Disrupt the System! Dwan Jordon

After watching, "Disrupting Systems of Social Reproduction - Jeff Duncan-Andrade", I wanted to quickly blog my thoughts and recap this powerful message!

In our current state, there is a renewed focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. There is no doubt that we must eliminate opportunity gaps, interrupt institutional bias, and remove barriers that get in the way of fair and equitable opportunities for all. However, before we can do that, we must be brutally honest with ourselves about what we are dealing with. 

Our society is fundamentally unequal and if we pay close attention we can see how the national agenda, which pushes goals and hopes, is simply rhetoric. When we take a deep look, the national agenda looks nothing like a focus on commitment to justice, fairness, and equity for all. With a more careful analysis, we can see how we can actually predict the social and economic outcomes of all by studying history and the national reality that has been constructed - and has been sustained for hundreds of years. This national agenda is stable and well-constructed - which is not something that happened by accident. It's a system of social reproduction. 

I've spent my last twenty-three years in education and I believed, like many people, that public schools were the great equalizer. However, if we look at the history of schools, we will see that schools were never designed to be equal. Schools were originally designed to school individuals on specific skills and prepare individuals (based on who they were) for specific establishments in life. Fate was predetermined by society. It's a system. 

Of course there have always been intentional cracks in the system to allow for a "sense" of hope and fairness. If people had to live in a state of absoluteness - knowing their fate - it would seem like apartheid. So, there has always been a "deserving few" of our downtrodden folks who have been able to gain relative access to power. This was and still is intentional. Just think what would have happened or what would happen now if we believed that our government consisted of a few "predetermined" people who held all of the power and wealth - based on an established and constructed system. Just imagine if the government or leaders were bold enough to say, "you were born poor so you are going to stay poor." The result would be Anarchy! 

Yet, if we look at the historical record and the data from an equity, diversity, and inclusion lens, it is very clear that the structure is designed to maintain social and economic stagnation while maintaining social order. The narrative that is painted is that there is opportunity for everyone, and if you don't cease the opportunity, it's your fault. It's a system of social reproduction. I see this play out in schools. We tell students and their families that they are basically responsible for their own success. While there is some truth to this ideology (many people make it out despite the odds and the system), the reality is that the inequity and advantages of the constructed system are so extreme, there is no way that most people can overcome the barriers in an equitable fashion. 

Think about it - talent (artistic, athletic, intellectual, mathematical, etc.) is evenly and randomly distributed throughout the population. However, access to the positions in society that will allow people to pursue those talents are not evenly and randomly distributed throughout. If schools were actually maximizing the talents of all students, we would have a random distribution of astronauts, scientist, lawyers, doctors, engineers, physicists, chemists, statesmen, artist, etc...across the population. Why is the education system not cultivating equity and random distribution of talent in society? This is not a coincidence. This is system reproduction. 

Those who need the most get the least and those who need the least get the most in United States schools. If a student goes to school from Pre-K3 to 12th grade in the United States, and their opportunities are limited (least experienced teachers, least prepared teachers, least supported teachers, least amount of resources, and least amount of options), they will leave school with a certain relationship and expectation of society. On the flip side, if you experience 15 years of an abundance of resources (tons of adults, tons of resources, multiple options, and failure is an opportunity for you to grow), your relationship with institutions of power will be different and you will have a different expectation of society. 

Remember, students are in school for eight hours a day for thirteen to fifteen years. It doesn't matter who your parents are, or what neighborhood you live in, these years norm the way students' experience life and see the world. Imagine if majority of that time is used to implicitly teach students that they have little to no value. With the exception of a few, students will eternalize this. The students will feel like they mean little to society. The opposite is also true. Imagine students who get real opportunity, investment, and support for 15 years straight. With the exception of a few, students will come out of that experience feeling valued and they will believe they can do anything that they want. They would expect for the world to take care of them.

This is what schools are in this day and age. This is what is normed in schools. We can see the internalized expectation about a child's value to this society. Once we can get a student to internalize their value to society, the rest takes care of itself. This is what is called social reproduction. Our students are falling into a reproductive line. 

Steven Biko said, "The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." If people believe in their lack of capacity, agency, and value, they will truncate their own dreams. You will no longer need an institution structure to do it because they will do it themselves. On the other side, if we can get people to believe in their capacity, agency, and value, they can become agents of change.

Now imagine if people are basically told every day/ all day, "you are nothing, nothing will change, you have no value, you will forever be poor, you will never get out of here, and you will never get the boot of your neck." This is an apartheid state and you will have total social unrest. The oppressed would not react favorably and there would be anarchy. As Duncan put it, there are too many people and not enough guns. So that's why there has been a creation of an exception to the rule. The institution gets people to believe that they can be the exception to the rule. The institution tells people that if they get in line with the program, they can be the exception. When people get in line with the program, they become the exception to the rule and gain power. 

But, what about the masses - the aggregate? How are schools serving the groups of people that need them the most? How are we serving their needs? We are completely failing that group. Multi-generational entrenched poverty is normed in this society and then silenced. Why are people not talking about this?

In schools across the United States you will rarely see explicit messages telling students that they do not have value. The messaging is usually, you have value if you "act like this." You have value when you act like you are middle class, white, heterosexual, Protestant/Christian, and male and the closer that you can get to that, you are on your road to success. Every bullet that you can't check-off, the further you are away from the center and the center is where success lies. So students are taught that the better that they can lie about who they really are, and "where the mask," the more permissive society will be about giving them access to some of the trinkets of success. 

The true test of a multi-racial pluralistic democracy is whether we can show up as who we are and be valued for that? In most schools, the answer is 'no.' Even adults struggle with this. We have a really hard time releasing ourselves from our own biases, training, and cultural indoctrination about what it means to be successful. There is a lot of unlearning that has to happen. We are dealing with 500 years of a legacy of building this normalization. So the question is not whether or not schools or school leaders will have to wrestle with this - the question is if they will? 

Teachers and leaders do not get into education to harm kids or hold up a paradigm of inequality. I believe that teachers and leaders fall into it because it's so much a part of the institutional culture. To disrupt this mental model, we have to be willing to go to really painful places together. There has to be a group of adults that love each other enough to really be honest with each other and then embrace each other and battle through this together - because it's what's good for children. Teachers and leaders must be honest about what we know and what we don't know and engage in that work first. We cannot act like we have it all together and figured out - when we don't. 

To be honest, this is really deep and overwhelming and many adults (in my generation) are institutionalized. Our hope is our young people who are not jaded, acculturated, or comfortable  with the level of inequity that my generation has grown to live with. We have to set the stage for the next generation to actually create change because they grow up believing that this is not right, not normal, and they don't have to accept this.