Too Long Have Others Spoken for Us: Literacy as Liberation
In America, and in the words of The Jackson 5, "Reading, writing, arithmetic are the branches of the learning tree." Hearing this song as a youth kept me focused on being strong in those three academic foci, if nothing else. Growing up in Louisiana, in a simple effort to finish up high school and go on to college, I made sure that my "grades" reflected the standard view of success–even though I wasn't a big fan of reading or my English classes (and certainly not of mathematics). In college, I avoided math as much as possible and took only the necessary literature classes to get my degree.
After finishing college and graduate school, I started teaching and replicating what I had experienced growing up in American public schools in Louisiana. I was fortunate to teach English Language Arts (ELA), where I was often the only male teacher–and certainly the only Black male teacher–of the content in each public and charter school in which I worked. I was honored as a teacher of the year, and I always received great support from families who vied for their children to be under my tutelage. As THE ELA teacher, I took pride in the culture of liberation cultivated daily and in my class's scores, outpacing those of peers in my building as well as the state’s averages for mastery. On paper, it looked like I was a great ELA teacher and ultimately a great ELA content coach and Assistant Principal, since success also came from teachers whose growth and development I supported. However, in all of this on-paper success, I always knew the way kids demonstrated mastery in an ELA class was limiting and only upheld the old adage of "the power of the pen." If you can write well, more than likely you can read well–and probably mark the correct answers on a multiple-choice selection or in a written response. But what if the school your zip code directed you to didn't set you up for early success in foundational reading? What if writing was a struggle, and your school never considered evaluating you for a disability? What if you were super creative and able to show skills and talents in ways that weren't what the system expected?
I knew that these were the students, and in turn the communities, who would always be left behind by a system that–due to its one-size-fits-all approach to literacy–was never designed for the success of all. So what was the alternative? I continued to grow in my knowledge and understanding of the content, began to study the Future of Learning, and was ultimately given the opportunity to dive headlong into this question when I became a member of the KIPP Wheatley National Equity Audit team.
As a long-time KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter school teacher and leader, I became highly familiar with the name of Mrs. Phillis Wheatley. She was kidnapped from The Gambia, Africa, and enslaved in Boston in the mid-1700s. Unlike most enslaved people during this time period, she was taught to read and write in values of that time: the Bible, Greek and Latin classics, and British literature. She ultimately was credited as one of the first women, and the first African-American, to publish a book of poems. How she proved her genius and demonstrated her skills was 100 percent aligned with the expectations of the people and institutions in power at the time. Tragically, the way she demonstrated her learning nearly 300 years ago is still what we expect kids to produce in American schools in the 21st Century. A couple of centuries after her life, the KIPP charter network designed and created a "rigorous" curriculum for English Language Arts and named it in her honor: KIPP Wheatley. This curriculum is noted for having a balanced approach to literacy instruction by offering close reading, independent reading, language study, and writing. It is thematic, has anchoring and supplemental texts, and has assessments aligned with Common Core State Standards. While this may seem like a good approach to literacy in schools that serve mainly Black and Brown kids, the data and thoughts from the teachers and leaders who support it would say otherwise.
Led by both Amplify Equity, Reimagine Consulting Group LLC and All of Us LLC, the KIPP Wheatley Equity Audit team employed Gloria Ladson Billings’s Culturally Relevant Pedagogy as a framework for scoring the curriculum to see if it cultivated the same freedom that Ms. Wheatley experienced as an enslaved person who was taught to read and write. The three tenets of Billings’s work include:
Student Learning
“The bottom line is that no matter what else teachers are charged with, their main responsibility is to ensure student learning. Culturally relevant teachers are capable of assessing what students know […] and can provide evidence of what they know and are able to do at any point in the school year.”
The essential question we grappled with here was: Does the curriculum position historically marginalized students as agents of their learning and equip them to become joyful, independent learners in pursuit of excellence?
Cultural Competence
“Culturally relevant teachers understand that we exist in a complex, diverse, globally-connected world, and that the world their students will enter as adults will be even more so. Thus, they comprehend the importance of helping students understand and appreciate their home culture while acquiring skills in additional cultures.”
The essential questions we grappled with here were: Are the cultures of historically marginalized students affirmed by the curriculum and leveraged to learn and process new material? Does the curriculum introduce students to different cultures and discourses in ways that promote healing and avoid harm?
Socio-Political Consciousness
“Students must develop a broad socio-political consciousness that allows them to critique the cultural norms, values, mores, and institutions that produce and maintain social inequities.”
The essential questions we grappled with here were: Does the curriculum center the voices of historically marginalized individuals and portray their experiences with authenticity and complexity? Does the curriculum cultivate criticality, resistance, and joy, and engage students as agents in the pursuit of justice?
Some of the key findings of the audit team included:
Of the key texts reviewed, a vast majority of texts were written by white female authors.
Relating to Gloria Ladson Billings’s Culturally Relevant Pedagogy tenets, cultural competence was rated as the least apparent of the three in the curriculum.
Assessments were rated severely low with regard to cultural relevance, which correlates strongly to the associated achievement data and work produced by students.
Based on these findings, we inferred that:
Data related to assessments is telling as to why student mastery within KIPP Wheatley is so low.
Since the assessments don't reflect real world applications, our students (mostly Black and Brown) are not able to show mastery in ways authentic to their lived experiences/ histories.
Due to the standardization of the Wheatley assessments, the data on state assessments is highly correlated to that of Wheatley assessments.
