“WOKE IS NOT ENOUGH: School Reform for Leaders with Justice in Mind” (2022)
Excerpts from each chapter of my new book!
When we talk about wokeness, I’m not talking about just being woke, because you can be obsessed with wokeness and suffer from insomnia. I’m talking about being fortified.
- Cornel West
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
- Each chapter centers on a paradox or dilemma that is difficult for school leaders to navigate. But there are principles we can keep in mind to ground and guide us. This leads to practicalities, including a list of 15 concrete actions every school leader can take.
Chapter 1 Racial Justice
- Paradox: Discomfort Means It’s Working
- Principle: Center Personal Stories and Historical Facts
- Practicalities: Redistribute Resources
- 15 Concrete Actions Every School Leader Can Take
Chapter 2 Democratic Governance
- Paradox: To Share Power You Must Assert It
- Principle: Clarity of Purpose, Transparency of Process
- Practicalities: Speak Its Name, Make Its Shape, Live It Variously
- 15 Concrete Actions Every School Leader Can Take
Chapter 3 Restorative Justice
- Paradox: Traditional Discipline and Restorative Practice Can Go Together
- Principle: Harm Is Repaired in a Community of Belonging
- Practicalities: Universal Supports for Dialogue & Community-Building
- Practicalities, cont: Intensive Restorative Justice Interventions
- 15 Concrete Actions Every School Leader Can Take
Chapter 4 Student Activism and Organizing
- Paradox: You Can Be an Ally and Still Enforce Rules
- Principle: The Actions of a Few Can Leverage the Learning of All
- Practicalities: Support for Student Organizing and Learning
- 15 Concrete Actions Every School Leader Can Take
Chapter 5 Counter-Extremism
- Paradox: To Silence Extremism We Must Listen
- Principle: Questions Are as Strong as Answers
- Practicalities: Curiosity, Transparency, Vigilance
- 15 Concrete Actions Every School Leader Can Take
From the INTRODUCTION
Most school leaders were first teachers because they have a love for kids, and love teaching and learning with them in a place called school. The teacher’s best impulse and very vocation is to imagine all the beauty that children are capable of and help them become it. This disposition toward the work persists when one becomes a school leader. But we also must make room in our imaginations for less beautiful becomings. Indeed, it is our job to imagine the worst.
School leaders have a responsibility to recognize danger or potential disaster, understand how it might come to pass, and do all that we can to prevent it. This is an often-overlooked component of being a school administrator, and it is a taxing and important one.
We have fire drills, for instance, because we imagine the horror and put measures in place to avert the loss of young life. This work to imagine the worst is as necessary in contemplating of fire and toxic spills as it is of active shooter threats and other less tangible dangers, such as the ways political polarization threatens our democracy. It is the school leader’s job to consider what threatens our young people and the wider society, and then put measures in place to address those dangers.
I once followed a young man into town after he left school in distress. I didn’t want to send anyone else to follow him because I was worried about how emotionally and physically volatile he was at the time. He was becoming increasingly unpredictable, in word and deed, at school and at home. He was growing out of childhood and into young adulthood, and even his mother had come to fear him at times. I’d learned this from her earlier in the week when, in my office, she said she didn’t feel safe driving her son home. We called the local mental health crisis intake counselor to come down to the school to be with us and figure out what to do.
Now I walked behind him into town as the school tried to reach his family. He carried a wide smile on his face, a frozen and unmoving smile, and he wouldn’t respond to me when I spoke his name. I decided to stay enough steps behind him that he couldn’t quickly turn and strike me, but I had to stay close enough to him that I could intervene if needed. This seemed especially important as we approached the bridge over the river, with great rocks and cold water fifty feet below. I knew he’d experienced suicidal ideation in the past. I knew about his father, and the paranoid conspiratorial thinking that governed the father’s world view. I knew about the guns that had been in the home, and the close calls…
From CHAPTER 1 RACIAL JUSTICE
In the face of discomfort and pushback, it can be hard to maintain motivation for the work when one has the privilege not to have to. This is a generous way to frame it. One could also call it cowardice. Either way, a relevant question to ask is, how can we resist the strong incentives to avoid discomfort? How to hold ourselves accountable for fighting what we know is a cancer ruining the lives of so many, dividing and conquering people who would otherwise strive in solidarity to bring better lives for ourselves and our children?
Personal stories and historical facts will guide and ground us. Personal stories and historical facts anchor us in truth, and the truth is the most powerful accountability tool we have. This is why “truth and reconciliation” is such a refrain in confronting atrocity and making attempts at healing: from apartheid in South Africa, to genocide in Rwanda; from efforts to remember the Holocaust and ensure never again, to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice remembers the white supremacist terrorism of lynching Black people in our country. “Why build a memorial to the victims of racial terror?” the museum asks. Because “publicly confronting the truth about our history is the first step towards recovery and reconciliation.”
