Building a Community of Learners and Educators

I am still recuperating from an enjoyable, hopefully fruitful WABSE (Washington Alliance of Black School Educators) conference. There were approximately 200 adults and 75 students in attendance over the course of three days of workshops. Attendees heard presentations about the African American Achievement Gap Final Report, they had opportunities to begin to develop an action plan for their schools and districts, and they heard from specialists in African American culture as it applies to education. Attendees came from across our state – there were teachers from Pasco and Everett, Olympia and Seattle. Attendees were African American, Caucasian, Asian and Hispanic. Although WABSE draws a predominantly African American crowd, the goal of the organization is to support any educator, parent or community member who works with African American children.

Even as one of the organizers of the event, there were many things I learned, the most important being that many people in our communities have pieces of the answer to the achievement gap. Our greatest issue is that the answers lie in outlying communities. Our answers are held in the minds and hands and hearts of many across our state. The pieces of the puzzle do exist, but there has been up until now no way to bring those pieces of the puzzle together in one place. There has been no clearinghouse for that information. Joe has not been talking to Susan who has not been talking to James who has not been talking to Ronnie. We are each fighting this problem we call “the achievement gap”, each with his or her own piece, each missing necessary pieces held in the hands of another maybe only minutes down the I-5 corridor or across the Snoqualmie Pass.

In this time of increased technology, we are still not communicating effectively. We continue to try to re-invent the wheel. We continue to make attempts to eliminate the achievement gap with merely SOME and not ALL of the tools necessary. I am not sure yet how to tackle this problem, but I am going to do my best to try to use our website to gather all these expert voices from our community in one place. If you are one of those people who has an answer, who has figured out how to gather our parents of color, who has figured out how to draw our men of color into the hallways and classrooms of our schools, who has found a way to interest students of color in mathematics and science, I am pleading with you to send me your answers, send me your research, send me stories of your experiences. I am not promising that all of it will end up on our website or that it will remain in the form in which it was sent, but I do want to ask you to share with us. I am asking you to join me in this journey to build a bridge, to build a community of learners and educators.

This request is not limited to those who attended the WABSE conference. If you are someone who didn’t know about the event or who couldn’t find the resources to attend, but you believe you have a piece of the puzzle, please contact me via e-mail (erin.jones@k12.wa.us). You, too, are invited to share in this process. I am not just looking for the answers to the achievement gap for African American students. I am looking for answers to the gap for our Native American students and our Cambodian students, our African immigrants and our Samoan students, our Latino students and our Eastern European immigrants. We would like to create a section on our website that is dedicated to best practices for all of our communities who are “in the gap.” We cannot do this alone. You cannot do this alone. We need one another. Please join us in this endeavor.

Teachers having a voice. Who is representing our students?

As always, life is a little crazy between running the office, doing presentations and advocating for parent involvement and our students of color on Capitol Hill. I think I have been invited to be on every board known to mankind. Well, not every board, but it feels like it…

Being in the classroom, it’s easy to become insulated, to feel like you are on an island, doing so much on your own. Am I the only one doing this? Is there someone with whom I can partner to some extent? Although I don’t enjoy board meetings, there is something about getting a number of different kinds of folks around the table from different industries with different backgrounds talking about the same issues. Suddenly it is apparent that you are not alone. There are other people out there with the same goals. We just didn’t know about one another.

Somehow we need to figure out a way to gather like-minded educators in a regular organized way to allow them to share ideas, to commiserate, to dream. This process should not be afforded merely to those who have left the classroom and now have “time” to chat. The conversations I was involved in today should have been happening with actual teachers around the table, people who are experiencing the challenges of trying to deliver curriculum while developing relationships with students struggling to find themselves in a complex world.

I know I realized this months ago, but something about today’s meeting struck me distinctly – so many of the decisions being made in our state (and likely around the nation) are happening in rooms full of middle-aged white men and women. I am not saying that these people do not know what they are talking about or that they should not be part of the conversation, but I am becoming more and more convinced that if our system is going to bring the changes we really need, the tables at board meetings MUST represent not only the diversity of the students being served by our system, but also with a diversity of perspective, which can only come by having young, middle-aged and experienced educators of all ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds at the table at once.