The essence of passion is an engagement and willingness to change.  There is little honor in holding back, limiting participation, accepting mediocrity, and finding comfort in the status quo.  With passion, we engage our soul and our being in this work, along with our mind and our body.  With passion, we reclaim our hope and belief in the possibility of a future devoid of racial injustice–a future governed by equity and anti-racism.  With passion, we survive the conflict, the lack of support, and the passive resistance that comes with challenging institutionalized racism in our schools.  And with passion, we will have the strength not only to stand up for what is right for our children, but to what is right for them as well.–Singleton and Linton, Courageous Conversations about Race.

I have been at work at my job for 7 full weeks now and I can say, that while I was excited about the job and the prospects for it and for making a change in education–I am not depressed by the way my hands are tied by those who I work under.  My job as Charter School Liaison to to hold our schools accountable both to the law and to education.  But really, we only care about the law–as we as an institution are not interested in finding our passion–I am not even sure those above me have the passion for education.  This depresses me beyond belief. I have a passion for education–the whole of my doctoral work and MA work was about ways to give a better education to the disadvantaged and under-served students.  I have a really hard time sitting by and accepting less than mediocrity.

The whole purpose behind the charter school movement was to offer options for parents who had few.  But not just options–better options, more innovative options.  What we have ended up with in education is a bunch of charter schools that function just like our traditional schools.  Our charter school (we have three more schools opening this fall) has less than 30% of its students proficient in English and math.  Yet because they are the highest performing charter school in the city and they are better than the majority of the public school options for students, we hold them up on this pedestal as though they are doing a fantastic job.  They aren’t.  But because parents keep signing their kids up and are not questioning the education their kids are getting and we as their sponsor are not willing to say–hey these scores suck–I am left feeling dissatisfied and guilty for allowing this to continue.  I want/need to be making a difference.  I am not and it sucks.

What also sucks is that the black kids in our more affluent districts are scoring just as bad at the high school level–anywhere between 13.6%-36.7% proficient in English and 14.9%-56.8% in math.  Compared to 58.7%-74.3% proficient in English and 75.8%-87.7% proficient in math for white students.  The discrepancy is horrid and I am so tired of the status quo being allowed to continue because we look at scores in aggregate and don’t bother to read the fine print.

These numbers are enough to support my reason for not wanting my minority children in a public school.  I need to be out there making a change and not in my cube checking off statute compliance.  This year needs to move fast so I can maybe get to the work of educating kids and then to educating teachers about the biases we hold and how that hurts the minority.