Justice Seekers with Lacey Robinson - Pursuing Equity in the Details of Teaching and Learning
Welcome in everybody. You are listening once again to the Authority Podcast on the Be Podcast Network. Thank you so much for being here with us today for what should be a great conversation. As you listeners know, not only is equity an essential topic in education, But, you know that it's a priority here on this show.
We've had some powerful conversations over the past year or so, and today I'm expecting another really good one. I'm pleased to be joined by Lacey Robinson, who is President and CEO of Unbound Ed, and the Chair the chair of the board of Core Learning.
She's a former teacher, principal, and professional development specialist, and has focused on literacy, equity, and school leadership for more than 25 years. Her life's work aims to enable educators to disrupt Stomach inequities in their school districts and classrooms. Lacey's book is called Justice [00:01:00] Seekers.
It's a love letter to teachers, inspiring us all to recognize that justice is found in the details of teaching and learning. Lacey Robinson, welcome to the authority.
Thank you so much, Ross, for having me.
Yeah, excellent. I'm so glad to have you here. And as we alluded to in the intro there. It's great to be continuing these conversations and getting different ideas and perspectives on this. And I actually want to skip ahead a little bit to the end and then work our way backwards.
But wanted to go first to GLEAM, right? Which is this acronym that you use in the book in your work. Grade level, engaging, affirming, meaningful. Wanted to start right there with breaking that down. What that's all about and how this helps you to get the framework for and the approach to achieving equity.
Yes. Ooh, I love that. It's like we're doing the UBD, the backwards design, right? Let's start with the goal in mind. So GLEAM, you're right, is the acronym that [00:02:00] stands for Grade Level Engaging, Affirming, Meaningful. I always tell folks that GLEAM exists because of the formidable work that Gloria Ladson Billings has given to the edu sphere, and till I say to our world as a whole around culturally relevant and responsive teaching and learning.
And it then stands on the shoulders of all of our folks from Dr. Lisa Delpit to Geneva Kay, Geneva Gay Django Paris Zaretta Hammond. It goes on and on but and, I would say, in addition to them Gleam is also I know the experience that I've held as a first, a student or what I didn't have access to as a student in my K 12 experience, what I began to experience as a college student, and certainly what I aimed for after my residency at the Marva Collins Preparatory School in Cincinnati, Ohio.
anD so it rests on the shoulders that all students should have access to grade level work, regardless of their [00:03:00] missing prerequisites, regardless of their disfluency, that we should be as facilitators of learning, um, maximizing on scaffolds to give access to the grade level work when possible, giving them opportunity to build up those prerequisites.
And then it goes on to tell us, it goes on to push us further. It goes on to say that students need engaging work. And engaging, I say is two tiers. One tier is engaging around rigorous, productive struggle and learning. Nothing makes a good lesson unless allows the students, I like to call it makes their brain sweat, right?
Shows them the dynamic of their brain power in a lesson. So it's important that we're offering our students opportunities for productive struggle and learning, but engaging also means that we're capitalizing. on our students local, historical, cultural, linguistic background knowledge that they walk in with every day through our [00:04:00] school doors.
And so any possible I would say segues or pathways or bridges that we can make to learning so the students can bring their whole selves into the lessons and the learning. Zaretta Hammond tells us. Just multiplies the brain cells, just multiplies those synapses connecting and building the all around knowledge base.
And then affirming. Affirming is really essential because affirming, it reminds us and asks us to look for the moments in our lessons, in our teaching, in our learning environment, in our schools, in our community, where students are affirmed academically, certainly. A affirmed as their academic selves affirmed in the possibilities of their academic selves and where they could go from, but also affirming who they are.
Interpersonally, also affirming who they are through their language acquisition, through their dialect, through their vernacular affirming who they are. where they come from and any cultural [00:05:00] inferencing that comes along with that. And then last is meaningful. And meaningful, I would say, a lot of times folks look at that and they think because they see the word socio political that it means that we're asking students to choose a political side.
No, what we're asking for us to do as facilitators of learning is give our students opportunity to see that what they're learning Right? Can be used to examine where they are and quite possibly the world that they want to co create. And so, that's GLEAM in a nutshell. We can go deeper into it, but that is the ultimate goal.
Yeah. And then, on that last one, meaningful. I love that. And, still on the theme of, I think backwards mapping it. It comes up so often in career in job opportunities where and I've, it comes up all the time in conversations that I'm having especially with mid career coaches [00:06:00] mid career professionals, and coaching them on various goals that they have, and it's again and again, okay, I'm trying to find work that to me is meaningful.
And everybody can define what's meaningful to them in different ways, right? But it's critical to motivation, to sustained engagement, to ultimately success, to feel like what we're doing is meaningful. And One of the reasons, perhaps, why so many of us are having challenges with that when we are in our 20s, 30s, 40s, beyond, is because Schools traditionally have not paid enough attention to that word, to of course, relevance is part of it, meaning, but making meaning of the content, whether it's math and understanding, okay, what are the applications in your life or [00:07:00] whether it's civics or social studies or history, whatever, whatever the case may be, but saying, okay, Am I taking that extra step to make meaning of this to not just assume that it's self evident or not think that it doesn't matter.
