In 2012, I had the pleasure of reading a poem dedicated to NYC public schools at a Save Our Schools rally in City Park Hall. In the midst of the rally, a handful of Black elders approached me and said, “Hey, before people came here, we had a rally about Black education and we’d hope you can join us.” I simply nodded and understood the gravity of what he’d been asking. For a generation of Black and Latinx folx, ethnic studies in schools was an extension of asking our school systems to see them as people, citizens deserving of an education as a whole. This solution spotlights racism and all its extensions into our students’ lives. The elders in front of me had seen how the ethnic students movement was borne of the larger civil rights movement and made its way through institutions of higher education.

Sadly, our school systems in PK-12 never addressed this on a substantial level, so while the anti-high stakes testing movement was at a peak in the years of the Obama administration, we still had a centuries-old question as to whether our Black students (and others) felt like full human beings in these spaces. More often, they didn’t, and still don’t.

To many, the basic pillars of education are reading, writing, and arithmetic. Generally, anyone with an opinion on education uses the conversation about these tenets as a touchstone for whether students are learning what they ought to learn. From there, the lines get blurry. Some believe students should learn from rote memorization and basic concepts that they too mastered in their academic careers. Others believe students should learn through so-called “progressive” means: ideation, inquiry, and intentional facilitation. Other still have solid questions about the necessity of these knowledges in a world replete with technologies that facilitate these subjects more readily.

Threading all of these visions for education is a sense that students should learn their subject areas the way their parents did, even as initiatives like the Common Core State Standards has prompted states to reconsider an adjustment. Yet, cognitive dissonance also settles in when we also want our students to do and be better than the generation who came before them. We’re asking students to aim at moving targets: jobs that don’t exist, tech that hasn’t been imagined, sciences that have yet to reveal themselves.

Oh, and that we’d like for this to happen in a country utterly deliberate in its subjugation of our most marginalized and oppressed youth, from our students in our early childhood education programs to the most important classroom in the world: The White House.

While this alliance is by no means perfect, we’re finally at a point where a chancellor would like to address systemic racism in the nation’s largest public school, a mayor that’s gotten out of the way, and a coalition of the mightiest students, parents, educators, and other deeply impassioned citizens who want to see things done a new way. At the next Panel for Educational Policy meeting (please click on July 31st, 2019), this broad coalition intends on moving forward with a definition of equity that doesn’t just amount to curriculum alignment and management realignment. We expect and have experienced a slew of derision for simply believing that everyone deserves a fair share of the opportunities our city proffers. (#WeDidThatWork on the way). Some columnists and policymakers would like to pretend that this coalition wants to divide the city than unite it.

Yet, the divisions are already there and have always been. We can no longer pretend that the most segregated school system in the country wasn’t already divided by plans, schemes, and laws that explicitly call for the various divisions of the rich and the poor. We can’t keep crying “identity politics” when citizens under pseudonyms use our Asian colleagues as wedges to continue subjugating our Black and Latinx youth. We can’t say “There has to be a better way” when these words often get used to dilute and subvert the direct intentions of the people most impacted by the lack of resources and opportunity. We can’t say that “everyone just needs to have good teachers” when so many Black and Brown teachers who our students connected with were harassed, harangued, dismissed, and pushed out of the profession through bastardized rubrics and wayward test scores.

Perhaps the claim is that students are “struggling with basic English and math,” an argument inconsistent with the thrust of the last three decades of the accountability movement. But we must know this and we must know this well.

Maybe our students can’t do math, but they can tell when they’re divided.

They can tell which schools love them for them. They can generally tell which adults care about them no matter how tough they present themselves. They can tell when another set of students is getting better or worse treatment based on social cues they’ve received since they were in their diapers. They can tell when the characters in their textbooks don’t look like them, or how people are more receptive to their struggles when a furry animal stands in their place. They can tell when the co-located schools with more resources and less students in the same building also have to stand in straight lines and get suspended at disproportionate rates.

To wit, culturally responsive and sustaining education isn’t just for Black and Brown students. It’s for everyone.

Asking our school system to honor everyone’s contributions to society and not just an elite few means everyone learns better. Prompting our policymakers to interrogate practices and laws that implicitly and explicitly bake bias and racism into our works means everyone can do better. Building relationships with students beyond a grade and a greeting at the door means everyone, especially our rich folks, can start to see how this isn’t just one person’s problem, but our city and country’s collective issue.

So, in a sense, that infamous yellow rag was correct: our city has been “readin’ and whitin’” for a long time because it’s evident that the experience of so many others have been ignored if not erased. Now, let’s continue to push the work so future generations never have to ask what we did when we were presented with these challenges.

We can’t wait to solve these problem sets; this is our task.