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The Launch of Textbooks & Turntables: Reflections on Remixing Education
As the 2022-2023 school year begins, I am reminded of a post I made on social media in 2018 when I was still an assistant principal at P.L. Dunbar Middle School for Innovation in Lynchburg, VA. Every word of it is still true today:
I started teaching 11 years ago, fresh out of college at 22 years of age. My students were juniors in high school, only about 6 years younger than I was. Still, to this day, one of my favorite things is seeing former students in the community and getting to hear about their lives now as adults. I still feel a sense of pride when I see them because they were MY students...students that exhibited strength, tenacity, and personality, and in turn enlivened my every day with joy, even when it was accompanied with frustration:) Some of my former students will thank me for being patient with them, when in reality I need to thank them for being patient with me--patient as I made mistakes, failed, and learned on the go about teaching and coaching.
I go on to talk about the importance of reciprocal grace between students and teachers, which I still believe is critical. In the years since I left school administration, however, we’ve all been through a pandemic, compounded by racial unrest, frequently toxic community/school relations, and exponential mental health issues for students and their support systems. We’ve also witnessed the gaps in education that were exacerbated by systems not equipped for the challenges they would face. In the midst of all this, I found myself more and more cynical regarding the state of public education in America. About this I should be clear—I refuse to overly criticize teachers and administrators, or at least the majority of them, because I know their challenges and how hard they worked during the pandemic. And I was not alongside them in the day to day grind. My frustration began long before 2019 and stems, in part, from intimately knowing the flaws of our education systems and seeing how they continue to get in their own way. I believe grace should remain central in our approach as we navigate our way through the mess that remains, but right alongside that must be creativity, competence, and accountability. It’s far past time we start pushing our systems to make changes that were long needed. We will continue to make mistakes and learn on the go, but the key is that we keep growing, advocating, imagining, and enacting.
This blog is my attempt at putting some of my reflections and thoughts on education reform to words, focusing on the personal, philosophical, practical, and political. As you will see, I have many critiques of public education as we know it, but I’m also deeply committed to it. I’m a product of public schools, as well as a former teacher and administrator in public schools. I currently work for an educational nonprofit that supports and works with our local public schools. And though I am not against private educational options for families, I still believe that a system of fully privatized education will never attain the results that some believe it will (for reasons too numerous to share right now). My thoughts on remixing education come from experience and research, but they are not immune to critique themselves. In the midst of so much busyness and exhaustion, I hope to stimulate reflection and responses from readers, creating a small community of thoughtful participants who dare to consider possibilities.
This blog is not limited in its scope to educators, however. As much as I will reflect on what I see as an often dehumanizing and uninspiring system, schools don’t exist in a vacuum. Local communities have too frequently relegated their role in supporting schools and students, choosing instead to focus on individual autonomy and divide into competing small tribes. This leads to fractured community, where the common good and care for one another is limited in scope and power. My goal is also to challenge this narrative and normalized way of being, especially for the good of all students, particularly the underserved and marginalized. As D.L. Mayfield writes:
Someone’s students have to attend the worst schools in your community. In your mind whose kids should that be?... It’s a hard message to give in my city—which, like so many in our world, is segregated by race and class. Asking people to do good, to give, to be charitable, becomes easy in these kinds of societies; asking them to be neighbors with those they most wish to help is not, since it points out an inconvenient truth that most of us try hard to forget all the time: some of us have worked hard to make sure we are only neighbors with certain kinds of people, and now we have to live with the results.1
Our fractured communities lead to many of the problems our schools face, and though I cannot offer expertise in how to reverse these macro-level social trends, I can write to encourage reflection and bring awareness to what I am learning myself.
In all, my goals for this blog are modest, and I’ll mostly settle for initiating conversations and reframing the narrative on education reform among a small number of devoted citizens who make a difference. In the end, small groups of deeply committed and passionate individuals are often the means to enact change in society, especially as their influence is multiplied. To connect back to the 2018 post at the beginning of this newsletter—those students deserve our best efforts, even if change is slow and arduous. Though it’s cliché, they are still the focus of my efforts and the heart and soul of any educational change. Want to join me? Let’s get going.
Mayfield, D.L. Myth of the American Dream: Reflections on Affluence, Autonomy, Safety, and Power.