The meaning is you need to just do it because it's school but and that's even, that's just Overall, that's without even getting into cultural differences and diversity between students, but that's just even when we're not making enough of an effort to even think about what does meaningful mean in general,
Yes. And I think, when we look at just where we are as a society and what does it mean to thrive and to live? And what does it mean to not just to survive, right? What does it mean to be able to live a legacy? When I think about who I am in my career, I'm on a very different path than I would say my grandparents and their parents and even my parents, we, yes, it's important for you to be [00:08:00] able to carve out a path that you're able to sustain a lifestyle that's not just a survival lifestyle, but that you're thriving, but it's important that you are in a lifestyle where you're leaving legacy for others, right? And when I think about that today, people aren't just working or the desire to work.
So that they can buy a house. They're wanting to work to have purpose, and I think that when I look at the youth, when I look at the young people, they are certainly pushing us to say that it's not enough that I have a degree. It's not enough that I have a career. I want to make a difference.
And sometimes making a difference means I have this piece of paper that says that I studied for four to five years in a particular subject. Okay? Sometimes making a difference means I mustered up all the audacity and entrepreneured myself into a career path where I had to learn, through hard knocks around this field that I'm putting myself in.
But all of it now [00:09:00] is built around purpose, right? I think that purpose, when I look back through my grandparents eyes, through my parents eyes, purpose around career was subjective. whO you were what you looked like, where you came from, what neighborhood you sat in. And we now live in an age where, thanks to social media, thanks to the internet, thanks to the lightning speed of data, that everybody is seeking purpose.
And so when I think about that word meaningful, it is, it's not just saying to the student, here's why you need to learn algebra, but it's saying to a student that holding algebraic thinking, number one, helps train your brain for much larger thinking, for analyzing, to being able to reflect, but understanding how to use algebraic expression to solve world problems, local com problems in your community, understanding that it plays a role in your business development, even as an entrepreneur.
And so it should bring meaning [00:10:00] to you. It should be meaningful to you to be able to gain that knowledge.
Yeah. Yeah. And there's, again, as we said, there's endless variety to it, right? To purpose, the purpose of something you're doing might be, it might gain you status. It might be that you're able to help other people. It might be that you're able to earn a certain income that allows you to afford things that you want.
The purpose might be to afford you the flexibility and balance in your schedule to spend time on other priorities, right? You may be in a position where certain of those things are in place and you're saying, okay, great. Now I want to have it all, and I want to add additional purpose. You may be in a position, you mentioned buying a house, where some younger people may say I'll never be able to do that.
So at least I can have a purpose. At least I can do work that means something. And we can't solve all that today, it is important. And it's, there, there is that generational shift. of that it's not, we shouldn't view it as [00:11:00] privileged to have a purpose, right?
Or that it's like asking too much. Okay, that's, that seems like a little too much. If you just have something that pays the bills, isn't that what it's really about? But that's not, Now when we talk about ultimate success and what's sustainable and what is building a better society, a better nation, a better world we want people to be doing things that they really believe in and that they want to do great at.
And each individual has a different idea of that, and that's why we know everything will be covered, but if each person has that desire intrinsically to be great at what they're doing and if we're able to position with those opportunities, and, while we're talking about words I want to also talk about justice and equity, right?
And of course, Justice Seekers is the title of the book, so it's right there. Justice Seekers Equity is a big theme. That's what it's all about. How do those words fit together for you? When you're [00:12:00] thinking justice, what comes to mind? What's, why is that the first word there? And then what are the, what are the overlaps and what's the relationship between justice and equity?
Yeah, I think it's really interesting. The title Justice Seekers to me just capitalizes on again, I would say my experience as a student, what I witnessed as a teacher, certainly as a leader, and certainly now being the president and CEO of the organization, justice to me is particularly in these United States, but we also know that many other countries are plagued with this same, I would say, endeavor.
It's something that we've been pursuing since the inception of the ideology of what the Americas or America or the United States of America was supposed to be or is supposed to be. And when I think about Justice and education. It has certainly been a pursuit. I know from many folks who come from my community, many folks of brown and black [00:13:00] communities, and I would say it's been a pursuit for us as a country that we have created a public school system in which Horace Mann first charged us in creating a public school system that essentially evolved its citizens to uphold democracy.
And in order to do that, in order and in his charge, Horace Mann also said that in order to reach that all citizens in the United States, Whether it was whether they were white, brown, black, indigenous to the land, deserve a high quality public education in order for democracy to thrive in these United States.
And so the seeking of that justice has been something that. I believe that we as a country have been in pursuit of, whether we've recognized it or not, it certainly has been since the onslaught of bringing on, bringing in the enslaved Africans, since the erasure of the indigenous folks of this [00:14:00] land the boarding school enforcement of those folks the extinguishing their language.
