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We Can Do Better

6/29/2020

4 Comments

 
PicturePeter Gow
Events in 2020 have forced us all as educators and humans to consider not only issues of public health but also, far too late, issues of equity and justice. At One Schoolhouse we are part of that reckoning.

Part of our stated mission is to empower learning, and cultivating student choice, agency, and self-advocacy are core learning objectives in all of our online courses. Students can even take their personal interests and values to a very sophisticated level by choosing the “Activism” track in our semester elective course program. We understand the need to promote these skills and values across our programs.

Most independent schools’ missions and values, taken at their word, make huge promises and offer visions of a better world for everyone. Right now we have the opportunity to start teaching and running schools as if our work truly is what our missions say it is: the quest for a more just and equitable world.
 
We may be social distancing for a long time, but that must not stop us from using our classrooms to end immediately the socioeconomic distancing that has nourished the lethal plagues of prejudice, injustice, and income inequality whose results we see all around us, every day. Teaching that can respond to a medical crisis must also be crafted to respond honestly and passionately to the pandemic of systemic racism and injustice that has been staring us in the face all our lives.​

Independent schools can do better. But, where does “better” start? We can do better in our hiring, training, retention, and promotion of teachers and administrators. We can do better as we balance what we know to be the right thing against the temptation to do the expedient thing. We can do better when we make choices to give our students confidence and strength, every day and on into the future. We can do better when we opt to support and affirm students who struggle to access learning fully.

We join school communities because we believe in their missions and values and want to further them. Designing, building, and delivering an education that truly flows from these missions and values is how we can demonstrate and live our shared faith in students, in the power of learning, and in ourselves.

As we prepare for the uncertainties 2020–21, let’s start by embracing our missions and values not as interpreted by history, expediency, and brand-building but as words of promise to our students, our communities, and our world—a promise that is ours to keep or break. 

And then let’s keep this promise.

4 Comments
Marcy
6/29/2020 12:37:43 pm

Hi, Peter. Thank you for your post. For many leaders at many independent schools, like recruits, retains and promotes like, i.e. people who look like them, come from similar backgrounds, etc. Additionally, they rely on the same pipelines, i.e. parents for leads for candidates for positions, where the like hires like is perpetuated even further.
Last, for too many years, independent schools have ignored the pain of students of color in general, and Black students in particular.

Question: Who and what makes independent school leaders, who are predominately White, do better?

Reply
Peter Gow
6/29/2020 02:05:17 pm

That's THE question for our time. I hope that the answer is: All of us, together, trying to understand and rethink our roles in the world and the history of privilege in which I am keenly aware that I have partaken, consciously or not. If we're not a "post-racial" society, and we're not, those of us doing the work of education must be pretty dense if we now, in this moment, cannot see, name, and acknowledge the systemic racism that has played an outsize role in making our schools look and act as they do. We get better when and because we truly realize that we need to be and can do better. I don't know whether white privilege holds some ironic magic wand that can dissolve itself, but we know that somehow this dissolution must happen. That so many of us are now speaking of this, against the backdrop of state terrorism and the elevation of white supremacy, gives me hope. But through my life things have given me hope, and things haven't changed much—certainly not enough.

I'm old and will fade from the stage, but those coming after me must take up the challenge of doing and being better. We as school leaders must all start TODAY—and sustain through the long tomorrow—keeping the many promises that we mouth as ideals but on which we have yet to deliver.

I keep ending things with the need to keep promises. But there it is.

Reply
Alexandra Newton link
6/29/2020 12:40:46 pm

Thank you, Peter Gow for your words insisting that we can do better. I agree with ;you wholeheartedly.

Reply
David Withrow
8/9/2020 06:56:31 pm

Well put, Peter. This institutional change is, I believe, harder now with the financial issues Independent Schools face. It is a good time to explore the needs of the many over the needs of the few, but I have heard "just wait until the old generation leave" and I know what that means. Little change.

Reply



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