns until the end of the year, social media users began circulating a clip of white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of and killing George Floyd. The video jolted the world.

Between May and August 2020, everyday people hit the streets in protest and remembrance of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, Ahmaud Arbery and many others. They protested despite COVID-19 stay-at-home orders and social distancing mandates and in the face of police repression and violent counter demonstrations led by far-right militias, social movements and individuals, according to a 2021 report by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project titled “A Year of Racial Justice Protests: Key Trends in Demonstrations Supporting the BLM Movement.”

The numbers and geographic and racial diversity of protestors made the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests the largest in U.S. history, according to reporting by The New York Times, and set into motion what Stanford sociology professor Douglas McAdam, in a newspaper interview, called “a period of significant, sustained and widespread social, political change … that is as rare in society as it is potentially consequential.”

Two years later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has documented COVID-19 infections among 51.6 million people in the United States with the coronavirus claiming more than 876,000 lives. At the end of 2021, Pew Center for Research polling showed more than seven in 10 adult Americans personally knew someone who had been hospitalized or died due to COVID-19, including a staggering 82 percent among Blacks and 78 percent among Latinx adults.

While the numbers that account for the devastation of COVID are familiar, the toll of racial injustice on the lives of children remains unaccounted for even while many schools are under attack for their efforts to challenge racial injustice.

Ensuring schools thrive beyond the pandemic will require us to pay closer attention to some of the crisis leadership that has emerged in the past two years.

A Crisis Response

Keisha Scarlett, assistant superintendent of academics for the Seattle Public Schools, believes much of the leadership she witnessed during the pandemic exemplifies practices racial equity leaders have long championed.

One such example is family engagement, an essential component of meeting students’ needs. Educators don’t always think positively about families of students with the greatest needs, who happen to be Black and Brown.

In regard to these students’ families, Scarlett says all of a sudden “we needed them — to turn on computers, to log students in. We re-lied on them as partners. And we need to continue relying on families” in ways that were not the norm before schools shut down.

Christopher Thomas, former elementary school principal in Seattle, concedes that the pandemic was eye-opening for him in terms of thinking about what he could do to strengthen relationships schools have with families.

“Before the COVID-19 school closures, our school had family-oriented activities every day after school,” says Thomas, now a leadership coach. “We teamed with community organizations. We held listening sessions. But when we distributed computers to our most marginalized families, it really helped us understand whose and what needs we were not meeting. We had conversations with families we had never had before.”

While “parents valued computers, a tangible resource, the main resource the school hadn’t extended to students and families was trust,” he adds. “Moving forward, we need to create spaces for healing from mistrust. And leaders need to be thoughtful about planning these spaces with students at the center.”

Capacity for Impact

Districts such as Milwaukee and Seattle started their equity efforts years before the onset of the 2020 pandemic and racial justice pro-tests. Consequently, these districts had the capacity to level up their racial equity efforts.

Reed in Milwaukee acknowledges how past commitments to equity helped them through the shutdown. “Just before the pandemic hit, I moved to professional development to make virtual professional learning more prominent. What do you know?” she says. “This became our only way to do professional learning for teachers and students. Was it perfect? No. But I watched adults embrace technology in ways that we previously had not. It does not replace in-person, but the tools helped us reach students differently. That should continue.”

Similarly, Scarlett attributes much of the success in Seattle during the pandemic to the fact that the structures and routines to succeed in a crisis situation predated the pandemic. This is because her district treated racial inequity itself as a crisis.

During the pandemic, Mia Williams, Seattle’s assistant superintendent of African-American male achievement, delegated an internal team to do direct outreach to African-American families to inquire about technology needs. Her office was established in 2019 when she was named executive director of Seattle’s department of African-American male achievement.

At Seattle’s Cleveland High School, principal Catherine Brown had laid a strong foundation for supporting student learning well before the pandemic. With the help of the district’s pre-existing racial equity teams working at school sites, the school’s teachers already were holding family conferences with students who were not attending school and trying to find creative ways to engage them, Scarlett says. The staff used the same protocols during the pandemic with great success.

Beyond the Pandemic

In the coming years, as COVID-19 concerns subside, the racial reckoning that occurred alongside the pandemic will come into clearer focus. The harm racism exacts on students will continue to linger. There will be no vaccines, mask mandates or social distancing guidelines for addressing this work.

Mitigating the harms of racial inequity will require the implementation of racial equity policies and the application of racial equity learning. It will require centering students and families most impacted by harm, working with community partners, relying on families as partners in learning and institutionalizing equity efforts through district research and evaluation priorities. Also required, cautions Thom-as, the former Seattle principal, is an intentional effort to not “rush to get back to normal without creating ongoing ways to understand, acknowledge and respond to what the school community — students, families, teachers, staff and leaders — feels and needs.” Hold onto and institutionalize the new, creative and courageous structures and routines that have worked during the pandemic to ensure they last beyond it.

All the education leaders I talked with agreed it should not have taken COVID-19 to help us acknowledge and address racial inequities. My hope is that it doesn’t require yet another uncertain crisis for school leaders to continue working to reduce the harms of a certain crisis called racism that, left unaddressed, will forever remain.

DECOTEAU IRBY is an associate professor in the department of educational policy studies at University of Illinois at Chicago and author of Stuck Improving: Racial Equity and School Leadership (Harvard Education Press). Twitter @decoteauirby