It is, it has definitely been a pursuit. And so, When I think about justice and equity, they are siblings, right? They go hand in hand. They are really one should not be found without the other, right? Justice is the goal that we are seeking and equity helps us develop the blueprint. On how to get to or the GPS on how to reach that inevitable point of justice.
And so it is essential. I know we've worn it out. I say this all the time. We use that word equity. It's like the little black dress. Now we use that word in every modality that we possibly can. We have literally saturated ourselves with it. And yet. We have not done enough to guarantee that equitable education, that the pursuit of equity in teaching and learning is a given throughout our schoolhouses [00:15:00] in the United States.
So,
Yeah. That's it's so interesting what happens with the terms and phrases. If I'm remembering correctly, it's been a while now, but I'm Pretty sure on our conversation here about with Buruti Kefele about his book, The Equity and Social Justice 50, that he said, I don't even use the word equity anymore because people are just taking it to mean whatever they want it to mean.
And I've seen that. Myself, I worked for years with dozens and dozens of companies in the education space on their messaging and their mission, and everybody was just throwing equity in and there was a big variance between those who truly, thought through that, what that meant, how it related to the work they were truly doing, and those who just knew that it was important to say and it was a buzzword, and and then, and then it's hard to make it the pathway to the goal, and then when we think about justice, and it's, it's correcting [00:16:00] wrongs, it's Doing what's right.
It's fairness, right? It's all these concepts. I think people understand. But again, they find ways to turn these words into something else or to just get further and further away from what it's supposed to be. And I wonder when we think about inequity there's obviously inequity in outcomes.
There's short term outcomes and, how students are doing in school today, there's long term outcomes, how that affects their future but there's the inequity just in terms of what opportunities are available right now, inequities in learning environments, can you, when you think about it, can you disaggregate those and, determine what's, I guess where it starts, and in other words I think it's fair to say that the reason why there's such an emphasis and [00:17:00] focus on equity is because of inequitable outcomes that are achieved by different student groups who have had inequitable opportunities And that's the case on the whole, and yet, individually, it's not always the case, but it still doesn't mean we should ignore it, right?
I may have had a terrible experience in school, you may have had a great one, and because we're just two people, we may have ended up in similar spots, but that doesn't mean that it was okay because on the whole, there's all these various, Inequities that begin at a certain point. Some of them are smaller, some of them are larger, some of them are more noticeable or less, and yet the end result is okay.
We can clearly see there's a correlation here.
Yeah, I think as you're talking, I'm really, I'm thinking about the best way I can describe this, honestly is the matter that we have at hand right [00:18:00] now. I participated in the Emily Hanford Soul to Story podcast and is now, I think I saw the other day, it's been downloaded over 7 million times.
People have really latched on to it, not just people in education, people outside of education. One of the reasons why I feel like that podcast took off is because when we look at the stats, over 25 million, 25 million students exit out of our school halls not proficient in reading, okay? 25 million. So let's just say for argument's sake that 25 million we know is a is a mixture of our wider population of who we are as citizens, right?
And so the injustice of not graduating out of our K 12 systems as a proficient student, let's just call that injustice in all categories, in all racial ethnicity categories, okay, where the compound effect of injustice begins to happen is that Old 25 million of those students walk out of our schoolhouse not proficient [00:19:00] in reading, right?
What starts to happen is that the other injustices that we have in our country, in this society, start to have a compound effect in particular communities with particular subgroups of students. which makes their injustice then added into. So I may walk out, I may as a black woman walk out with the injustice of not being a proficient reader, and my colleague as a white woman may walk out as being not proficient as a reader, but the compound effect of job insecurity, housing insecurity, financial insecurity, all of those things, safety insecurity, begin now to add into the effect of me not being a proficient reader.
Of me being I would say housed out of or pushed out of the opportunity to be able to enter into a higher education platform because of anything from finance to opportunity to, so,[00:20:00] to even some of the assessments that are given, right? And so when you think about injustices, You could almost think about injustices in the United States when we think about the reading injustice.
It's almost like a level playing field. 25 million walking out, not being proficient readers. But then when you begin to see that compound effect of injustice, you now start to see how those communities, the communities that I hail from, the communities that I dedicated myself to teaching in, are now having this layered effect of injustices.
And so let's think about it in reverse. Let's think about that if we had a K 12 system where 25 million students graduated as proficient and above readers, that I might have a fighting chance now coming out. I'm still going to experience those injustices, but now that compound effect of not being a proficient reader is not going to be there.
So now I have the opportunity to go and research different means of how to get into school. Now I [00:21:00] have an opportunity to go and look at different modalities. Of career and practice. Now, the audacity of me being able to dream bigger and larger is in effect, and all of those other injustices I'm able to push and thwart against because at least I have the tools.
