What About Our Black American Children? Leadership MIA

                         Photo: MSNBC "For eugenic sterilization victims, belated justice. (Fair Use)

By Don Allen, M.A. Ed./MAT - Editorial Opinion 

     After each year goes by unaddressed, our Black children sink further into the depths of not knowing important life skills and the importance of well-rounded education. Education and life-skills are an at-home and at-school combination of real-time experiences sometimes replaced with human trauma and the need to survive their circumstances. Many of us have watched the television programs and read the New York Times about how many Black American children and other BIPOC kids in the United States have to walk to school with guns because they are not safe in their own neighborhoods (Read: Black Mothers are the Real Experts on the toll of Gun Violence).  Activating premature independent learning without the ability to discern (undeveloped brain) in a dependent learner with no apparent experienced self-actualizations is what starts this downward spiral in the Twin Cities and communities across the United States with the same challenges - how do you get children to learn that are distracted by their man-made circumstances? Let’s make any mistakes; let’s be clear…there is something apparently disturbing about our youth selling drugs to make sure their families can eat and wear nice clothes or more tragic things like pulling a trigger and killing. Black American Children in the United States are some of the most overlooked, undervalued, and rejected in most inner-city public school settings. Today, across the United States, the tables are turning and some within the dominant culture are seeing in real-time how leadership in Black educational pursuits and the successes are invaluable and the most important piece of the pie that must keep tight connections between equity and communication;  the outcomes change when the right leadership is humble, respected, and takes the necessary actions to benefit child and family in their systems. There are Black American children that do well and the leadership in those communities have building blocks in place so their children will never fail the mission of an important educational experience.  


Educational Leadership: Complicit in halting Succession Planning

There are blind spots we need to look at like succession planning. As you know, succession can add huge value and mitigate significant risk at an organization or within community leadership. To get it right, one must have a clear picture of where the talent lies within our school districts, community, and political leadership as well as an objective process for finding the best candidate beyond someone’s personal “heir apparent.” We’ve read the stories about “The First…,” and to no avail was that person wasn't remotely successful. In the Twin Cities, the heir apparent is consistently replaced by political glad-handing and who best fits some organizations personal and political beliefs; heck, they might be members of the same fraternity or sorority, go the same church, have the same dentist - of which none denote the ability to lead as seen locally in secondary education. Technology has been a curse for succession planning. If an HR person can plunk in a few numbers, and a program with unknown algorithms spits out a couple of names, succession is never considered in decision making. When AI does more HR work than the people in them, we will continue to get the results we get with plenty of data to back it up. 


Equity Mining In Education 

     Equity can be dressed up. Equity can be static. Equity can be a plan. Equity will be excluded when the leadership teams and school leaders in education do not understand multifaceted approaches to teaching and learning, team building, and healthy conflict.  Stop what you’re doing right now; search for your children's school district. When you get to the website, type in ‘equity,’ hit return - review what you see. The district that I see says it is committed to equity; it even has an office with a contact - (a real person) that leads this dynamic super hero leap into 2022 politically correct, and cancel culture-free nomenclature like ‘student centered,’ ‘social emotional learning (SEL),’ ‘uncomfortable conversations,’ and a random quote by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that defines this agency as a ‘leader in equity’ and everyone from local politicians to community leaders ask for their advice! Again, for all intents and purposes -  just because it’s on the district website does not mean that the district leadership has figured it out - the data will agree with the statement. 


     Equity in education is defined in simple clarity as letting our Black American  children (and everyone else's child) pick apples out of the same tree using the right height scaffolding to reach every apple (even at the top) by balancing every child in his/her own cultural norms and eliminating the lens of historical assumptions and biological determinism. The experts agree, noted leadership author Karin Chenoweth wrote in her book How It's Being Done: Urgent Lessons from Unexpected Schools wrote, “America’s educational dilemma doesn’t make sense to even the casual observer. How can it be that the world’s only superpower has so much trouble educating its youth? Why is it that providing all American children with a solid, first-rate education is so hard for this mighty nation?”