The recommendations of the audit committee were:
Improve the quality of instruction within early childhood education (K-2), since many kids come to KIPP in Kindergarten and get to 5th grade unable to read or so severely behind grade level that they can’t comprehend what they’ve read, let alone show success on the assessments.
Use more texts (supplemental and novel-based) written by and featuring protagonists who are people of color.
Provide more opportunities for authentic and real world assessments/demonstrations of learning to allow for more equity and student-centeredness.
Note: While the data reflected and curriculum examined was one case within one charter system, KIPP Wheatley (adaptation of Wit & Wisdom) is reflective of most ELA curricula used in American schools; the audacity of even doing an audit touts its commitment to racial equity.
Based on the above equity audit results and what we know of Ms. Wheatley's success in life, isn't it time we allow students to show understanding and demonstrate mastery of the "standards" in more genuine and holistic ways? Isn't it time we allow them to tell their own stories? As the great Albert Einstein said, "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." While I'm obviously not purporting that Black children–or any children–believe they're stupid, statistically one can make a strong argument that they at least have not been as successful as their white counterparts in the educational system in America. While Ms. Wheatley was a genius ahead of her time, her approach wasn't aligned to the model that Black literary societies of the 19th century showed to be successful. In these societies, rather than Black people writing for the sake of others’ enjoyment, “literacy was connected to acts of self-empowerment, self-determination, and self-liberation.” Since literacy was the basis of all learning, it was used as a tool for taking back control of their lives.
In her nationally acclaimed text, Cultivating Genius, when describing the importance of literacy for Black and Brown children, Dr. Gholdy Muhammad writes, “reading and writing are transformative acts that improve self and society.” In this view, literacy is not a destination but a means, a vehicle to self-determination and a better world. It is this understanding that motivated me to first seek ELA as a content-area focus as a practitioner. My priority for students has been to move beyond proficiency and standard mastery to deep literacy, the literacy that Dr. Muhammad describes as “seeing, naming, and interrogating the world to not only make sense of injustice but also work toward social transformation” through the pursuit of skills development, identity, intellectualism, criticality, and joy. In this regard, literacy was and is a transformative act, and highly personalized and relevant to the people experiencing it. Literacy, then, is liberation.
When it comes to the teaching and demonstration of learning in English Language Arts, competency and authenticity must be taken into account to allow for a greater and more equitable view of success for all learners. In this view, learning will be meaningful, differentiated, varied in pacing, and assessed in meaningful and authentic ways. Culturally, there will be a commitment to equity, support for a culture of learning and inclusivity, the ability to build connections that increase relevance, the cultivation of empowering and adaptive leadership, and a fostering of a growth mindset. Structurally, there will be advancement upon mastery and not just seat time, transparency will be maximized, intentionality and alignment will be cultivated, mechanisms can be employed to ensure consistency and reliability, organizational flexibility will increase, educators will be invested in as learners, and there will be a process developed for ongoing and continuous improvement and organizational learning. Students will be allowed to tell their own stories of success.
While a competency-based approach to English Language Arts instruction in America is still a long ways away with many roadblocks, one major hurdle must be noted: if kids can't learn to read by 3rd grade, their ability to display understanding, utilize authentic assessments, show mastery in project-based ways, and much more will always be limited. Kids must constantly be read to. Since language is oral, and written language must always be interpreted, kids who struggle with the foundations of reading will never reach the level of sophistication needed to become critical thinkers or effectively show their understanding of what they’ve read. Even the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) purports that a child doesn’t qualify for specialized educational services if they have learning problems due to another disability or lack of opportunity, experience, or instruction. Our students often can't even have thoughts of freedom or get the support they need to engage more holistically with literacy since so many are locked out of the richness (and services) that words and books–and therefore the world at large–has to offer. As Toni Morrison said, “This is a really cruel fall-out of racism.” The Science of Reading must be implemented in all schools for us to be able to one day step into a world of literacy where mastery is displayed beyond simply reading something and responding well on multiple choice and open ended response questions. If quality foundational reading can be actualized, a competency-based approach to literacy in upper elementary and beyond will one day be possible.
2Revolutions is fortunate to be partnering with a statewide education nonprofit in Arkansas that is aware of these challenges and is making strides towards something potentially different. During recent empathy work with community members in the state, 2Rev team members have been able to hear firsthand the same cries for something new, better, and different both in literacy as well as other subject areas. In Arkansas and other states, statewide demand is being activated and partnerships are being formed to transform the student learning experience, build educator capacity, and create state policy and funding conditions that enable all of this. 2Rev’s ultimate goal in the Natural State is to support statewide transformation in education that is reflective of the hopes, dreams, and desires of the communities that will be the beneficiaries or captives of it.
Freedom's Journal, the first African-American owned and operated newspaper in the United States, proclaimed in its inaugural issue in 1827: "Too long have others spoken for us." It bears repeating today, almost 200 years later. Too long have others spoken for Black and Brown students as they attempt to show their mastery and their genius. Too long have others told their stories. And particularly now, after almost three years of disrupted education due to a worldwide pandemic, schools must do something drastically different for the achievable and sustainable success of all students. Without doing so, educational systems will continue to focus on the deficits of students rather than harnessing their strengths. All students can and will learn (and read) in different ways and on different days, but without an authentic and competency-based approach, many of our nation’s children will be left feeling like the fish trying to climb a tree--and that's a story no one hopes to tell.