At least I have the wherewithal, at least I have the intrapersonal skills and the audacity to know that I have the knowledge base to go and push forward. It doesn't mean those injustices. I'm not gonna knock up against. It doesn't mean that they're not going to get in my pathway, and in some instances knock me down, but it sure as hell gives me a running start. And so when I think about injustice, the reason why every bride, no matter your zip code, no matter your socioeconomic status, No matter your race, ethnicity, everybody should be paying attention to the injustices that are happening in our schoolhouses. And one of the things that I say all the time is that what I've learned in this walk is that when we pay close [00:22:00] attention to those that we've made the least amount of movement, in the justice, in the pursuit of their K 12 experience.
That when we pay attention to the least of them, we get the rest of them. And so that's part of our charge when we talk about pursuing equity in the details of teaching and learning. And so I hope that paints a picture to the folks that are listening. It's certainly the picture that I, along with my colleagues, have tried to paint injustice seekers in acknowledging some of the historical affects of injustice, and how we at this have a time and hand right now to be able to peel back some of those injustices in our school system, so that when our students go and meet those other layers, they at least have a running start.
That's also part of the work of GLEAN. Oh,
Yeah. And I would presume a lot of what you just talked about with respect to the compound effects of injustice and how. Injustices of all sizes and their outcomes [00:23:00] affect future outcomes, relates to bias and positive or negative bias because there may be two students who have the same, uh, lack of proficiency in a certain area or any subject area.
And the person evaluating them, whether they have a positive or negative bias toward either of those students may either one notice. That lack of proficiency, but believe, okay, that can be, we can work with that. They may completely not notice it at all because they're like, just assuming this kid probably knows this thing.
And I'm not even asking the question or they may see it as a red flag and say, Oh no, the student can't read as well as they should. Oh, that's a, and that follows you all the way. Through your life, right? [00:24:00] and
yeah, and I was gonna say, and it activates the automaticity of the caste system that Isabel Wilkerson talks to us about in her book, right? It's I think people underestimate how automatic. The dividing and the casting that we go into when we meet folks in our day to day lives that fit the implicit and explicit beliefs that we have about certain groups.
folks from different regions or socioeconomic statuses or racial backgrounds. And so you're right. There is the bias that oftentimes we will implicitly and sometimes explicitly flip into that then. Seeing these two students coming out of the schoolhouse, both of them being not proficient in reading, we begin to make assumptions.
We make assumptions about the brown and black student. We make assumptions about the student who is a language acquisition, or a student that is learning English but comes from a variant language, [00:25:00] from their home base. We make automatic assumptions about their intellectual level.
And I have to tell you that we're paying a price for that, whether people realize that or not. We are paying a price for that as citizens of this country and the world, because innovation our next miles how we get to Mars. How we thought climate change, what we're going to do about our GDP, who we are economically, all of that is only as strong as the citizens that you have helped become or place on their path for their livelihood.
And so, we can no longer pay that price. We can no longer, we can no longer ignore or pretend that those biases don't exist. We don't have any options. We are a global majority society. aNd I would say that again, that is why the stance that we have in the book, the stance that we take at our organizations is that we are asking us [00:26:00] to come together as a collective community.
And pay closer attention in the details of teaching and learning so that all students experience a grade level, engaging, affirming, meaningful K 12 experience.
yeah. Yeah. And that, that idea of the paying attention, the critical thinking, I mean with the bias, the biases that are present in the system. Most of them do you think historical biases that were, embedded into the structure and just over time they were never corrected. And, eventually they became so taken for granted that people stopped paying attention to them.
Or are they primarily active biases that You know, beliefs and behaviors that people continue to really hold. What have you found in that regard?
I think it's a both and, it's a both and. I'm going to liken it to two things. First, when I look at the historical track of our public education, certainly Brown versus Board of Education, but even [00:27:00] prior to that, when we look at the emancipation of the enslaved Africans and the opportunity that they were supposed to be given, right?
But the opportunity that many of them took to become when I was just watching a show the other day that was highlighting this the Tuskegee Institute, right? And the opportunities that they took to grow their knowledge, to grow their skill set, and then when I think about the injustices that happened either through the Pig Laws or through Jim Crow, that thwarted the efforts that they made, or the injustices that we saw with the terrorist acts of annihilating all Black communities that were actually socially, economically, They're hedging their way forward, right?
That we're actually building out communities. And so when I think about that, it's been in the DNA of who we are as a country, right? Because we started this country with a caste system in mind, right? And so even with the desegregation of our school system, no, we did not pay close enough attention.
We did the technical moves. To desegregate schools, but we didn't pay a [00:28:00] close enough attention really to what I call the adaptive moves. I was reading this this report, this autobiography once about Wilberforce. And one of the things that he's really known for is saying that culture eats policy every single time.
It doesn't matter how many laws, the legislation that you have, it's the culture of the community of the people that are going to stand that up. that are going to push it forward. And so we as a country, uh, are having to pay some back tax on not paying close enough attention to the type of culture that we were feeding in this country in order to annihilate those assumptions, those biases that have been built into our DNA.
