All Our Children: The Church's Call to Address Education Inequity
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All Our Children: The Church's Call to Address Education Inequity
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Overview
All Our Children aims to create a moral imperative for congregations, faith leaders, and faith-based social justice groups to make advocating for quality public education for all an explicit part of their mission through partnerships with under-resourced public schools. Includes an Introduction and Epilogue as well as chapters executive summary and discussion guide written by diverse voices within the Episcopal Church, laying the theological groundwork while showcasing examples of how partnership between church and school can lift up “education as forming humans” as one way to serve God’s mission in our neighborhoods.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819233486 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Church Publishing |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
The Rev. Gay Clark Jennings was elected president of the House of Deputies by her peers at the 77th General Convention of the Episcopal Church in 2012, and at the 78th General Convention in 2015, she was reelected by acclamation. She is the first ordained woman to hold the position. She lives near Cleveland, Ohio.
Read an Excerpt
All Our Children
The Church's Call to Address Education Inequity
By Lallie B. Lloyd
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2017 Lallie B. LloydAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-3348-6
CHAPTER 1
A Social Movement for Education Justice
Lallie B. Lloyd
Low-income children of color are at the epicenter of injustice in our society, and it will take nothing short of a social movement to break this cycle and transform our schools and communities.
— Mark Warren, "Transforming Public Education: The Need for an Educational Justice Movement"
A National Crisis
After decades of underfunding, high-stakes testing, and increased racial and income segregation, public education in the United States now has two systems of education: one for children of affluence (who are largely white) and one for children of poverty (who are largely black, Latino, or recent immigrants). These two systems are almost completely separate and vastly unequal. The promise of Brown v. Board of Education has never been fulfilled, and many agree that this education crisis is the civil rights issue of our time.
Robert Putnam has amply demonstrated that children born into poverty used to be able to benefit from public and community programs that would guide and support them toward long-term well-being. In recent decades so many public and community programs and resources have been dismantled that this is no longer the case, and children born into poverty today face more daunting challenges to their long-term well-being than thirty years ago.
Education is an essential path on the road from poverty to social stability and self-sufficiency, yet access to this path has been systematically blocked for children of poverty — a disproportionate number of whom are children of color — by historical patterns of structural racism, including school and housing segregation, mortgage redlining, voter suppression, hiring bias, and the redirection of public funds for services, programs, and neighborhood investment away from communities and people of color.
The immediate effect of this crisis is young people, too often black males, stunted by their lack of opportunity and alienated from the dominant culture. This is in part because of the dominant culture's passivity in the face of crisis and its failure to take responsibility for its complicity and greed in keeping the public benefit of the nation's wealth disproportionately to themselves. The social fabric of our democracy frays and wears thin as persistent racial and economic inequity causes resentment and often fuels partisan debates as families are harmed across generations by the long-term impact of substandard schooling.
This moral issue, affecting the lives of children, families, communities, and our nation, calls for attention from the church.
While high school graduation rates in the United States are at an all-time high of 82 percent, that statistic masks signs of deep and persistent trouble. For example:
• The racial achievement gap is dramatic. Black fourth graders scored twenty-six points lower on a national reading assessment than their white peers, while Hispanic fourth graders scored twenty-four points lower, a difference equivalent to about two grade levels.
• Graduation rates for students of color are lower than for white students. During the 2013–2014 school year, 87 percent of white students graduated from high school on time, while 76 percent of Hispanic students and 73 percent of black students earned a high school diploma.
• One in eight students is chronically absent. Missing school increases a student's risk of dropping out of high school, and experiencing poor life outcomes (poverty, poor health, and involvement in the criminal justice system).
• Only around 40 percent of high school graduates are prepared for college-level work.
• The correlation between neighborhood income and school quality means schools serving high proportions of children of affluence receive more support, both in funding and in parental and community engagement than those serving high proportions of children in poverty.
