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.