And so we see that now in policies and school systems anywhere from listen, as a country, we've had our Congress and Senate have to push legislation for the Crown Act for black students to come wearing their hair as it grows out of [00:29:00] their head. Like the fact that we've even had to make laws to say that you cannot stop a child from attending school because of the way that their hair grows out of their head.
Which, by the way, they had no role in.
That we're having to legislate that, right? The fact that we're having to give a technical fix to that is also telling the story about the adaptive fix, about the eradication of those DNA traits that we have in this country around that implicit and explicit bias.
The other thing I was going to liken this to is that when we look across the world, we as the United States, I have an opportunity to travel. A lot. And oftentimes I have to catch myself, you go into other countries, you go into other communities and you look at the role of women, right?
And as a woman, oftentimes you're like, Oh, man, I don't know if I could live here, and we oftentimes will may have a knee jerk reaction to the way that women are treated or the way that women are [00:30:00] seen in the society because we here in America has done so much work around women rights, right?
But in some, but in much parts, it's still in our DNA. There's still a patriarchy we're having to push against, certainly the argument around Roe versus Wade Roe versus, V versus Wade is what brought that out. And just how we look across at other countries and are like, Oh, look how they're treating, their women.
It's in the DNA. ANd until you fix the technical with the adaptive, until you teach that DNA to regenerate itself by not having those biases, it will always be there. And so, that's why it's important for us to pay attention to it individually. I say self, and then system. Look at yourself, and then look at the system.
We have to be able to pay attention to both of those ends if we're going to annihilate and deconstruct it.
Yeah. And you've described it well. And and in that description, you've described some of the reasons why it's, [00:31:00] it clearly things haven't progressed expeditiously, right? Because if we're having to battle over something that should be as obvious and straightforward as hair, as the Crown Act, then, And then getting hung up on that, then how difficult is it to get into untangling things that are structurally built in there because of.
historical biases that wouldn't be obvious today, you have to start to study it and understand it and say, Oh, now I'm starting to see and become aware of it. Like one of the, a simple and oversimplified. The thing that I think of when, you know, discussing this is like the history of ethnically insensitive mascots and team names in sports, right?
And how they were given to these teams many years ago when people had specific biases and [00:32:00] races, racism happening. And then over time, People just stopped thinking about it and they just turned their brain off to it. And that's just that's what the team's called. That's the name of it, right?
And they would never give the team that name today. If somebody was, if they were new but all it took eventually at some point was somebody to say, Hey, we should really change this. This is not, look at this. Oh yeah. It is pretty bad. And then some of it happened pretty fast after that.
Once somebody, but that's on the surface, that's very easy to identify. Yeah. That's. Yes. You're right, that is pretty obvious. These things are so built in and entangled with other things and, and they may be relatively ambiguous and unclear, and our tendency to lean towards the status quo.
That's the way we've always done it. But not understanding one, is it is there any case in favor of doing it that way, let alone the case against it, but what's the what's the, the [00:33:00] affirmative case. And but it's hard to have those conversations in a meaningful way.
If. We can't just solve some of the simpler things. And then, when you get to, one of the other words in gleam affirming, and I just mentioned affirmative, right? But that's, A big part is getting not just to the stance of accepting change is needed or being okay with it or tolerant, but it's like actually actively affirming the fact that every student has.
the, the right and needs the opportunity to be fully seen, fully represented, served, and to have a system that's built to serve them, actively built to serve them.
yeah, I think what you're reminding me of Ross is like I, one of my, one of my favorite authors Chidamande Adichie talks to us about the single [00:34:00] story, right? And I think that what has happened in, certainly in education, but in many other sectors is that We as the United States have pretty much propped up a single story view that our cultural norms have been pulled through a single story when in fact we are a country of of a woven multidisciplinary, multi historical, cultural, ethnic, linguistic story, and I think that inviting students into the classroom and, Be healthy and showing them the both ends, right?
Being, having, raising your awareness around, we used to think about our nation this way, right? And this is the way that it used to be. And we used to pull it through a single story. And now as we're growing and maturing as a nation and getting smarter with every turn of the century, we now understand that it is more than just a single story viewed.
But it's getting folks to understand that oftentimes our policies, our practices, our ways of being are [00:35:00] through a single white dominant lens. And because it's been the norm, because it's been the bar, I know certainly as an African American woman, I was taught very early on that, you have to study it.
If you want to be counted in, if you want to be, accepted, if you want to have a chance. You have to understand it. And what I'm witnessing now, and I think many people out here are witnessing, is that we're moving away from that single story. We're asking us to consider that it's through a multi lens, or at least to be curious about the lens, the other lenses that might be at play, or that could be at play.
Certainly I would say the generations that are coming up now are demanding it of us. are saying that it's not just from a single story view but that my story, who I am, where I come from, should also be counted in. And that is the world that I think, as much as there are some people out there that, that don't like it, that is the world that I believe that we have been pushing to move ourselves to.[00:36:00]
Yeah. And this I think this probably isn't the first time I've brought up this comparison on here. I've certainly talked about it before, whether or not it was on the podcast, but you referenced earlier the primacy of the importance of public education and what it could mean.
