Overview:

The checkered history of Black K-12 education in America — ranging from the enslaved being punished for learning to read and write to the stubborn Black-white achievement gap — is a sign that the K-12 school system isn't built for Black children. The best way to correct that, El-Mekki says, is to resurrect an idea from the past: freedom schools.

Kasserian Ingera: Are the children alright? 

El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, the civil rights leader better known as Malcolm X, once said, “Only a fool would let his enemy educate his children.” While it certainly might be easy to say that too many Black people have been foolish since emancipation from enslavement, the bigger issue is systemic racism in our school system. 

Black education has always come under the authority of the white power structure, if for no other reason than because the liberation of Black people never came with land. Unlike our kinfolk throughout the diaspora, where independence movements saw the colonizer kicked out, ours wasn’t an independence movement but a liberation movement within the nation that oppressed us. 

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Thus, we sought freedom to be rather than freedom to be a nation. And that parallels how Black children are educated in America.

Advancing, Yet Falling Behind

Consider: African people are torn from their ancestral homes, enslaved, then shipped to a continent half a world away. Considered chattel, they were severely punished and sometimes killed for obtaining even a rudimentary education — learning to read and write — because knowledge is liberation from bondage. As slavery gave way to emancipation, freedom yielded to Jim Crow laws, forcing children into segregated and critically under-resourced schools. Yet white terrorists still burned many of those schools to the ground, punishment for communities that dared to educate Black children. 

Upon winning the right to educational equality, African American students subsequently were made to assimilate into majority-white schools, with predominantly white teachers and anti-Black administrators. In turn, Black schools were closed, and Black educators — many with advanced educations, including doctoral degrees, who taught in those schools because they couldn’t work anywhere else — were suddenly unemployable.  

Coupled with anti-Black policies, including presuppositions about inferior Black intelligence, culturally incompetent instructional and assessment methodologies, and disproportionate punitive discipline, Black students fell behind their white peers across grade levels and schools. 

To improve performance, policymakers treated schools like businesses, and assessment scores — specifically, statewide test scores — began to resemble profit-and-loss statements. They imposed unrealistic expectations, misaligned goals, and unproven theories on students — including radical educational strategies such as replacing phonics with whole language learning, reducing bathroom breaks, and eliminating instruction in art, science, social studies, and history. They even cut out recess. Instead, students were subjected to endless hours of reading and math, with rote memorization as the chief strategy for achievement. 

Too many public school systems are white institutional spaces that were not —are not — created with the best interests of Black children in mind.  

Sharif el-mekki

Bureaucrats and politicians, insisting that a “calm” learning environment would boost those test scores, incentivized diagnosing children with behavioral challenges by increasing funding for “support” of disruptive kids. Nevertheless, Black students still performed worse than their peers, continued to be disciplined disproportionately, were more likely to be diagnosed with behavioral disorders or learning disabilities, and, as a consequence, struggled with mental health challenges. 

And that’s before red-state politicians demanded the removal of Black history from classrooms and curricula.

Racist Educational Power Structure

So, when someone asks, “Are the children well  — Kasserian Ingera?” the answer, when it comes to Black children, is “Hell, no.” And schools are indeed the reason. 

The larger context, however, is what Malcolm X hinted at:  too many public school systems are white institutional spaces that were not — are not — created with the best interests of Black children in mind. That’s true for both private and charter schools, unless they are governed, administered, and informed by Black educators. 

A consequence of reality is that education for Black children lay in the hands of an anti-Black racist power structure that facilitated the end of the first attempt at a multiracial democracy. It is no surprise, then, that systemic racism maintains its lineage in Black education dating back to the birth of a nation. 

In his book “American Grammar: Race, Education and the Building of a Nation,” Dr. Jarvis Givens shows that the public education system was organized around the exploitation and control of Black and Indigenous people. Inequality has always been a defining feature. ​Black literacy was policed to the extent that it wouldn’t become a tool of liberation during enslavement. The legacy of this history sadly shapes contemporary schooling, whereby Black children constantly test low, if not at the bottom, of standardized tests for reading across grades when compared to other racial student groups. The other realities of systemic racism compounded upon that legacy have done a lot of harm to Black children, which public schools are ill-equipped (or unwilling) to repair over time. 

Back to the Future

It’s unrealistic to think we African Americans can divest ourselves from public schools, lacking a plan and process to gather the fiscal resources and the community resolve to educate ourselves formally. Or is it? 

Some Black parents have divested their children from schools, choosing to teach them at home, now more than ever before. Maybe we don’t need a massive system of schools for Black children to be educated through, where leaders must be chosen, a curriculum must be developed and piloted, funds must be collected, and sustainability plans created. 

We can adopt the idea in education, as we do within the community, that we are all leaders and that we create our own Freedom Schools to affirm and cultivate Black genius through education. It starts with a Saturday school at your home with your children or children in the neighborhood. From there, it can build into a school every day after school and then during the school day as its own school. And, with social media, the Black proverb, each one teach one, has evolved into each one teach one thousand.

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The COVID lockdown of schools was a chance for Black parents to divert their children from schools that weren’t centering their humanity. Folks began creating “detox centers” to protect their children from the harm caused by far too many anti-Black school environments. 

We shouldn’t wait for another pandemic to create our affirming and loving learning spaces for our children. Just as many enslaved communities formed their own schools to teach one another, we can do the same. Instead of asking why, ask why not?

Or, we can watch and experience systemic racism work on us. Let’s make our answer to Kasserian Ingera different for this generation of students.

Sharif El-Mekki is the founder and chief executive officer of the Center for Black Educator Development. The Center’s mission is to build the Black Teacher Pipeline to achieve educational equity and racial justice. El-Mekki is a nationally-recognized principal and U.S. Department of Education Principal Ambassador Fellow. He’s also a blogger on Phillys7thWard, a member of the 8 Black Hands podcast, and serves on several boards and committees focused on educational and racial justice.