For the past year, two organizations — (Empowered Parents in Community) and (working to extend anti-racist education) — have been part of a collaboration designed to eliminate the use of exclusionary discipline for preschool students, a punishment disproportionately used against Black children.

Standing in the gap

As the name suggests, at EPiC the focus is on empowering and organizing Black parents to advocate for equity in the education system.

Until now, EPiC has done this work with parents of K-12 students, building a community of parent advocates who bridge the gap between home and school.

“I began this work because when my son was in first grade, he was regressing in school and I couldn’t figure out what it was,” said Jovonia Lewis, founder and executive director of EPiC.

“I was doing everything that I needed to do as a parent to help support him — going to PTA meetings, going to school improvement plan meetings — and it wasn’t until the end of the year that another parent approached me and said, ‘Hey, you know our school has an achievement gap and all the Black kids are not doing well.’”

While Lewis was relieved to know it wasn’t just her son, she was outraged by the idea that Black students were collectively falling behind. She realized that what they were facing wasn’t an achievement gap, but an opportunity gap.

Black students like her son were being excluded from learning through suspensions, expulsions, and trips to the principal’s office. The behaviors for which they were being punished were typically appropriate for their age and stage of development, but were being perceived differently in Black children than in white children.

That’s when Lewis decided to stand in the gap.

She developed a strategy to bring Black parents together to learn about how systemic racism operates in education, then to increase the leadership opportunities and decision-making power of Black parents at her son’s school.

“My work was to share the data, to realize there was a moral outrage about the data and the experience the children were having, and to move that to a place of collective dreaming, to collective hope, to mobilization,” Lewis said. “We can’t just sit there and have this pity party, but we have to actually move things.”

At first, teachers bristled. Lewis said they felt like parents were blaming them for the opportunity gap. So Lewis brought in a guest speaker who explained that systemic racism in education is a national and historical issue, that it wasn’t specific to one school or its staff, but that it was in their power to fix it.

“That brought down a lot of the tension and allowed us to begin to work closely together,” Lewis said. “And after our first year, we had the greatest growth in academic performance by Black students in their school.”

That was the beginning of EPiC, which now also conducts a mental health support group for parents called Circle of Hope. Rooted in Lewis’s training and experience in counseling, parents who participate in Circle of Hope have the opportunity to share experiences and resources, preparing them for educational advocacy.

Now Lewis is bringing that model of success to Durham’s Black preschoolers. And she’s doing it by layering her project into that of another local racial justice organization.

‘Educators are the pipes’

Dr. Ronda Taylor Bullock, founder and executive director of we are, explains her organization’s mission succinctly: “We do anti-racism work with children, with families, and with educators to disrupt systemic racism in the education spaces.”

They offer summer camps for children in elementary school, professional development for educators, and workshops for parents and families.

“We’ve been teaching [our anti-racist curriculum] now for seven years in our summer camp,” Bullock said. “So what I wanted to do was not move into middle school, but go down to the foundational level where I first encountered a lot of this harm.”

For Bullock, that first encounter with racism occurred in kindergarten. A white classmate invited everyone at their lunch table to her birthday party — except Bullock.

“And when I asked her, you know, ‘Why didn’t you invite me?’ she said, ‘Well, my dad said Black people are not allowed in our home,’” Bullock told EdNC.

This experience from the 1980s ultimately led her to become an expert in white children’s racial identity construction.

“The research shows that by six months, children can recognize a difference in skin color,” Bullock said. If children that young are already understanding racial difference, Bullock knew they could benefit from their own age-appropriate anti-racist curriculum.

“Children are paying attention and forming thoughts about people to whom they’re similar and from who they are different,” Bullock explained. “And so what would it look like to talk about skin colors, to talk about where it comes from, to talk about your identity, the importance of your name, the food you eat?”

In addition to adapting their anti-racist curriculum for preschool students, we are is training early childhood educators to eliminate the disproportionate use of exclusionary discipline against Black children — sometimes referred to as the preschool-to-prison pipeline.

“Some early childhood centers say, well we don’t have school resource officers, so the school-to-prison pipeline isn’t an issue for us,” Bullock said. “They don’t recognize that exclusionary practices such as removing a kid from the carpet, sending a kid out, sending a kid home, those things are happening disproportionately to Black children, not white children who had similar behavior.”

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

“One of the things that I always tell people is that in the school-to-prison pipeline, educators are the pipes,” Bullock said. “No one person or no one system can end racism, but you can definitely stop the school-to-prison pipeline at your school — that is 100% within your control.”

Seeing children for who they are

Both EPiC and we are share the goal of eliminating exclusionary discipline in early childhood education settings. And both wanted their strategies to be driven by the communities they serve, especially parents.

So EPiC facilitated a series of parent listening sessions to benefit the work of both organizations.

The sessions have helped EPiC learn how structural racism manifests, specifically in preschool settings, and how that may differ from the K-12 settings they’ve worked in before.

For we are, “What we’re trying to do is better understand what is it, first and foremost, that parents recognize children need to see in the curriculum,” Bullock said.

Both organizations will use what they’ve learned together to promote culturally responsive, strength-based strategies to eliminate exclusionary practices in preschool classrooms.

“It’s been fun to listen to,” Lewis said of the listening sessions. “The first one was overflowing with people ready to talk and share their experiences, rich information,” Lewis said.