And, and particularly in recent years, I've noticed, attitudes on that kind of fracturing and fragmenting around even as far as. Certain viewpoints and ideologies questioning whether or not public education should even be a thing. And I've compared it to, attitudes toward democracy versus authoritarianism, et cetera, that et The course of history is such that these things have been the status quo for a long enough time that the people who were [00:37:00] alive to bring them into existence are no longer here, and people lost that perspective on, okay this what was it like before?
And then start to question should we even do this because the challenges of it at this stage that the last 10%, you would say, or whatever it is the hard, is hard. And then it's should we even do this at all, right? It's, it's because we still have these problems with our public education system, should we just throw the whole thing out versus trying to address the problem?
And a lot of it, I, so often is because I think that societally, whatever it is, we, we give ourselves credit for having achieved things that are a work in progress, right? Like when it was written. All men are created equal, took 200 plus years to get somewhat close to that, it didn't, it still didn't get all the way there, but it took a long time [00:38:00] to even get like
In the realm.
of that.
So our public education system hasn't made it all the way to where we want it to be. But if you compare it to say other countries who haven't even attempted it. Why do you think the United States became what it became? Why do you think it was the home of innovation and NASA and all, it was because there was an emphasis on educating the population.
And yes, it needs to be better. But the counter to that is I, and I honestly do think that just because some people have totally lost the context and the perspective on it, they do think there is an equitable solution that is something other than. a universal public education system.
I don't even necessarily, now there's some people who probably don't care about equity, but I actually think there are people [00:39:00] who think the answer to equity as they see it is a system that's, a free for all, which I'm not exactly sure how that would work.
Yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with I think the insurgence of hope has been drained out of education and I personally try to everywhere I go. And any again, even in justice seekers to talk about the ground. the ground of hope that we all need to stand on. We, as the United States, have always used our education system to be the lever to propel us, into our next level into our next stage that we need to go in.
If it was anywhere from the creation of citizenship to when Sputnik was launched, there was this great urgency in the United States to ensure that All students, boys and girls all students were being engaged in mathematical thinking because they understood that we needed to develop cohorts of students that had mathematical ability and that saw [00:40:00] themselves as as mathematical thinkers, right?
And so we, we turned to our education system in order to prime the pump for that. We turned to our education system, when we were moving through our insurgents around the civil rights movement, right? There was a such thing in the civil rights movement known as the Children's March.
A lot of people don't recognize that students played a big role in the civil rights movement. And so school education has always been the fertile ground in which we stood on. I think what has happened is that we've allowed the few, the loud and the few, to first fear monger us. in believing that hope is no longer being planted, which it is.
Every day a student walks into a classroom in which a teacher has walked in, flipped the lights on, turned the heat on, wrote the quote of the day, picked out the book to be read aloud, went back in, picked up the classroom, rearranged the desk. That means she is planting seeds of hope. He is [00:41:00] planting seeds of hope for those students to enter into the classroom with.
And so I think that shame has been used as a tool that we've seen now for the past couple of years that has been used anywhere from school board meetings to elections to book bands, shame around our history and who we are as the United States and the importance of us being able to relay that history to our students so it doesn't repeat itself.
And so we've allowed the small the few and the loud to make us believe that we can't move through shame, that we can't do hard things in this country and which we've proven in every turn of the decade that we can. And so I believe that when we start to sort through those things and understand that those are a small amount of folks.
that the hope still lies in our education system, the hope still lies in our public education system, that if we push past the single story view [00:42:00] and make a concerted effort of galvanizing folks to come into the teaching cohort, folks from all kinds of backgrounds of race, ethnicity, social economic status, certainly folks, brown and black folks who were erratically pushed out of the education system.
If we make moves to make this a wider landscape, to reflect who we are as a country, I believe that those seeds of hope that we've been planting all along will begin to bear fruit for us as a country. And we can begin to think about how we use our education system to propel us forward. Now, that doesn't mean, I'm a both and kind of person, Ross.
I think there's a both and in public education. I think there's a both and. In private education, I know I'm a rough some feathers when I say this, I think there's a both and in the way we think about the charter movement, certainly for some students who have had no access to high quality education, the charter movement has helped.
I also think there are instances [00:43:00] where it has hurt. And so, when we began to look through the lens of both and, the importance of public education, we cannot roll the dice on that. We don't have a choice. It has to remain. And I think more importantly, the way that we view our teachers, the way that we think about what it means to be a teacher in these United States.
is where perhaps we should start to look or where perhaps we should start to push ourselves, I talk about this in the book to move away from being, thinking that teachers are these magical beings that walk into classrooms and sprinkle fairy dust and all of a sudden now students are learning that We think about it as just only a missionary occupation.
