In case you missed the news, the NYC Department of Education adopted a definition of culturally responsive / sustaining education inspired by several parts scholarship, stakeholder voice, and surveys done across the city. The writers included a coalition of parents, students, educators, and other concerned citizens, including yours truly. While the media concentrated on the virulent response to the definition, which was really another anti-Richard Carranza protest, the proponents for the definition saw it as a pivotal moment in the direction of our children’s education.

Up to this point, the definition hasn’t gotten the publicity it deserves in pulling us towards a more inclusive foundation for our children.

I’ll attempt to make an argument for its proliferation through the lens of math, perhaps the most hotly contested subject area with respect to our academic core. Unlike the humanities, people love treating math as a set of absolutes, a content area apart from the human experiences we inject into the rest of our scholarship. Even though more people are starting to see how their mathematical experiences are connected to the subject area itself, we still have a way to go.

When we say “Amy can’t read,” we don’t dismiss this claim from just an academic viewpoint, but also from a moral one. Illiteracy has been treated as a scourge we ought to ostensibly destroy, even when our structures perpetuate illiteracy in our most marginalized spaces. Innumeracy rarely gets this treatment, partly because of its complexity, but also because of the narratives we tell ourselves about who deserves to learn math, how they deserve to learn math, and what math they should learn.

Too much of the argument against the Common Core State Standards, for example, starts with “students should just learn basic math.” That sounds fine, but “basic math” is often shorthand for “I have low expectations and I already know who I’m setting them for.” I used to rail against the Common Core State Standards not just over implementation, but also that CCSS came with a suite of reforms that proved ineffective at best. Our opportunity gaps persist along with the inequities.

For example, one might say that solving systems of equations in the eighth grade is too dense. We should just make sure they know how to do the four basic operations. I believe that students who can only do the basics should have boundless opportunities for success in whatever constraints success takes. Yet, I also believe that students can do more than the four basic operations and may not even need to master those to have a conceptual understanding of systems of equations. In other words, we lose out on a world of opportunity by capping our students to a fifth-grade education when they have the potential for so much more.

There’s something to be said for believing that adults should have given students access to systems of equations by the eighth grade. In order for that content to take shape in a classroom, the adult in the room must believe that the students in the classrooms can actually solve the two-step equation at some point in that classroom. What’s more, the adult must open themselves up to the idea that their pedagogy has to align itself to student understanding, not the biases and narratives we tell ourselves about students.

That’s where the definition lives richly. To do culturally responsive/sustaining pedagogy is to know students as people and build relationships with the people.

It’s not just about the pedagogy, however. We have staff demographics in our schools that don’t reflect their student populations. We have school leadership that both uphold antiquated understandings of how math gets taught and hold back math teachers – especially of color – from enacting pedagogies that would make students feel more connected to the material. We have peers who jeer and grind their teeth at the mere mention of anti-bias even when their students are begging for it. We have contracts with book publishers who only sell books in English, very rarely in Spanish, and almost never in the next eight most popular languages (Chinese – Mandarin, Russian, Kreyol, Arabic, Hindi, Urju, Hebrew, Gujarati). We have economic and social stratification across the board in our neighborhoods, including our homeless and sheltered people.

Oh, and we have a small window of opportunity to assure that our children get a quality education that embraces them as fully human beings regardless of their area code or local bodega.

When we say we want a “culturally responsive / sustaining education,” we’re explicitly saying we want all our students to treat each other as human beings and have our classrooms symbolize that recentering. It’s definitely for our Black students, Latinx students, Asian students, indigenous students, and our white students. It’s for our students who see themselves as mathematicians all the time and for our students who keep being told that “it’s OK because I wasn’t a math person either.” It’s to assure that we’ve created multiple pathways for discussing math as a vehicle for augmented intelligence and deconstructing perceptions of said intelligence across racial, gender, and class lines.

We believe our students can reach the heights they believe they can and we believe our students can go higher than that. Don’t miss it.