• In twenty-three states, high poverty districts spend fewer total dollars per student than low poverty districts, because education funding formulas amplify differences in opportunity instead of ameliorating them.
The root causes of this education crisis are the subject of research and debate among education policy experts. Some experts point to structural and technical problems internal to the education system, such as the length of the school day, high-stakes testing, class size, teacher unions, or the teacher shortage. Arthur Camins describes the position of others who point to social and cultural changes over the last decades:
There is no denying that education falls short. However, supporters of equity and democracy need to reframe what ails American education and offer unifying solutions that give people something new to fight for together. ... The crisis we face in education is not about test scores. Rather, it is that we cannot achieve satisfactory results amidst the far broader crisis of growing inequality, eroding democracy, and escalating divisiveness.
Residential housing patterns are more racially and economically homogenous within themselves and isolated from one another. Affiliative and community-based connections to our neighbors are fractured, and as a nation we have retreated from the consensus that poverty and race should not limit a child's access to quality education.
Education equity, or education justice (the terms are interchangeable), means an education that gives equal opportunity for quality of life to each child. In real life, differences in maternal nutrition, prenatal care, early childhood education, and relative stresses of living in poverty with its correlates of violence, depression, and ill health, mean that children born into poverty often begin life with developmental deficits that require more support — intentional, planned, and publicly funded — than do their more affluent peers. Giving each child an equal opportunity may mean giving different levels of support and services to children in different circumstances. Equality and equity are related, but distinct.
An image may be helpful. Picture three children watching a ball game over a picket fence. In the middle is the older brother, tall and lanky, on his right is the younger sister, and on his left their younger brother. The tall boy in the middle can see over the fence with his feet on the ground. His sister needs a box to see over the fence, and their littlest brother needs two boxes. This is an image of equity: they all have what they need to watch the game. Equality would mean each child standing on a box of the same size: big brother towers over the fence, sister can barely see, but little brother can't see a thing.
The education justice we long for is both simple and complex. To paraphrase John Dewey, we want for all children what we want for our own: that they be safe, known, and nurtured; that they be respectful, kind, and know how to share; that they be curious explorers and creative artists; that they learn to think clearly, to interrogate their sources, and plumb the riches of the diverse cultures around them so that the fullness of their own selves might be the gift to the world that God intended.
Parents, teachers, educators, and researchers can describe what this kind of education looks like. Their lists may vary, but here are some things that appear on most of them:
• High quality early childhood education, and universal public pre-K
• Safe, calm, and purposeful school climate
• High and clear academic expectations, accompanied by:
° High social and academic support
° Testing that informs classroom instruction
° The arts and physical education
° English as a second language instruction
• Social and emotional support:
° School-based medical and social services
° Screening, and intervention, and treatment for learning and developmental needs
° Professional teaching staff
° Stable, skilled, and supported teaching staff
• Community engagement:
° Active and broad parent and community engagement in school activities, policy, and leadership
• Meaningful use of out-of-school time:
° Long-term relationships with caring adults outside the family
° After-school and summer programs with adult supervision of peer interaction and academic support.
"It's important not to confuse inequity with ineptitude," writes Jack Schneider, summing up the point I'm making here. He says:
The public-education system is undeniably flawed. Yet many of the deepest flaws have been deliberately cultivated. Funding inequity and racial segregation, for instance, aren't byproducts of a system that broke. They are direct consequences of an intentional concentration of privilege. Placing the blame solely on teacher training, or the curriculum, or on the design of the high school — alleging "brokenness"— perpetuates the fiction that all schools can be made great without addressing issues of race, class, and power. This is wishful thinking at its most pernicious.
Thus while structural and technical improvements may help at the margins, if we don't address the cultural challenges — our attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions — the technical changes will be window dressing — as likely to distract us and disguise the real nature of the problem as to reveal it and direct our attention toward solutions.