And in fact, it is a profession that one can grow and shift and change and create a career trajectory in that we put it on the pedestal when we look at other careers and professions in the United States and really recognize the importance of our [00:44:00] teaching cohort, of the teaching profession, of the educator in the United States.
Then I think we can start to also really yield that fertile ground of hope around education. Oh,
I always describe a lot of around the school choice debate and we've partnered the past couple of years here on the network with the National School Choice Awareness Foundation that does a lot of great work in there is that if there's not multiple good options, it's not a choice, right?
If it's framed as if it's just anti this pro that and or it's framed as only one thing is good and the other things are bad, right? then you're not saying there's a choice, and without having a strong set of options, but also a strong universally accessible options, the incentive structure isn't there, right?
Not to get into a whole other issue, most people have Complaints about their health insurance [00:45:00] providers. If it's the only option that you have, the incentive structure isn't necessarily there to fix all those problems, and it just needs to be that we have options and then people can choose what works best for them, for their child.
on a variety of factors that are important to them and, ultimately, then we can have a stronger system, as you said, because, yeah, private charter. There's some really good charter. There's, there's some that are not really even schools, right? And that's, but once You know, and, but you can understand how students end up there when their experience has been that they're, the other schools they've been in haven't served them, and then they think, okay, there's hope in this new option, and then later find out, oh goodness, this is even worse than where I was. Lacey, one thing I wanted to ask you about, so you describe yourself as a truth teller, and I think [00:46:00] we've told a lot of truth here today, but what's hard about that?
man. Something I try to practice every day, something I actually ask all of my colleagues, certainly our leadership folks in the organizations is that you have to tell the truth with grace and mercy. I say you got to tell the truth with grace. You got to. You gotta have grace with yourself, first of all.
I think I know as an African American woman in the United States, telling the truth hasn't always been opened and welcomed I, I haven't always had the audacity to tell the truth. I like to think they are right. The older you get, the more truth telling you become. But you gotta do it with grace.
You gotta have grace with yourself. And then you have to extend grace to others because oftentimes, particularly in the day and age that we live in now, telling the truth isn't always the first go to and telling the truth with grace certainly isn't something that folks consider.
And then I say mercy. I always talk about having mercy with myself first because sometimes telling the truth will spark trauma. Sometimes it'll spark [00:47:00] trauma in myself, sometimes it'll spark trauma in other people and I have to really think about instituting mercy for myself and for other folks.
It doesn't mean that it abdicates them from their roles and responsibility. It just means that we're human beings and and we have to oftentimes recognize that telling the truth will always pay a price. And but the hope is that if we stand in the truth that we can eliminate a lot of the shadow and the darkness, I believe.
And so, yeah, I think telling the truth with grace and mercy and with audacity. I think I would say those are the three things that make it hard.
Yeah. Yeah. And even to some of the points you made earlier, it's hard to continue to tell the, the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth when there's people who are saying that it's not truth, but yet they're often so small in number and and we, [00:48:00] we, I think we've seen a lot of movements.
In education, whether it's a variety of approaches to equity or social emotional learning or whatever that had gained near unanimous approval and then started to hit a roadblock because of a real. small number of voices. They, when they dug in recently to to a lot of the books that were being taken out of libraries in Florida, they found there was like two parents that had filed 95 percent of all the complaints, stuff like that, where it, it requires a community and support and more than one person, maybe telling the truth, but that it's important.
And, but I think it's also important that we acknowledge, as we're putting this conversation in action, and the practical takeaways that. Teachers are working in a variety of environments, right? And you want [00:49:00] teachers, number one, to talk explicitly about race.
And we want teachers to be able to tell the truth. We know that some of them are in an environment where they can't tell the whole truth, right? They're in an environment that discourages or even prohibits. certain things. And yet, they may, a conscientious teacher who believes in equity and opportunity operating in a less than ideal environment is better than a teacher that doesn't care about that stuff or that's unqualified, right?
What would they, what would you say to that teacher who's working in a school somewhere where they know that they are, they don't want to get themselves into trouble and risk their job by going into certain directions and yet they want to be informed, knowledgeable, doing the right things, at least avoiding doing the wrong things, right?
To really make the difference that they want to make within their sphere of influence,
Yeah, I think this is why I call Justice [00:50:00] Seekers my love letter to educators, because I will tell you that part of the reason why I knew I was ready, and we were ready to put forth this manuscript is because one of the first things I learned in my career track is that I could tell the truth. I could. How the courageous conversations that Glenn Singleton pushes us to have, when I was able to grow in my vocabulary, concepts, and historical understanding, when I got, when I was able to fill my knapsack with the language, the words, the historical markers, the legacies, the lenses.
I was able to better describe what had happened to me, what I had done to other in, in the words of educating other students, and what, most importantly, the system was actually demanding of me as an educator and the inequitable act that it was actually pushing me in. And so what I try to explain to a lot of educators is that.
