equity frames | equity frames to use with educators

Unaccompanied Child Immigrants

Related Data

850 children have arrived in the Bay Area in the last three months unaccompanied. These are children who were detained at the border and were sent to the Bay Area as they await an immigration hearing. There are many more children who have arrived in the Bay Area unaccompanied who were not detained by ICE. There is no official data on this number.(KQED)
63,000 unaccompanied minors have been detained crossing the border since October, 2013. Again, there are many more who have crossed into the US without being detained. (NYT, 8-7-14)
There has been a surge of unaccompanied children since 2012 from Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. (NYT, 8-7-14)
“Under an anti-trafficking statute adopted with bipartisan support in 2008, minors from Central America cannot be deported immediately and must be given a court hearing before they are deported. A United States policy allows Mexican minors caught crossing the border to be sent back quickly.” – (NYT, 8-7-14)
After they receive a health screening and immunizations, unaccompanied children stay in a short-term shelter for 35 days and then get sent to live with a relative or sponsor while they await their immigration hearing. (NYT, 8-7-14)

Sample Frame

I’m feeling so good about our week together last week. We did amazing work learning together and preparing ourselves and our school for students this week. I was particularly happy about that given the difficult summer that unfolded while we were on vacation… from the conflict between Gaza and Israel to the struggle in the Ukraine to the crisis of child migrants from Central America.

There are hundreds of children who have arrived alone in the Bay Area during the past two months from Central America. We may be receiving some of them here at our school. I want to speak to this possibility because it illuminates something that I think is essential about our work as educators for equity.

The children that have migrated from Central America left unimaginably horrendous circumstances, endured an extremely dangerous journey through Mexico and the US, and are now in the Bay Area about to attend schools. Why are they here? They are here for two reasons: safety and opportunity. As children alone in the US, they are coming into our arms as their educators seeking safety and opportunity.

How sacred is this responsibility that we have?!?! Some of us in this room hold skin-color privilege, some of us hold gender privilege, some hold socio-economic privilege. All of us here hold education and documented status privilege and the current privilege of serving, guiding, educating, and shaping young people. I would argue that being an educator for equity means, in part, being aware of our privilege and using that privilege responsibly in working with children.

I say all of this to express how careful and diligent I want us to be this year, collectively and individually, in our responsibility to ensure the safety of our students and to ensure, through careful, thoughtful, engaging, outcome-driven instruction, that our students can access the opportunities that we have to offer, the opportunities the next school has to offer, the opportunities available in the higher education world and the work world, and the opportunities in the larger US society. It matters how carefully we have planned our lessons. It matters how prepared we are each day. It matters how engaging our pedagogy is. It matters how thoughtfully we assess our students’ learning. It matters that we make sure they are making steady and adequate progress—their parents, after all, may not come to the parent teacher conferences to demand this of us. Consider these students’ journeys this year when you are thinking about how tightly planned your lesson is, how accessible your instruction is for a diversity of students, and how thoroughly you know the learning levels of each of your students in any given subject area.

We have to be excellent in order to honor the courage and dreams of these young people. They are counting on us! We will work together this year to be excellent.

Michael Brown

Related Data

Michael Brown, 18, was shot several times by a police officer in Ferguson, MO after he and a friend, Dorian Johnson, were walking in the middle of the street. They were unarmed. There was a verbal and possibly a physical interaction between the police and the young men that ended with the officer fatally shooting Michael Brown.
There was a video released on Friday of Michael Brown and Dorian Johnson shoplifting cigars. The officer who shot Michael Brown did not know about the shoplifting incident at the time of the shooting.
The town of Ferguson, MO is 67% African American. Three of the 53 police officers in Ferguson are African American. The mayor and police chief in Ferguson are both white males. Five of the six city council members are white and six of the seven school board members are white. (Mother Jones, 8-13-14)
After several days and nights of protests (some of which involved looting), tear-gassing by the police, and a militarized police presence, the governor of Missouri delegated the management of the situation in Ferguson to a member of the Missouri State Highway Patrol who is an African American man who grew up in the area of Ferguson.
2% of the US population identifies as African American while African American men comprise 38% of those imprisoned in the US. (US Census, 2010 and NYT, 2-27-13)
In SFUSD, 53.1% of suspensions from school last year were African-American students while African American students make up 9% of SFUSD students. (www.sfusd.edu)

Sample Frame

The shadow over last week was the tragic death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the aftermath of which worsened each day last week. I’m certain that you all know about the circumstances of his death at this point, but I don’t want to miss the opportunity to connect this tragic situation with our sacred role as educators this year. I want to talk for a moment not about Mike Brown and his death, but about how some young people have responded on Twitter.

You may have seen the #IF I WERE GUNNED DOWN tweets. These are young people of color posting two photos of themselves, side by side, one that depicts them in an upstanding light and the other that depicts them in a pose that dominant culture may construe as negative. They pose the question, ‘Which photo would the media publish if I were gunned down?’ This is happening in response to several media outlets posting pictures of Mike Brown with his fingers pointing sideways, possibly in a peace sign, possibly displaying a gang sign. Given what we know about his life, his fingers were most likely in a peace sign. These young people are pointing out that media outlets often show images of Black men that are intimidating, aggressive, thuggish, shady rather than showing images of the very same people in graduation caps, in military uniforms, at picnics with their families, etc.

After years and years of seeing negative images of Black males in the media, many Americans, educators included, are carrying a fear of Black males (sometimes conscious, often subconscious). This internalized fear, in my opinion, is what led a White police officer to gun down a young Black man in Ferguson, MO after he was walking on the street rather than walking on the sidewalk.

We are not immune to this fear even though we live in the Bay Area. Oscar Grant was gunned down a few years ago in Oakland. Our African American males are still the student group most often suspended and expelled from our schools. Here at our school… (insert reference to relevant school-based data)

Why is this important for us as educators beginning a school year in 2014? I believe that every person at this school chose to be an educator because you want the world to be a better place. We want to create opportunities for all young people. I want to give us a sacred charge this year as part of our roles as revolutionary educators: I want us to check ourselves every time we struggle with our African American male students in classrooms, on the yard, in the hallways, and ask ourselves, Is there fear in me? If this were a White boy, would I be reacting the same way? To what extent is this situation a serious issue or am I conflating fear and control with a young person demonstrating a need? The answers to these questions will sometimes be unpleasant and I want us to have the courage to face those answers, support each other in evolving our awareness, and consistently choose something different when we interact with our African American males. What should we be choosing? Love, open heart, curiosity, more love, calm, healing, and nonviolent boundaries—what we would want for our own children. This is also why we are choosing (or moving toward) restorative practices, culturally-relevant curricula, policies that aren’t zero-tolerance, seeing our African American students as the young humans they are and saying, “Hello, I see you, I care about you—how are you today?”

Last year at this same time, we were talking about Trayvonn Martin. The year before that we were talking about Oscar Grant. We will have more young dead men to talk about until every educator in America, every cop, everyone in authority over young people makes a decision to check themselves, reflect, and face difficult realities about what we have been taught to think about Black males. Let’s do this together so that we’re part of the solution and not inadvertently part of the problem.

(For more research on the matter of how images of race affect perceptions of innocence, see http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/03/black-boys-older.aspx)