Education Week - April 14, 2021 - 18

Ed. Leaders: Discuss
Race, Call Out
White Supremacy
You risk misunderstanding school
problems if you downplay racism

E

ducational leaders
need to be courageous
in challenging white
supremacy in our schools
and vigilant in eliminating its toxic impact if
we are to lead for racial
justice. The urgency of acting now was laid
bare as we watched a violent mob, carrying
white-supremacist symbols and encouraged
by then-President Donald Trump, invade
the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. But hate groups
are just one facet of a much broader white-

By John B. Diamond
& Jennifer Cheatham

included a whitewashed version of U.S.
slavery, prior to leaving office. While the
Biden administration is working to reverse
these decisions, the actions demonstrate the
broader challenge we face.
In order to provide a countervailing force
and disrupt deeply ingrained systemic
racism in schools, education leaders
need to fundamentally redesign how their
schools and school districts function. Every
practice needs to have anti-racism at the
core. For instance, how educators are hired,
inducted, and mentored needs to counter
the unfair burdens often placed on educators
of color. How educational resources are
allocated across schools and students needs
to eliminate unfair racial advantages.
The taken-for-granted mechanisms of
opportunity hoarding built into our schools
such as gifted programs, tracking, and
overreliance on testing need to be challenged.
As we do this work, school leaders can center
and help amplify the voices of Asian, Black,
Indigenous, and Latinx students, parents,
and staff rather than placating certain white
people who seek to monopolize advantages.
This failure to directly confront white
supremacy undermines a basic practice
of educational leadership. In their book
Diagnosis and Design for School Improvement,
James P. Spillane and Amy Franz Coldren
argue that school leadership is about
carefully diagnosing problems, clearly
articulating solutions, and purposefully
designing organizational routines to solve
the problems. The issues that we have found
hardest to budge-among them, improved
school climate, unequal educational
opportunity, and disparities in school
discipline-are ones in which school and
district leaders did not accurately diagnose
the problem from the start. For example,
discipline issues are too often understood by
educators as simple. The problem is with our
students, so the solutions focus on modifying
student behavior. In Jen's experience in
Madison, district leaders recognized that
the problems were more complicated-
policy issues that disproportionately and
unfairly affected Black students. And so the
solutions were to modify policies and related
practices, yet the issues largely remained
because the modifications didn't address the
fundamental problem.
Still another diagnosis emerged from the
views of Black students and their parents,
however. They pointed to lack of trusting
relationships between students and adults,
limited access to deep and relevant learning,
and inability to influence decisionmaking
in their own schools. These problems,
more complex and rooted in racism and
white supremacy, require a different set
of solutions. When we fail to acknowledge
how deeply embedded white supremacy is
in our educational organizations, we risk
misdiagnosing the cause of education problems
and develop interventions that miss the mark.
As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, the author of
Racism Without Racists, has argued quite
convincingly, in the post-civil rights era,
many people believe that not talking about
race makes them (and their institutions)
nonracist, as if we can wish away centuries of
accumulated racial oppression by closing our
mouths and eyes. We argue that silence is not
an option. Education leaders have the power
and the responsibility to move our education
system toward racial justice.
Getty

DIAMOND is the Kellner Family
Distinguished Chair in Urban
Education and a professor in the
University of Wisconsin-Madison's
education school. A sociologist, he
studies the relationship between
social inequality and educational
opportunity. CHEATHAM is a senior
lecturer on education and the co-chair
of the Public Education Leadership
Project at the Harvard Graduate
School of Education. She is a former
superintendent of the Madison school
district in Wisconsin.

supremacist system in which, as law professor
Francis Ansley argues, " whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, "
and ideas about white superiority permeate
society and its institutions.
Too often, we educators soft-peddle this
reality as if avoiding the racial elephant in the
room would persuade certain powerful white
people to listen to our messages. The best way
forward is for educational leaders to challenge
racial oppression boldly and directly.
The nation's schools have a history
of supporting and reinforcing racial
hierarchies, along with other forms
of domination, through their policies
and practices. From Native American
boarding schools to Jim Crow segregation,
U.S. schools have been fundamentally
shaped by race. These historical roots
show up in our current systems through
school segregation in practice if not in
law, enrollment policies, and school
discipline practices in which students of
color are systematically provided with
limited resources, less rigorous learning
environments, and fewer chances to make
mistakes. We cannot lead for racial justice
without confronting this history and its
contemporary manifestations. As writer
and activist James Baldwin reminded us,
" Nothing can be changed until it is faced. "

We recall a meeting we had in 2018.
The two of us-John, a faculty member
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
and Jen, then the Madison school district
superintendent-sat with another
superintendent, talking about our collective
work on race and education. It was a moment
of reflection for all of us. John thought about
how his work on distributed leadership and
education policy had evolved to foreground
race and power. Jen recognized that her own
approach to leading change in school districts
had become increasingly more explicit
about systemic racism over time. Both
superintendents had just completed their
second strategic plans.
During the conversation, we discussed
those initial plans, which downplayed race.
Instead of foregrounding racial justice, the
plans couched their strong racial-equity
concerns in the more palatable (to white
people) language of diversity, achievement
gaps, and equity. As we talked, it became
clear that not calling out race more directly
from the start-even if that was temporary-
was as much a response to anticipated
resistance from white parents, community
members, and even educators as it was about
building the trust and credibility to make
change. Looking back, we realized that it took
too much time for racial justice to become an
explicit part of the districts' agendas, valuable
time given most superintendents' relatively
short tenure.
To those who worry that taking a bold stand
for racial justice will result in resistance or
even hostility to change, we point out that
the most recent wave of white-supremacist
backlash has already come. For instance,
the Trump administration rescinded almost
all the Department of Education's " Dear
Colleague " letters that guide school districts
regarding their responsibilities for protecting
students from discrimination. Trump also
used his office to issue executive orders
designed to silence those who work to raise
awareness of systemic racism and released
the propaganda-laced 1776 report, which

18 | EDUCATION WEEK | April 14, 2021 | www.edweek.org/opinion

This is the first of three essays by Diamond and
Cheatham about leading for racial justice.
http://www.edweek.org/opinion
Education Week - April 14, 2021

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