Such memorials and efforts at communal repair center both personal stories and historical facts. Personal stories tell of bodies and what is done to them. They communicate a name, a place, a family. The hair of children killed in Nazi extermination camps is collected for visitors to see. The names of lynching victims, state by state, county by county, are etched in the metal that weighs and hangs near the visitor’s head.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, invites every walker through the winding journey of the museum experience to pause and enter a “Reflection Booth” and tell a story. This is after seeing the artifacts and hearing the narratives of many stories. The experience of hearing a story invites the sister experience of telling.
Stories are how we understand our lives in place and time. We must surround ourselves in stories. In this regard, educators are among the most privileged people in our communities. By simple virtue of our profession, if our eyes are open and ears listening, we will encounter more stories of children and families than most other people will encounter in a lifetime.
Educators are also academics by vocation. The study of history is our job. Sound research and vetting of sources are tools of our trade. Few professions are better positioned to let personal stories and historical facts gather about us and help us see the truths that can guide us forward.
From CHAPTER 2 DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE
School leaders committed to democracy in theory may find it difficult to use their positional power to cultivate democracy in practice — for many reasons. The system is hierarchical by design. The job responsibilities are innumerable and the related tasks often urgent. It is hard to slow down and include others. And there’s little explicit guidance about democratic leadership, since the discourse of leadership has been blanched of the concept. This happens, as we have noted, because democracy is dangerous. The democratic spirit challenges the status quo in an era of privatization, wealth hoarding, and the control of vast resources by a shrinking number of people few. In the face of such challenges, how can we deepen our commitment to democracy in theory and practice in schools?
Paradoxically, democratic systems require not the retreat from positional power, but that leaders use it intentionally to shape school life. School leaders can live well with this paradox by keeping in mind the principle that democracy thrives on clarity of purpose and transparency of process. This principle leads us to consider practical matters, from the very words we use to speak about the work, to how we literally shape human interactions in the school community, to the various ways that democracy is lived by various stakeholders, based on their different roles and needs.
Thomas Jefferson was an early leader of this republic. He was a conqueror and enslaver who wrote very public words that gave the world the language to name his sins even as he lived them. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” is a phrase that has, for hundreds of years, broadcast the hypocrisy of a American slave-holders into every corner of this country and world. Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” These words resonate for their clarity, for their truth. They set a standard, and have, helped hold to account the leaders of the nation born in the wake of the articulation of the words.
To voice moral principles in no uncertain terms gives the human community — which lives in language and passes its ways down through generations in stories — the tools needed to affirm what’s good and to call out failings. Freedom fighters through the ages have held up the Declaration of Independence as a mirror that reveals both what is right and how far we have to go to get there.
From CHAPTER 3 RESTORATIVE JUSTICE
You are a school leader who is aware of contradictions. You believe in the creative and liberating power of education, and yet you work in a system that has perfected regimentation and confinement.
You know the health and rejuvenation of your society demands disruptive and youthful critique, and yet your school can stand only so much youthful disruption.
You strive to empower young people to challenge the status quo, and yet getting through any given day demands that rules as-they-are be followed.
And the contradictions are deeper and more troubling still. You believe your school can be a place where youth learn the names of oppressors — indeed how to unseat them — and yet you know the schoolhouse is but a few steps from the master’s house, and your tools are also his tools, and you are an agent of his state. You are a student of history. You know this nation was built on a foundation that included genocide and slavery. You know that to assemble, sit, move, order, measure, rank, sort, reward, admit, dismiss, and discipline students is done in this context, with the weight of that history.
In particular, the school’s discipline system concerns you. It concerns you in both senses of the word. As school leader you have say in this system. It is your professional concern. The moral dimensions also concern and worry you. You see how discipline systems can punish young people, how punishment makes them feel, and how school consequences can mirror the racial and socio-economic biases of the criminal justice system. You see how schools rank and sort according to how people across the land are unjustly ranked and sorted. You see who gets suspended and who doesn’t, and who gets suspended again, and who doesn’t come back. You’re familiar with the historical facts, the data, and you’ve heard personal stories. You know the school-to-prison pipeline is real.
You are working to address these concerns. You know that restorative practice is used to disrupt oppressive disciplinary systems in schools, but you’ve also heard they can fall flat. You know that they take time to develop and lots of time to implement. Time is a precious resource. Who has the time? Teachers are always teaching and then they need their preparation time. Your school counselors are swamped. And when it comes to major behavioral infractions, and the related investigations that administrators must conduct, just getting through one harassment investigation can take days.
You also know there could be substantial pushback if the discipline code is changed. Pushback will come from parents, teachers, even students who are accustomed to the status-quo. Yes, you have discretion as a leader, but there are mandatory minimums that the community is accustomed to when it comes to suspensions, loss of privileges, detentions, and any number of other consequences.
