Jim Crow's Pink Slip - Dismantling the Education Gap

Jim Crow's Pink Slip - Dismantling the Education Gap with Amy Edelstein

In this episode of The conscious Classroom, Amy Edelstein helps illuminate the little-known history and ongoing influence of resistance to de-segregation within America's education system - and how mindfulness, being conscious and aware of our biases, is an important part of our work to redress inequity. Leslie Fenwick's seminal work, Jim Crow's Pink Slip, serves as a guide and compass, unveiling the long shadow left by the  dismissal or demotion of a significant number of black principals and educators after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. 

This episode offers a deeper understanding of past injustices and their lasting impact and also shows some approaches that can support our efforts to shift the educational landscape. Expect to uncover why representation across racial and cultural lines is more than just a number—it's about students being able to see themselves in the leaders in their learning journey and a call to bring about change in our classrooms for each student and for the benefit of society at large.

Additional reading related to this episode can be found here:

•  Jim Crow's Pink Slip by Leslie Fenwick
• https://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/cmscontent/TCZ/Book%20Reviews%20Collection%202022/July%202022/Jim%20Crow%27s%20Pink%20Slip-1659381190.pdf
• https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2022/0912/How-the-1954-Brown-decision-still-influences-today-s-teaching-ranks
• A Diverse Teaching Force Is A Quality Teaching Force
• Why Diversity Matters

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:10

Welcome to the Conscious Classroom podcast, where we're exploring tools and perspectives that support educators and anyone who works with teens to create more conscious, supportive and enriching learning environments. I'm your host, amy Edelstein, and I'll be sharing transformative insights and easy-to-implement classroom supports that are all drawn from mindful awareness and systems thinking. The themes we'll discuss are designed to improve your own joy and fulfillment in your work and increase your impact on the world we share. Let's get on with this next episode. Hello, welcome to this episode of the Conscious Classroom. My name is Amy Edelstein.

Speaker 1: 1:09

Today I want to talk about some reflections that were inspired when I finished scholar Leslie Fenwick's well-researched and illuminating book called Jim Crow's Pink Slip, which is about what happened in the education system, particularly in the southern states, following the seminal Supreme Court decision Brown versus the Board of Education in 1954. I'd like to talk about that. Usually, I don't talk about such specific legislation and their impact on the educational system, as we're focused more on solutions and on contemplative practice and how contemplative practice can help us restore dignity, respect, equity, balance, purpose, love, humanity and aspiration into our education system, at the same time understanding how we got to where we are in America's public education system before we dive in to address the gap is essential. We need to know what structural legislation was in place, what informal actions that had far-reaching consequences were the habit, informal policy under the table policy, and we need to think deeply about how we can internalize all of that, since it was was the history, without imposing any limitation on what we can do now, recognizing, of course, that what we do in the present has long-term consequence and as Fenwick helped us see through documented studies, meticulous research, documented studies, meticulous research, as well as combing through the public US Senate transcripts from 1971 on a committee chaired by Walter Mondale that was exploring the impact of Brown versus the Board of Education and the loss of Black teachers and principals and good, high quality Black schools. So her work is both her deep understanding as well as combing through public record, and that, to me, is part of what has given me impetus to think more proactively and creatively about how we can reach our students of color in better and better ways. So I'm going to dive into some of the key insights from that book.

Speaker 1: 4:14

What I'd like to do before we start is diving into the details, is to do a short practice. We're going to do a thought bubble practice that's guided to allow you to recognize what are the immediate reactions. What are the immediate reactions? Curiosities, dead ends, brick walls, biases, what's going on? Just hearing that in a podcast like the Conscious Classroom we're going to be exploring the desegregation of American schools and, in effect, a higher order of segregation that ended up coming about among the educators and the consequences of that.

Speaker 1: 4:56

So if you're driving, please do the meditation later. Keep your eyes on the road and if you're not, put your phone on, do not disturb for the next few minutes, really taking the time and allowing yourself to notice your preconceived assumptions, your conclusions, convictions, and allow them all to be. This meditation is not to question or pick at our beliefs. It's simply to notice what's there, to be conscious and aware of what's arising, to be conscious and aware of what's arising, to be conscious and aware of our emotional reactions and be conscious and aware that we can hold all that in the vast field of our own mind and allow room to observe the phenomena that we're looking at, as well as our own conclusions, in a new light. So let's sit by being in an intentional posture, with our spine tall, our hands relaxed, folded in our lap or resting on our thighs. You can find a beautiful shape or color or window to rest your gaze on, or you can close your eyes and allow yourself, as you let go of the visual, to sink back into yourself, allowing yourself to rest in your own self, in your own heart, in your own strengths, in your own care. Just like the bulbs in spring push their fronds up to the surface and break through the cover of the dark ground, new understandings can reach through naturally, in an affirming and positive oriented way. Allow yourself to soften and accept your conditioning, your exposure, and and allow yourself to be curious to see what's there, intentionally, mindfully, with care and with acceptance, simply because that is what's arising, that is what's there. We don't need to act on everything that's there.

