What Do You Do When Silence Is No Longer Golden?

For decades, the voice of Black Americans has been systematically silenced: from the beginning, when African ancestors were ripped away from their home shores of Senegambia and West-Central Africa, through the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s, to current civil unrest after America witnessed the murder of George Floyd. The Black Lives Matter movement's rise is a direct result of Black people who are sick and tired of being silenced. The purpose of this chapter is to describe four personalities—mediator, advocator, agitator, and activator—, the situations in which each would be appropriate, and the lessons learned through these experiences. This chapter will cover a brief personal narrative of the author growing up and taught to be seen and not heard and how the sheer notion of silence is golden is no longer appropriate in times of social unrest and when lives are at risk. The author highlights the cognitive dissonance felt as a school board member amid the new social justice movement of the late 2000s.

Building Purposeful Superintendent and School Board Relationships Through Examining the Historical Narrative of Evolving Roles

The author presents a summary of the changing role of the traditional superintendent within the United States through the lens of how this work can be challenged or encouraged by the relationship with her or his respective board. The author emphasizes how the evolving roles of both the superintendent and school board member have contributed to the lack of clarity around their respective responsibilities that has influenced relational factors between these two groups. The importance of building, nurturing and sustaining relationships between the superintendent and school board in order to be proactive and prepared to encounter the many issues that school districts face daily is integral to this conversation. School boards and superintendents must understand how to collaborate beyond simply abiding by their delegated role at the time to flourish and support a successful school district.

Ida B. Wells

Ida Bell Wells (b. 1862–d. 1931) gained prominence in the 19th century as a journalist and social activist. She began her professional career, however, as a teacher in the rural schools near Holly Springs, Mississippi, where she was born, and then in the Shelby County Schools in Memphis, Tennessee. In Memphis, she joined a lyceum, an intellectually vibrant group of African American professionals, and she became editor of the lyceum’s newspaper, the Evening Star. During this time period, racially oppressive Jim Crow practices were taking hold in the South, and Wells fell victim to its effects. She was forcibly evicted from the ladies’ car of the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad Company, and she refused to ride in the segregated smoking car. She won a lawsuit against the company in the circuit court, but lost in the Tennessee Supreme Court (1887). She wrote about the experience in another paper, the Living Way, in which she became a regular contributor, with articles syndicated in periodicals in other cities as well. By 1889 she was a co-owner and editor of The Free Speech, writing bold editorials related to freedom and justice for African Americans. Her editorials that protested educational inequities and that exposed an interracial affair of a school board member factored significantly in her being fired from the public schools. By 1891 she had become a full-time journalist and was building a reputation as an astute businesswoman, an insightful investigator, and a courageous advocate for civil and human rights. Her anti-lynching campaign began with an editorial, written on 21 May 1892, about the lynching of three friends who were store owners in Memphis. She called for an evidence-based recognition of lynching as a lawless act of injustice, economic oppression, and terrorism. This editorial catapulted her to fame as a crusading journalist, public speaker, and leading woman activist. The full scope of her leadership and activism included other reform interests as well (women’s suffrage, the Black Clubwomen’s movement, and the settlement house movement) and the cofounding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. After her 1895 marriage to Chicago-based lawyer and fellow journalist Ferdinand L. Barnett, Wells went into “limited retirement” but kept working for justice. Before her death in 1931, she saw that public awareness of her was disappearing and began writing her autobiography. It was left for her daughter, Alfreda M. Duster, to finish the work and get the work published, which happened in 1970.

To Charter or Not to Charter: What Questions Should We Ask, and What Will the Answers Tell Us?

In this essay, Harry Brighouse and Gina Schouten outline four standards for judging whether to support the chartering of a new school within a given jurisdiction. The authors pose the following questions to a hypothetical school board member: Will the school increase equality of opportunity? Will it benefit the least-advantaged students in the jurisdiction? Will it improve the preparation of democratically competent citizens? Will it improve the quality of the daily, lived experience of the students? Brighouse and Schouten suggest that most of the evidence concerning charter school performance focuses on just the students within the schools, without addressing a charter school's effect on students who do not attend. They argue that a full evaluation requires both kinds of evidence and that these questions are the four standards that should guide both the decision maker and researchers gathering evidence on the effects of charter schools.