Leadership Mining in Education 

     Schools overall were designed to give its K-12 scholars the skills to move from dependent learners to independent learners (Hammond) over the course of 12 rigorous years. Although educational design for BIPOC students is different than the mainstream, I clearly understand that children of color were never the focus of education. For the last 15-years in Minnesota, some educators in inner-city schools estimate that BIPOC students, and many White students might not read at grade-level, and math scores are in the proficiency range of 5-percent; in some cases, science benchmarks are not achieved. If school leadership is casually unaware of culture, teambuilding or management, and the environment inside a school building is unresponsive  to the children (all) and their communities, systems that intersect with social clusters like crime, law enforcement, poverty, homelessness, and parent/guardian disengagement are top-of-mind constructs that weaponize our youth and force them into an adult world of survival without the necessary skill sets to be successful; it’s on the news everyday.  There are multiple reasons this happens. If our schools leadership is controlled and represented by a one-sided political ideology that operated in areas of blighted, economically disenfranchised, and an academically challenged neighborhoods -  common sense tells us that what we see today in Minneapolis and Saint Paul and other communities like them around the United States are layered in similar conditions of concentrated mismanagement and mismeasurement created by malicious set of rules that only apply to a group of  BIPOC children that are always guided into downplaying the importance of having a vision and a plan; many of our children haven’t had the opportunity to dream. 


     As some of you know, I am taking courses in pursuit of earning a superintendent licensure here in Minnesota at a local teaching university. My professor asked us to read a piece she wrote, a position paper on Human Relations in Organizations. This particular position paper is the third in a series of papers written by academics that I respect from that university that clearly and distinctly lays out the many challenges with solutions. The information and the steps back to successful outcomes are available, but to publicly speak about them is considered by some of the politically comfortable as ‘unneeded’ or ‘toxic and accusatory.” This also makes me wonder if the political power dynamics in education are so strong it pulls-away and negates the servant-leader piece in favor of continuing operational norms that clearly mismeasures and makes static the goals of leadership in education.  This would explain the trajectory of vertical and horizontal alignment in cultures never connecting under extreme conditions of artificial harmony.   


     The professor writes: “Right here in Minnesota, we can see inequitable educational opportunities for individuals with disabilities, for students of color and for students from low-income communities reflected in achievement gaps, attendance, access to AP classes, graduation rates, and post-secondary participation. We experienced perhaps the most significant shift in education that has ever occurred in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic - distance learning. Every system had to change. Every system had to find new and sometimes better ways to serve its students. But did those systems change, really? Or, are we still trying to stuff our children into boxes that aren’t a good fit; into a sort of functional system? Many schools want different results, but the adults are afraid to abandon programs that do not deliver. So, what’s needed” (Dietrich)? 


As I sit here typing this, I realize the million dollar question are the questions that nobody responds to:

1. Can we find a new way to drive education?

2. Can we do something different? 

3. Why do the same results keep happening? 

4. Can we duplicate the successful charter model? 


Many in public education institutions struggle to answer. 


“O Leadership, Leadership, wherefore art thou Leadership?”

     Leadership missing in action just means they are powerless to change, and the authoritarian hand of downtown has too many cooks in the kitchen. There are several different systems or constructs, if you will,  involved in this messy non-delivery of educational assets to cities and states with high achievement gaps that affect one or more caste of K-12 scholars. The first is clearly Human Relations in Organizations, meaning that relationships in and between workgroups must be cohesive, actionable, and academic; the second (of a very big list) is organizational communication in leadership meaning that if your school has historically and generationally moved around chairs on the Titanic, without drastic change everything will remain the same. When leadership is inept, the juggernaut of best practice substitutions are layered in non-actions where “Education does not naturally awaken in us a concern for the uneducated” (Hoffer).  


     In best-selling author Patrick Lencioni’s book,  The Advantage (Lencioni is also the author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team),  Lencioni draws attention to what might be another critical failure in human relations in organization and organizational communication. Lencioni writes, “Since the 1980s, many organizations have centered their  clarity and alignment efforts around a singular tool that has been a major disappointment” - what he’s referring to is the mission statement.  He writes: “Even if my historical suspicions are untrue, it can’t be denied that most mission statements have neither inspired people to change the world nor provided them with an accurate description of what an organization actually does for a living” (Lecioni). 


     With racial disparities unbound, lack of digital access and human needs (there are over 1000 shelterless pre-K to 12 scholars in my home district; unconnected and disenfranchised), adding untrained teachers, and leadership castes beholden to budgets and antiquated policies  like one size fits all because your superintendent or principal’s  jobs depend on you being political connected with the governor, mayor, and local like-minded folks that don’t take to healthy conflict well. What is right or adjustable in critique is considered a personal attack. This system is the worst in stratification with nothing to undergird it.  Today, and pre-COVID-19, the culture and true meaning of education (if it can be defined) operates in a realm of false harmony.  To question an eight-hundred and fifty million dollar system about why the same kids are generationally getting the same results  means you are a central negative filled with toxicities and if you  have vision, ideas, or a plan to eliminate gaps in our education systems, you will be systematically dismissed with prejudice. The political power in education is strong today (2022), rather than learning from our mistakes and failures, system-advocates in leadership surreptitiously cloak bad outcomes by celebrating small climbs but to the casual observer, a 19-percent proficiency in reading is not passing. The questions about why from parents and community members are heaped in acronyms like the SCIP (School Consistent Improvement Plan) that in some cases are changed every year without multi-year clinical observations to tell if a school-designed plan will even work. The system and culture of filling out forms about what you speculate will happen has been left to the untrained eye of a leader without the cognitive ability to achieve success for every student (and building staff). 