Speaker 1: 8:30

Our mindfulness practice helps us identify and be easy. So begin by noticing your own reactions and responses, identifying feelings, thoughts, curiosities, disagreements, angers or frustrations, and putting each of them in a bubble and letting that bubble float away. As you notice your initial surface layer of reactions, allow those to float away and continue to look for the next layer of reaction. Conclusion interest, disinterest, blame, guilt, anger, resignation or hope, passion, determination, conviction. You can pause the podcast and continue making some notes for yourself, naming what we see, making objective what's subjective and allowing yourself to capture your own reflections and thoughts on the matter, and we can finish the exercise now, allowing yourself to re-engage with your cognitive functions listening and being curious with a little more space and a little more calm and a little more ease.

Speaker 1: 11:37

In many studies it's been shown that students of color who have at least one teacher of color for at least one year between, believe it or not, kindergarten and third grade saw improved math scores raised by three to five percent, so their reading scores jump three to six percentage points. That was in a study conducted by an education professor at Stanford named Tom Dee, in 2000 on students in Tennessee. And another more recent study in around 2022 in North Carolina, conducted by four different researchers Gershenson, hart, lindsay and Papa George saw that students who had at least one black teacher students of color who had at least one black teacher between grades three and five, students of color who had at least one black teacher between grades three and five significantly increased their graduation rate, reducing their high school dropout rate. This was brought to my attention when Inner Strength did a strategic planning that involved 10 of our students of color. That involved 10 of our students of color and one student very emphatically and kindly said she had a very passionate and committed, dedicated young white instructor from Inner Strength. And she said, while this instructor was really kind and really engaged and really nice and loved teaching, was really dedicated to us, she said it would be better if I had a teacher who looked more like me, who looked more like me. So we thought about it and as an organization have made a lot of effort over the last few years to offer training scholarships to encourage future instructors of color to develop the skills to run mindfulness programs in school of color. To develop the skills to run mindfulness programs in school, we've offered paid internships both to our older students and participants in our courses, hoping that they'll continue on as they mature and grow, go into college, and paid internships to others who want to learn by placement in the classroom. And we're also engaging with our local colleges and universities, setting up university co-op programs to bring in a cohort of younger students and, with the emphasis on students of color, creating those bridges both in age and in culture so that our students see people in authority who look like them, who are closer to their age and who can hear and listen and respond back from their own experience in ways that may connect a little more closely, or even be perceived to connect a little more closely, with our students. I invite any of you who are working in the education field and looking to bring more instructors of color into your organization or into your school to share with me what you are doing. Forward-looking solutions are very important, and using AI now to diversify our questions and problems and examples is much easier and really important, and especially the photographs and images we use.

Speaker 1: 16:02

So back to Jim Crow's pink slip by Leslie Fenwick. What she found was that in the years following the decision Brown versus the Board of Education in 1954, more than 100,000 black educators were dismissed or demoted and primarily black schools were closed and those students were moved into predominantly white schools. Now, as she documents, the black principals and teachers said who were dismissed or demoted, and she goes case by case. These are real people with documented histories. Those black teachers often had teaching credentials from excellent northern universities, including NYU, columbia University of Chicago, university of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan, all of which have excellent teacher preparatory tracks. These educators were often replaced by less qualified white educators with fewer credentials, white educators with fewer credentials, fewer PhDs, fewer masters of education, some without even a bachelor's, lower scores on educator testing, educator tests and less experience both as educators running schools and with the students that they were now charged to educate.

Speaker 1: 17:58

The fallout has been extreme for a number of reasons which I'd like to pull out. As Fenwick says, and I'll quote her here she says it's resulted in what's perhaps the quote most significant brain drain from US public education system that the nation has ever seen. It was so pervasive and destabilizing that even more than a half century later, the nation's public schools still have not recovered, and we can see that. But many of us didn't know that there was a different history and a different trajectory that was disrupted, and I'd like to just take a moment to identify what the fallout is.

Speaker 1: 18:46

One we lost qualified educators. A principal with an EDD from Columbia is an asset to all students. We lost good people in the profession in the immediate aftermath. We lost inspiration to the generations that they would have taught or led. We lost role models that would inspire really smart students of color to enter into the teaching profession. We lost role models to Black communities, because those principals and teachers with high degrees of education were often community leaders and real representatives to their neighborhood. Devastating blow to see them dismissed or demoted. So discouraging, so disheartening. We lost qualified educators who would have shaped curriculum differently. We lost their high expectations that would have uplifted Black students, since they represented Black individuals who excelled. Since they represented Black individuals who excelled and in a very long-reaching shadow, we lost income to those Black communities. That 100,000 Black educators represented something like a billion dollars of economic cut across these southern states. That would have resulted in homeownership, in intergenerational wealth creation, in community investment, in business startups. We would be seeing a very different present had those educators remained in the school system.