A Problem of Power
Mark Warren, in his 2014 article "Transforming Public Education: The Need for an Educational Justice Movement," frames the education crisis as a problem of power. People with social power demand quality schools for their children. They organize around their schools, hold school leaders accountable, and use relational networks to share information about how the system works. People who are marginalized by prejudice based on race, poverty, language, or status often have less social power, limited knowledge, and weaker networks to get their children the schools they need.
The concept of oppression and terms like power are seldom invoked in the mainstream discourse on education reform. Yet, in the end, educational inequality is rooted in and systematically connected to social, economic, and political inequalities in U.S. society. Education reform, then, cannot be considered mainly in technical or organizational terms but rather should be addressed as a profoundly political problem.
Warren argues that equity requires transformational change, by which he means changes in the norms, values, and assumptions that undergird the more conscious choices leaders make; in other words, Warren argues for culture change. Changes in policy, practice, or program will bring about only transactional — or more superficial — change, but they cannot change attitudes and beliefs.
Warren defines this social movement for education justice, as a "collective action by oppressed or marginalized people to build power to win changes in government policy and public attitudes that advance the cause of social justice." He and others have documented that such a social movement is already underway in cities as diverse as Oakland, Boston, San Antonio, Chicago, and Denver among many others. Broad-based organizing coalitions that engage parents, youth, teachers, community leaders, and faith-based organizations have been growing for years. All have emerged from their local contexts, and some are affiliated with national networks in the PICO, Gamaliel, and IAF traditions. They are building a movement on the core principles of community organizing: local leadership development, realistic and achievable outcomes, robust coalitions across social barriers, public claims-making based on legal protections, and accountability for officials.
These coalitions are changing the culture within schools and communities. They call for, lead, and support individual and collective acts of cross-boundary speech, assembly, and collaboration, and develop — and then follow — the leadership of parents, teachers, and young people. Community-based leadership development, parental engagement, youth and teacher activism, and local accountability are among the practices effecting the requisite culture change that can bring about the "high-quality humane schools" Warren reminds us we all want for all our children.
Warren names three ways social movements change arrangements of unequal power: they demand recognition, use their collective voice, and stimulate broad participation. These movements can change attitudes and reframe the public conversation; they challenge the negative stereotypes faced by children of color in school, on the streets, and in the media. Today the church is joining its neighbors in demanding recognition, asserting a collective voice, and participating broadly in many places, including volunteer-based partnerships.
Today's Social Movements
Social movements transform the people who join and build them, bridging the silos of race and class around shared vision and purpose. Today's social movement for education justice provides churches a "way in" to engage effectively and confidently with local schools. While the church has something to contribute to this movement, it also has much to gain. This is good news for churches and other communities of faith that feel called to work for education justice, because this movement is grounded in the crucial democratic principles of inclusion, local leadership, transparency, and full participation.
Relationships nurtured through collective action toward shared purpose, based on research, and developing local democratic participation are crucial to reweave the fabric of our democracy. Community organizing coalitions build relationships with local leaders and other advocates that multiply one congregation's impact, and organizations like the Education Law Center, the Education Trust, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation generate high quality data that congregations could not acquire on their own.
Church-school partnerships benefit from research into educational history, policy and best practice, as well as social systems thinking, which can equip them to "get up on the balcony" from where we can see how the interwoven connections of race, poverty, and policy contribute to our education crisis. Learning how to connect the dots between federal housing mortgage insurance, redlining, "ghettos," black urban poverty and white affluent suburbs, and "good" and "bad" schools changes our understanding of these complex issues. It invites us to ask and explore different questions and challenges us to acknowledge any unearned benefit we may have received and to seek to ameliorate the harm done on our behalf.
Social movements are strengthened when those of us who have benefitted from historical patterns of injustice commit to becoming effective allies, build relationships, and contribute time and energy to make the necessary changes in policies and practices. Beneficiaries of unearned privilege due to race and class must make both individual and corporate acts of repentance and take responsibility for the harm done by historic patterns of racism and greed. Not in order to control the movement, but to learn from it, be changed by it and strengthen it. The church is called to join this social movement for education justice to heal our own divisions and because Christians believe broken relationships can be healed through repentance and just action. We have words to speak and actions to take that can help.
