White Philanthropy Won’t Save Black Education: Tracing an “Ordinary” Segregated School’s Life in Delaware

This essay suggests examining “ordinary,” segregated Black schools from the past helps explain persistent issues in Black education at present. To demonstrate this point, the essay focuses on the shortcomings of philanthropy in education from the 1920s to the present day in Wilmington, Delaware. It asserts for Black education to thrive, a combination of adequate resources and Black control over those resources is necessary. Utilizing School No. 5, a school heretofore undocumented in scholarship, as one specific case, the authors show how this elementary school was initially overlooked by white philanthropy, only to be pervaded with it decades later. Centrally, the authors argue in both instances, whites’ actions, either by oversight or interference, hindered the holistic quality of Black children’s education; these persistent impediments to Black education, however, transpired alongside the valiant efforts and self-determination of Black educators and Wilmington’s Black community.

Deurbanization and the Struggle to Sustain a Black Teaching Corps: Evidence From Michigan

From 2005 to 2015, the number of Black teachers in Michigan dropped by 48%, substantially exceeding declines in the corresponding K–12 Black student population. These teacher losses are an acute phenomenon within a broader national context of deurbanization of K–12 student populations away from those districts with the largest and most established faculties of color. Districts receiving large numbers of incoming Black students hired few Black teachers over the period, leading to marked declines in Black student exposure to Black educators, and Black employment gains since 2016 have generally been in areas where Black teachers were already employed. We discuss the historical conditions under which Michigan’s Black faculties were established and multiple forward-looking challenges to building and sustaining Black faculties in geographically diffuse populations.

“Dissed”: The Removal of Black Educators from the American Schoolhouse

For almost a decade, the teaching profession has seen a drastic shortage of black educators. The closing of many schools in urban areas has helped reduce the number of black educators. Also, evaluative protocols and rubrics applied to measure effective teaching practices harbor biased lenses that impact how black educators maintain their employment status to succeed in the profession. Without promoting recruitment and retention interventions and culturally applied methods to assess teacher effectiveness, fewer students will have an opportunity to experience black educators in their lifetime. The research paper used a critical race and culturally responsive theoretical framing to review the research literature to determine how black educators receive evaluations and become dismissed from public schools.

Challenging Anti-Black Racism in Everyday Teaching, Learning, and Leading: From Theory to Practice

Anti-Black racism and White supremacy continue to have dire impact on the lives and educational outcomes of Black people and students in educational spaces. Examining ways in which this form of racism is disrupted, confronted, and challenged in education and schooling is important not only to Black students, scholars, practitioners, and staff, but to all People of Color. Drawing on research conducted with educators in, Canada, the United States and our lived experiences as Black educators this article examines how antiblackness and anti-Black racism is manifested in schooling spaces through teaching, learning, and leadership, and offers actions that educators can take in everyday practice to confront and disrupt. In so doing connect theory to practice, and offer possibilities that school leaders and others can act on.

Black educators in (white) settings: Making racial identity visible in Early Childhood Education and Care in England, UK

The participation of Black educators in the UK’s education system has been a source of much debate in recent years. Research indicates having a teaching force that better represents society is critical because of the character, ubiquity, pervasiveness, duration and importance of teaching as a social activity. However, to date, many of the existing studies have taken place in primary, secondary and higher education contexts. The primary purpose of this paper is to draw upon concepts of identity to make Black educator identity visible in the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) context. Secondly, this paper aims to contribute to recent developments around mobilising Black studies as an academic discipline by seeking to explore how Black ECEC educators construct their identity through their professional practice. This paper draws on Critical Race Theory and narrative analysis methods to illustrate the experiences of Black ECEC educators. While this paper does not generalise to the experience of all Black educators, it does highlight a much under-researched area and advocates the need for counter-narratives to challenge normative unracialised experiences.

Remembering an Apocalyptic Education: Revealing Life Beneath the Waves of Black Being

We write, individually and collectively, as Black educators attempting to survive the ravages of schooling. Along with a host of Black people, we too believed our schooling was a means toward liberation – a saving grace and way to honor the resilience of our people and their resistance to national investment in their undoing. We conflated our humanization with matriculation in schools. We now recognize the inextricable link between our social death and the function of schools. We have witnessed and experienced the social reproduction of Black death that schools rely upon for national order. As survivors, we lay to rest the schooling project, engaging Christina Sharpe’s (2016) mournful meditation on the Wake to exhume how even critical education work can reinforce the very projects it seeks to fight against. We hold ceremonial space for prospective and veteran educators across the K-20 continuum to re-conceptualize their curricular posture and join us in a final farewell to schools. From Shujaa (1993), we distinguish schooling from education and propose the Root Work of Apocalyptic Education, a meditation, a posture, an epistemological stance rooted in African ancestral ways of knowing (Ani, 1994; Fu- Kiau, 2014) to help us make sense of our loss and usher us into new ways of existing and being beyond the afterlife of schooling. *Both authors contributed equally to the preparation of this manuscript. Their names are listed alphabetically. This piece was crafted in September of 2019. The authors submitted this work, as it was originally rendered, in alignment with the aims of Root Work Journal.

“I’m a Teacher, I’m Gonna Always Protect You”: Understanding Black Educators’ Protection of Black Children

Many Black educators in the United States demonstrate a political clarity about white supremacy and the racialized harm it cultivates in and out of schools. We highlight the perspectives of some of these educators and ask, (1) How do they articulate the need to protect Black children? and (2) What mechanisms of protection do they enact in their classrooms and schools? Through further elaborating the politicized caring framework, our analyses show how Black educators disrupt the racialized harm produced within schools to instead (re)position Black students as children worthy of protection via caring relationships, alternative discipline policies, and other interpersonal and institutional mechanisms. This study has implications for teaching, teacher education, and how the “work” of teachers is conceptualized and researched.

Education's “Talented Tenth”

While the discourse on achievement among Black American students often includes the perspectives of researchers, teachers, and college/university faculty, retired educator views are often disregarded. Based on Du Bois's exertion about the Talented Tenth, who he recognized as “educational experts” and “seers” that serve as “leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people,” Black retired teachers and educational leaders are questioned about how to change Black student achievement trends, and included in this chapter are the recommendations offered by Black retired teachers and educational leaders—recommendations designed to bring about change in practice. Beyond adding to the discourse on Black student achievement, the chapter gives voice to retired Black educators whose years of professional experiences qualify them as “educational experts.”