Speaker 1: 21:04

The impact on the Black community can't be underestimated. As Fenwick researched among Black professionals during that time, something like 72% of them were educators. So the majority of Black professionals who got higher degrees, who entered into the professional job market, did so through education. There was a great value on education, great emphasis on education, great desire to bring more young Black students up into the professional world. Losing such a huge percentage of them meant not only that the black professionals of that generation lost the momentum of their education and often the emotional momentum that goes with success, but it lost a whole generation that again would uplift and inspire and economically contribute to those communities. The impact on the students was huge as well.

Speaker 1: 22:25

The result of Brown v Board of Education was supposed to create desegregated schools and allow for equity of access. In fact, what happened was Black students were now moved into previously all-white schools and their Black schools were closed, often resulting in needing to travel to neighborhoods they weren't familiar with, to be met with indifference or dislike and to be placed on a social hierarchy as lower than the students where they were integrating to In some sense. For many of those aspiring students, the unintended consequence of Brown v Board of Education, because of the deep-seated resistance and beliefs and prejudices and unexamined emotional reactions, resulted in a lowering of the quality of education. How many teachers in schools were affected? Fenwick's research covered most of the 17 states in the South that were operating racially segregated schools prior to Brown versus the Board of Education and Prior to that decision. In those 17 states, 35 to 50% of the principals and teachers were black. 30 to 50% of the principals and teachers were black in those states. Now I don't have the stats just for those states, but today, of the 3.2 million teachers in our schools, only 7% are Black, and of the 90,000 principals in this nation, only 11% are Black. Of the 14,000 superintendents, only 3% are black. So we're not exactly comparing apples to apples. In those stats which I don't have other ones at my fingertips right now states 35 to 50% of the principals or teachers were black and we lost 100,000 of those principals and teachers. We're seeing a huge shift in the balance of representation and when we see that kind of shift in the balance of representation, the impact psychologically is even more than the numbers show. You see a slow but determined attrition over a decade or two, over a decade or two. And now, in 2024, we still see predominantly black and brown schools run by teachers and principals who do not represent the cultural background of the students they serve and B who tend to have lower academic qualifications than those serving predominantly white students.

Speaker 1: 26:18

So what does this have to do with mindfulness in education? What does this have to do with mindfulness in education? What does this have to do with making our classrooms conscious? I want to take a few moments to reflect on that One. What it has to do with our conscious classrooms is checking our biases with our conscious classrooms. Is checking our biases, assuming that education hasn't been a priority in black communities, rather than understanding that there has been an effort to remove qualified black educators from the school system among a significant number of states, and that tendency, of course, spreads throughout the country.

Speaker 1: 27:19

So what are our assumptions, whether we're black or white, or from a different cultural background, immigrant background, what are our assumptions about how we got here, what are our assumptions about the value of education for our young people and what are our expectations then? People and what are our expectations then? Part of being in a conscious classroom is awakening to our own unexamined conclusions, assumptions, expectations and replacing them with intentionally, intentionally constructed and deeply examined beliefs about the power of education to open doors, the universal creative spirit in all young people and the thirst for learning that is simply part of the human species. We are a curious species. I don't know what happens in an earthworm's brain, but I know that in the human brain we love exploring, experimenting, learning, discovering and expanding our horizons. This is part of what makes us human Recognizing that in all of our young people, allowing our own mindfulness practice to constantly allow for the unexpected, the unknown, the experiential, to enable that curiosity to come forward in our young people in ways that are previously unexpected and unpremeditated.

Speaker 1: 29:19

Working with our students in a lot of flipped classroom, experiential learning, project-based learning incorporating a significant amount of reflection, peer-to-peer instruction, collaboration, sensory demonstrations and activations and expressions and enactments of the concepts we're teaching, real-world scenarios, applying the concepts to problems and successes, celebrations that relate directly to students' lives, all enable that learning to come forward. It requires a little bit of thoughtfulness, but not much more. Retooling of our lesson plans and our own mindfulness practice can really allow students to discover their own innate curiosity. Support that Encourage them to become teachers, bring that possibility to the forefront. Our investment in our educators is our investment in the future. Our investment in exceptional learning and teaching is our belief. It's a demonstration of our belief that a better world is possible to create, and we are planting the seeds for that better world.

Speaker 1: 31:02

As we reflect on our own passion for the possible through the education process, let's allow ourselves to feel the updraft in our own hearts that our students are not inherently disengaged, inherently less interested in learning and inherently less capable. In a large part, it's been the result of how environment has shaped expectation and how they show up, and how they show up and by simply opening up the context and shifting the dynamics in the classroom, the natural curiosity of these young people will take over and that 4-year-old or 6-year-old or 8-year-old or 14-year-old or 18-year-old will start recasting their own aspirations and self-reflections against a very different mirror of expectation. And as teachers, when we do, that's a beautiful thing, it's a noble part of our profession and it's a real gift to the future. Thank you for listening to the Conscious Classroom. I'm your host, amy Edelstein. Please check out the show notes on innerstrengthfoundationnet for links and more information, and if you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with a friend and pass the love on. See you next time.