In addition to being resource-intensive, restorative practice is also individualized, resulting in different outcomes for different people. This will feel unfair to some. Accusations and feelings of unfairness are sentiments you do not want to inspire. A leader who is perceived as being unfair will make people angry and resentful, or withdrawn and dismissive. You do not want to erode the sense of community you’ve worked so hard to cultivate. And yet you know that there are ways to make your school community even healthier, more bonded and fair. How can restorative practice be a thread woven to make the fabric of the community stronger? …
From CHAPTER 4 STUDENT ACTIVISM
Our nation’s dominant culture abhors suffering of the self, even in mild forms, from a slight fever or cough to the discomforts of seeing oneself get older. Rather than be a source of meaning, pain of any degree is killed. Painkillers of countless types, from pills to creams to syrups, overflow the shelves of pharmacies, while cosmetics pack the shelves the next aisle over, and in the next we find potato chips, soda, and racks of magazines celebrating celebrity. “It is a culture,” writes Chris Hedges, a journalist, pastor and student of totalitarianism and war, “based on self-absorption, medical procedures to mask aging, and narcissism. Any form of suffering…is to be avoided.”
Of course we do not want people to suffer, or for students to be in danger, but we do want our students to feel the discomfort of moral dilemmas and the clarity that comes with action on the other side of choosing.
“I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering…” wrote James Baldwin many years before Hedges, in a similar vein, “but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.”
We want them to struggle with difficult choices in the name of what’s right. When students are energized and organizing for a cause that they believe in — and one that we adults may also believe in — what is the best way to support them? If they are planning an action that disrupts the normal functioning of school, this question becomes even more complicated. Should we make it easier for them — and for us? What is gained or lost if we change the rules and accommodate their disruption? What is lost if we allow student protest and resistance to be without hardship and ethical dilemma?
A certain quality of freedom is lost.
“In every act of rebellion we are free,” says Hedges about political resistance, artistic expression, and other assertions of humanity in the face of oppression. He’s right. It is in speaking, dancing, or singing a personal, spiritual or political truth to power that one finds freedom and feels the strength of one’s moral core…
From CHAPTER 5 COUNTER EXTREMISM
In terms of far-right, white-supremacist or white nationalist extremism, most school leaders do not have a lot of practice integrating a focus on this danger into our professional development forums or our work with teachers to develop curriculum. Organizations like those mentioned already in this chapter are providing resources of extraordinary value, but how those resources are adapted for particular school settings will take creativity, willingness to experiment and to make mistakes.
This is especially true in an era when communication and social media technologies are rapidly evolving. While the danger isn’t new, the communication technology is rapidly shifting to produce new avenues for dissemination and indoctrination. We need to be ready to feel surprised and off-balance at times. We need to take a stance of curiosity combined with vigilance. We need to be transparent with our community about our concerns and our responsibilities. We also need to be learners, ready to learn from others and by doing with others.
The paradox we have named is that to silence extremism we must listen. A principle to guide us through the paradox is that questions are as strong as answers. Our curiosity is as important a force as our conviction. This leads us to consider forums for professional learning, community dialogue and student engagement — the forums where we must hold these various stances of vigilance, transparency, and curiosity.
As with each section in this book focused on the practicalities, we are concerned with resources over which the school leader has control or influence. This includes the time given to meetings and classroom interactions; the content of those interactions, including historical facts and personal stories; the pedagogies and protocols we employ; and the staffing resources allocated to support the work.
From the CONCLUSION
Trends today are toward deepening division, with schools as a site where much of the conflict plays out. What this means is that the reforms described in this book will be even harder embrace tomorrow than they were yesterday when this book was written.
Democratic societies like ours, which are troubled by inequality and violence, can avoid the descent into more savage and widespread violence when leaders step into the public sphere to mobilize people in nonviolent directions. Even politicians corrupted by the influence of the wealthy few are still dependent on the middle and working classes for the votes that keep them in office. Rachel Kleinfeld, an expert in what makes some societies more violent than others, names the necessity of creative and courageous leadership in a polarized society:
It takes social leaders to organize the middle class into movements that are focused on effective goals, strong enough to overcome entrenched interests, and broad and nonpartisan enough to achieve success in highly polarized countries.
A school leader can be such a leader. Schools are small societies situated within larger societies. Schools are subject to the polarizing forces that disable dialogue and drive people apart, but schools are likewise positioned to center goals that all can believe in. A goal nearly all families and neighbors can share is that the community’s children grow up healthy and happy. School leaders can articulate such goals, cultivate collective commitment to them, and shape the conditions of our small societies to achieve them. We can make and hold democratic spaces for dialogue, mutual understanding, and the repair and prevention of harm. We can engage children and adults in collaboration across difference to see and work toward solving the problems large and small that face us…
