Higher Learning

Empowering Youth Through Culturally Responsive Education

- Jose Luis Vilson

On May 1, 2019, the New York City Council asked a group of students called Teens Take Charge to weigh in on how to improve education for the city’s 1.1 million public school students. One young activist, Sokhnadiarra Ndiaye, gave compelling testimony about the responsibility of educators and policymakers: “I’ve heard a lot of adults say how much they love hearing student voices, how much they value us,” she said. “I agree. Student voices are great. But you know what I prefer? Adult action.”

With that comment Ndiaye connected herself to legions of Black education activists, from Elizabeth Eckford, Anna Julia Cooper and Ruby Bridges to modern-day students, parents and educators who have called their school systems to task for mass racial inequities. The history of education in this country has always included barriers to Black children. In the early nineteenth century, states in the newly formed nation forbade the teaching of reading to enslaved peoples for fear that literacy would lead to insurrection. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws instituted segregation between Blacks and Whites, including within what were then known as common schools. Eugenicists stepped up their efforts on the policy of separating the races by using pseudoscientific IQ tests to argue that Black people were intellectually inferior to Whites.

The mid-twentieth century saw a victory for educational equity in the form of Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled the segregation of schools to be unconstitutional and the so-called separate but equal educational facilities for Whites and Blacks to be inherently unequal in quality. But while it would take more than a decade for many schools actually to be desegregated, especially across the South, an unfortunate result was the mass exodus of White students from public schools to independent private schools and the monumental decimation of the teaching profession.