My Position (thoughts and experiences) on Human Relations in Organizations 

     First of all, I see some of the messiness in secondary education. Secondly, I’m leaning towards what it says in the book, Coherence - the Right Drivers in Action for Schools, Districts and Systems (Fullan and Quinn) where they spell it out by saying, “It’s all about doing, working from a practice to theory, and getting better by doing more with added knowledge” (Fullan, Quinn p. 5).  As a Black male educator and servant leader, the onus of education cannot just fall into the hands of school administrators and teachers. A lot of this work must be done in the home and community (after school activities, church, family, and adult mentors) of the student. Parent and community engagement even before COVID-19 was strained. The lens of historical assumptions about the development of and destiny of our BIPOC students has evolved significantly under Jim Crow; in some blighted communities where multi million dollar renovation of school buildings have taken place, no investment in the students have been made. In 2022, White students in inner-city schools may suffer the same consequences as their Black American counterparts; usually an action is taken. Around the United States we have great examples of successes with BIPOC students like the New Orleans’ St. Augustine High School, which accomplished many firsts for African Americans during the 1950s and 1960s, again enjoyed a historical moment for its 2022 graduating class. The entire graduating class at the all-boys college preparatory school received acceptance to college, earning more than $9.2 million in scholarship offer; and the Chicago Bulls College Prep provides educational equity in Chicago that empowers students with the scholarship, discipline, and honor necessary to succeed in college and lead exemplary lives. Throughout their history, 100% of their graduates have been accepted to four year universities. It would be simple to duplicate the successful educational engagement done in both of these schools. This represents a unique and critical and high stakes challenge; if stakeholders in New Orleans, Chicago, and New York have figured out that the students are not the issue, and commanded leadership that is intentional and forward thinking, why are school districts in Minnesota rejecting this data? It might be as simple as the great charter school debate, which really shouldn’t be a debate because if public schools cannot do it; charter schools will.


     I also agree with the professor's stance; “As leaders, we set the stage and create the culture to make these things possible. We design the systems that support our culture, or our way of life in the organization. Sometimes, we successfully disrupt and rebuild the antiquated systems that don’t support the culture we are working toward. Somedays, we make small ripples that over time evolve into big changes. No day is ever a loss. Rather, it is an opportunity to assess, gather more information, learn, and guide our next steps'' (Dietrich).  In short, there has to be an effective leader with an educational vision who puts systems for improvement in place (emphasis of effective). For starters, research cited by Chenoweth shows that “there has not been a single case of a school improving its student achievement record in the absence of talented leadership.” 


     Our Black American Children deserve a better chance in education. There is no cure when the policies are non-consequential, and children from tough neighborhoods are looked at and treated as victims versus vessels. If the many challenges of education are not reset, especially in Minnesota, the system and the leadership in those systems will implode causing a ripple effect for every family, community, school, and businesses dependent on our children (all of them), getting a well-rounded education. Learning does not stop after grade 12, a message missing from most textbooks. 


References

Dietrich, K. (2022). Instructor position paper on human relations in organizations. Hamline University Canvas. Instructional. 


Fullan, M., & Quinn, J. (2016). Coherence: The right drivers in action for schools, districts, and systems. p. 5. 


Hoffer, E. (2006). The ordeal of change. Titusville, NJ: Hopewell Publications. p. 38. 


Lencioni, P. & hoopla digital. (2015). The advantage: [why organizational health trumps everything else In business].


n.a. (2022). All-black New Orleans graduating class earns $9.2 million in scholarships with a 100 percent acceptance rate. The Seattle Medium. Retrieved May 29, 2022, from https://seattlemedium.com/all-black-new-orleans-graduating-class-earns-9-2-million-in-scholarships-with-100-percent-acceptance-rate/  

n.a. (2022). Chicago Bulls College Prep. Noble Schools. Retrieved May 29, 2022, from https://nobleschools.org/bulls/ 

Nettles, A. (2021). Black mothers know the toll of gun violence. The New York Times. Retrieved May 29, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/05/06/opinion/gun-violence-black-mothers.html  

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