Five sites are participating in we are’s anti-racist curriculum and professional development pilot this year. EPiC has secured one site to pilot Circle of Hope and advocacy training for preschool parents, and is in the process of securing another. (If your preschool is interested in becoming a pilot site for EPiC’s project, please contact info@epic-nc.org.)

“This project is one project I am most excited about,” Lewis said. “It is just an opportunity for us to put into practice the model that we feel will most help parents to bridge school to home, to increase trust between providers and parents, to see the children for who they are.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The , published Monday in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that a ninth-grade ethnic studies course in San Francisco was associated with significant, long-term benefits, including improved high school graduation and college enrollment rates. The results, which were released during a moment of divisive backlash to schools’ use of what’s broadly referred to as critical race theory, suggest that students who struggle in class become more engaged in school when lessons reflect their lived experiences.

“That really lifts the curtain for students,” said report co-author Sade Bonilla, an assistant education professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Ethnic studies courses like the one in San Francisco give students a stronger understanding of society, she said, and how long-standing issues like oppression and racism affect their lives and the world around them. The course also offers students tools to combat racism and build more just communities.

“The way in which these topics are discussed is not just telling students, ‘The world is bad out there and it’s going to be tough,’” Bonilla said, but instead offers lessons on issues like school segregation and housing discrimination while highlighting people who responded to injustices.

Similar courses could soon make their way to schools across California. On Wednesday, the state Senate that would require all districts to offer at least one ethnic studies course and make it a graduation requirement by the end of the decade.

We did it! Grateful to the for voting on this morning and for the numerous coalitions and caucuses who have come together to make this bill what is is.

— Jose Medina (@AsmJoseMedina)

To reach their findings in San Francisco, researchers examined the high school transcripts and college matriculation records of more than 1,400 San Francisco high school freshmen between 2011 and 2014, including teens who were assigned to the ethnic studies course because they struggled academically in eighth grade. Researchers found that students enrolled in the ethnic studies class were 16 to 19 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school than their peers and were 10 to 16 percentage points more likely to enroll in college.

The ethnic studies course focuses on issues related to social justice, stereotypes and social movements in the U.S. between the 18th century and the 1970s. Many of the lessons are not traditionally covered in typical social studies courses, such as the genocide of Native Americans in California.

Though the report has been in the works for years, it doesn’t shy away from the reality that anti-racist teaching has been caught up this year in the national culture wars. It acknowledges that some have accused ethnic studies courses of offering nothing more than “politically charged indoctrination” that promote a form of “reverse racism” against white students.

But the debate over such instruction, which has been loosely characterized under the critical race theory umbrella, is “pretty dishonest” and politically motivated, Bonilla said. “The agenda they are pushing” in ethnic studies classes, she said, is a genuine conversation about the historical realities of racism in the U.S. “Frankly, I think it’s promoting some honesty for students about the historical past.”

In California, ethnic studies has been a thorny issue for several years. In March, state education leaders approved an ethnic studies model curriculum that was years in the making and had faced accusations of antisemitism, promoting “woke” left-wing propaganda and sewing further racial division by teaching white children to feel guilty about past injustices. Controversy surrounding the curriculum has been unrelenting. Just last week, three , accusing officials of violating the California constitution’s establishment clause requiring the separation of church and state by including an Aztec prayer in the model curriculum. The model curriculum isn’t a mandate and simply encourages California districts to offer ethnic studies, but that could change under the new legislation.

The latest research is a follow-up to positive short-term benefits for high school freshmen who enrolled in the city’s ethnic studies course. That report found the students had better school attendance, higher grades and passed more classes during their 9th-grade year than those who did not enroll in the course. To measure the course’s long-term effects, the latest study examines the educational outcomes of the same group of students through high school and into college.

Thomas Dee, a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and the study’s co-author, has spoken highly of the previous study’s findings, going so far as to say he’s “never been so surprised by a result” in his career. He quipped that “innovative curriculum,” including the San Francisco ethnic studies course, is the “low-hanging fruit of education reform.” The latest study, he said, further backs up that assessment.

“It continues to surprise and intrigue me that we see the educational potency of this sort of culturally relevant pedagogy,” Dee said. While many historically underserved students “perceive their classrooms as hostile and threatening environments,” a course that allows them to see the world as they do can change those perceptions with ongoing educational benefits, he said. Emily Penner, an assistant education professor at the University of California, Irvine, also contributed to the report.

“Pedagogy that engages students, that can promote belongingness within school settings, has the capacity to unlock their motivation,” Dee said. “And I think in particular the fact that we’re seeing these sustained gains is evidence of that.”

Yet the researchers were quick to highlight the limitations of their research and to discourage people from falling prey to “the common trope of the silver bullet.” For one, it remains unclear how ethnic studies courses affect the educational outcomes of high-achieving students. Additionally, Dee said that San Francisco’s ethnic studies teachers were highly trained and motivated to teach the class.

“I do worry sometimes a kind of feckless, low-quality rollout of this curriculum won’t generate similar findings,” he added.

If California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose education policies are expected to play a key role in a Sept. 14 recall vote, signs the legislation to require ethnic studies statewide, Dee said it’s important that districts are given adequate time to develop robust programs and ensure that educators are carefully trained.

“Teaching ethnic studies calls for teacher professionalism of a particularly high order,” Dee said. “We’re asking teachers to go into the classroom and have potentially difficult, critical discussions with their students and I think it requires really careful craft to do that well.”