The words the church speaks matter: the stories we tell, the hope we proclaim, the promises we repeat. These words open hearts, sometimes bringing hope and refreshment, and sometimes convicting a conscience.
The world sorely needs to hear the messages our liturgical practices and rituals proclaim in action and symbol. We set a public table and proclaim that God invites all to approach; we light a candle in the darkness and proclaim that life has overcome death; we wash one another's feet as a reminder that we are called to servant ministry. We leave the table nourished and equipped to bear God's gifts of healing and reconciliation, which were not given to the church for the church's own sake. They were and are given — moment by moment — to the church for the sake of the whole world.
Our acts of holding, speaking, and acting can be transformative acts that change culture; they are not merely technical or structural fixes. They are social acts, requiring and nurturing connection with others, and the transformation is mutual. It goes in both directions. We do not serve another at the sacred meal without opening to the possibility of transformation. We do not mentor a child without being changed. Our practice and our words change lives, and those lives change the people around them.
Culture Change
If the root causes of the current education crisis are the subject of research and debate among education policy experts, what the Church can and is doing about it is the subject of this book.
Church leaders are calling attention to the moral crisis of the education opportunity gap and the school-to-prison pipeline, to their root causes in implicit race bias, and the impact of historical patterns of structural racism, and the overall recognition that concerns of people of color in general — and black people in particular — do not get the attention they deserve.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from All Our Children by Lallie B. Lloyd. Copyright © 2017 Lallie B. Lloyd. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword Gay Clark JenningsIntroduction Lallie B. Lloyd
Part One Discoveries of Disparity
A Social Movement for Education Justice Lallie B. Lloyd
Why We’re Here Diane Carson
Finding Jesus in Unexpected Places Jackie Whitfield
Part Two A Theology of Relationship
Public Relationships and Public Institutions Liz Steinhauser
Partners for the Kingdom Benjamin P. Campbell
Part Three Education as Justice
6. In the Beginning Catherine Roskam
7. Turnaround Audrey Henderson
8. An Ecumenical Public Education Initiative W. Andrew Waldo
Part Four The Reality of Socioeconomics
9. Gaps and Crosses A. Robert Hirschfeld
10. They Were Reading on the Bus R. William Franklin
Part Five Partnerships of Church and School
11. Giving Up Outreach Projects Hal Ley Hayek and Amy Slaughter Myers
12. Transforming Mission Alexizendria Link
13. The Journey Ruth Wong
Epilogue Lallie B. Lloyd
Appendix
A. Types of Partnerships
B. Ten Steps to Successful Church-School Partnerships
C. Partnership Prayers
Selected Bibliography
What People are Saying About This
"Lallie B. Lloyd has brought together a collection of strong voices proclaiming the value of courageous individuals from a diverse group of faith communities pushing themselves beyond their comfort levels to engage the educational needs of children. In this era where 'savage inequalities' continue to rage in our schools, it is crucial to hear such voices as all of us who are compassionate seek to find the best ways to ensure that all of our children receive the best education possible."
––Dr. Catherine Meeks, editor of Living Into God's Dream: Dismantling Racism in America and Chair of the Beloved Community: Commission for Dismantling Racism in the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta
"Here is a passionate and clear-eyed argument for why we should add 'educating our children' to the commands by Jesus for us to give drink to the thirsty, feed the hungry, care for the sick and those in prison, clothe the naked, and welcome the stranger."
––The Very Rev. Will H. Mebane, Jr., Interim Dean of St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral in Buffalo, New York
"I am so inspired by the work of All Our Children!"
––Giovanna M. Romero, Director of Programs and Youth Leadership Development, Children's Defense Fund-NY