While it is essential [00:51:00] that you are, as a facilitator of learning, able to exhibit and to put forth to your students the whole truth, while it's essential for you to be able to stand on the history markers that we have in these United States, put forth some of our formidable writers and themes that are in the books that people are now saying that should be banned, It's also just as important for you to have an opportunity to build your vocabulary, your concepts, your conceptual understanding about race and equity and social economic status around the historical markers that we've stood on.
One of my keynotes that a lot of people come up to me steal is when I took the time to show the hysterical, the historical markers about the way that literacy was used as a weapon for the enslaved Africans and how one of the formidable examples, Frederick Douglass really [00:52:00] marked for us that the being taught how to read while and when it was illegal, and the way that he was taught how to read, using those elements that we talk about that are the elements that came out of the research around the science of reading, and how when you flash back or you look at where we are now where we have brown and black students in communities that are still fighting to have access to the high quality instructional materials to have access to educators that have been equipped.
With the methodology and the strategy around how to teach one to read that it's really coming from the same underbelly of who is deserving of the right to read and who is not right. And so it's essential that. that we began to build our knapsack around that. Now that doesn't mean that because you immediately you're listening to this podcast, I don't have that yet, Lacey.
So should I not? No, you should.[00:53:00] But I think the more you grow in the vocabulary, the concepts, the historical markers, the more audacious you become. I tell people all the time, and I think we had talked about this a little bit earlier. I can talk about equity without using the word equity.
I was just talking to a colleague of mine that says the school system I'm in, I won't name the state, but you probably can guess, I'm not allowed to use the word equity. Great. You have a vocabulary that can describe what equity looks like. You have the wherewithal, you have the teaching strategies and knapsack to ensure that all your students are receiving an equitable education through the actions and the materials that you put forth through the questions that you ask.
And so it's getting them geared up. That's part of our formidable work at Unbounded and Core is to be able to go into the edgesphere and sit shoulder to shoulder with educators to do that work in building up that knapsack so that they have the audacity to go back to their systems and to push for more of telling the [00:54:00] truth.
Yeah, and equally important is enabling and empowering that audacity, right? In the schools and environments where administration does support the explicit pursuit of equity and justice, how do they make it unambiguous? that teachers understand that they have the freedom, the support, and the equipment to do so, and to do so without fear but also to do so effectively.
Yeah. Yep. And I think you're hitting at my, my, my second reason for Justice Seekers is that I wanted leaders, I wanted educators to have a manuscript at hand that they could walk into the schoolhouse and say to one, two, three of their colleagues, to the administration, Can we do a book study with this?
Can we sit down and read Justice Seekers together? Even if it's not front to back, even if we only read chapter one and then go into chapter three and [00:55:00] four to see what gleam is, even if we only study the chapter that talks about the historical legacies in education, or that teaches us the importance of deconstruct, construct and reconstruct and what that has to do with grade level, engaging, affirming, meaningful, like I wanted folks to actually have.
Something tangible that could help them start the conversations and the think abouts, and I oftentimes charge educators go into your schoolhouse with justice seekers and your data because here's the thing, I know for sure I can take a rock where I'm sitting right now and throw it and know that I will hit a community that is.
Reflecting the predictability of student achievement by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. I challenge people all the time, show me a system where across the board, I cannot, don't have to go in and predict, if you show me the data, that I can predict to tell you who is below proficient, who is above proficient, who is at proficient, based off of [00:56:00] their race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.
And until we as a United States do not have that predictability. Justice Seekers, The Conversation, The Analyzing, The Activating is going to be essential. So, take the book, take your data, go into the schoolhouses, and challenge folks to have the conversation around the two.
Listeners, you can learn more about the book, Justice Seekers, Pursuing Equity and the Details of Teaching and Learning at unbounded. org, or you can find it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, bookshop. org, wherever you get your books. Lacey, is there anything else listeners should check out on the website about anything you and UnboundEd or CORE are working on currently?
Yeah, I want to shout out, we are actually instituting our inaugural Leaders Institute this winter. We're inviting all leaders to come and sit with us. for two and a half days so that we can unpack, deconstruct, and reconstruct their blueprint for teaching and learning with GLEAM at the center of [00:57:00] design.
CORE has its formidable work with the Online Reading Academy. It is a self paced, asynchronous online academy that all educators can take, K 12, to better themselves around the science of reading. We have actually a 2. 0 version. I'm telling a secret that's coming out in the spring that is going to be really exciting because it's going to put at the center of design, our students and their language variations.
And the acquisitioning of their language. And so in, in house encompassed in the science of reading and developing ourselves as teachers of reading. And so there are lots of stuff. Go to unbounded. org, go to core learning. org and check out our products and our programs. And we look forward to you joining us as justice seekers.
Excellent. Listeners, yeah, we'll put the link to the website and the social channels and everything down there in the show notes. And so check out the book check out the other work, the other resources. Please do also subscribe to the [00:58:00] Authority for more author interviews like this one. We will keep the good guests coming and please also do visit bpodcast.
network to learn about all of our shows. Lacey, thanks again for being here.
Thank you so much for us. This was great.
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