An erroneous outcry around critical race theory created more red tape for Akeem Brown, complicating the opening of , a school designed to celebrate the Black and brown communities who partnered with Brown to co-create it.

identifies and prepares excellent leaders to transform education in their communities. Brown is a , and we are proud to have walked alongside him in his remarkable journey to found Essence Prep, set to open in August 2022 serving students in kindergarten through second grade. 

Building and leading a locally responsive public charter school is the ultimate exercise in community organizing and engagement for school leaders. BES understands how to do this, and we believe Brown did it very successfully in designing Essence Prep.

While Essence Prep will deliver a high-quality education to any and all students, Brown intentionally co-created a public charter school with a predominantly Black and Latino community; a community who expressed a desire for a public educational option designed to meet the unique needs they face every day in San Antonio鈥檚 Eastside and beyond. The charter application he submitted in 2021 promised high academic standards, culturally responsive teaching, social-emotional learning and a focus on learning about public policy. 

At first, the Texas Education Agency enthusiastically recommended the school be granted a charter with an 11-3 vote. Days later, TEA leadership received feedback from an elected official citing . Though this criticism inaccurately lumped together the school鈥檚 diversity, equity and inclusion practices with critical race theory, it effectively influenced TEA to request that Brown and his team remove anti-racist language from their website and from the charter application, unnecessarily lengthening the authorization process. Not only did this delay cost Essence Prep energy, time and money, it forced them to rewrite parts of the application that were important to the founding of the school 鈥� a process they had worked on together with the community.

To be clear, Essence Prep never promised to teach critical race theory; critical race theory was not mentioned in any part of the application, its curriculum, or its website. What Essence Prep promises is an inclusive learning environment that celebrates students鈥� cultures; ensures a psychologically safe environment for students of all backgrounds, needs and abilities; and teaches students to examine and interrupt the inequality they see in their own lives. Preventing anti-racism is inherently racist, and it is wrong.

Under the new Texas law, a 鈥渢eacher may not be compelled to discuss a widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs.鈥� Charter schools are public schools, held to the same accountability standards as any district-operated school and the curriculum taught in public charters must uphold state law. Unfounded claims about Essence Prep鈥檚 charter application created more work for a team made up entirely of people of color, forcing them to compromise on authentically representing the voices of the community, one of the hallmarks of their school model that parents stated they couldn鈥檛 find in other schools. Using these laws to limit opportunity for people of color is rooted in white supremacy. It is racist, and it is wrong.

Essence Prep was pressured to abandon its equity vision statement, which called for its school community to focus on 鈥渆ducational reform to achieve social, cultural, environmental, economic, and racial justice.鈥� All references to 鈥淏lack and brown students,鈥� and all references to anti-racism were dropped from their website and marketing materials. We at BES believe this pressure was driven by the fear that children might be taught to critically examine the world around them and create pathways to help all people overcome oppression. Those who fought against Essence Prep鈥檚 anti-racist design argued that such an educational experience would be uncomfortable for the school鈥檚 white students. This claim is baseless, and it is wrong. 

Families have a right to high-quality educational options that are intentionally designed to celebrate their communities and cultures and meet the unique needs of their students. Brown and his team spoke with nearly 500 families when designing Essence Prep; families who want their students to be able to interrupt the injustice they experience, develop knowledge of themselves and be agents of change in their communities and beyond. Essence Prep has promised to do this and more.

 Just as privileged, often white, communities have the opportunity to create and choose school options that meet the needs of their children, communities of color have the right to help design public school options that are aimed at creating safe, inclusive and anti-racist spaces for all students. Essence Prep will be that school when it opens its doors in a few months.

Chris Riback: Julie, welcome to the studio.

Julie Olsen Edwards:聽Glad to be here.

Chris Riback:聽Thank you for coming by. What is Anti-Bias Education?

Julie Olsen Edwards:聽It’s an approach to thinking about working with children. It’s a foundational idea as basic as developmentally appropriate education. It says that children are not only their individual personalities, their individual temperaments, but that all children have social identities. That they exist as boys, girls racialized identities around all the ways we categorize people. That children have identities around class, around culture, around language, and that those are as much a part of the child as their temperament is. And then in a world like ours where people are treated unjustly and badly, where the stereotypes come down on children, that there’s a constant process where children’s identity is being put up from the top down.

Chris Riback:聽Submerged.

Julie Olsen Edwards:聽Being pushed in from society onto the child and at the same time being created inside the child, which means that those of us who work with kids have the opportunity to help create a sense where children feel strong about who they are without having to feel superior, but can feel strong and proud about who their families, who they are and feel at ease and excited about the diversity of people. That rather than being fearful of people being different, embracing that. Have the skills at age appropriate ways to recognize what’s unfair in the world and kids are very concerned about fairness and have the skills to stand up for themselves and for others. And that frame is what we call Anti-Bias Education.

Chris Riback:聽And why is it so hard to attain?

Julie Olsen Edwards: I think there’s a bunch of things. One is that the world is still an unjust place, that the world we live in continues to perpetuate and treat people differently based on their identities, and that’s a big thing to shift. Also that as teachers we carry our own identities and our own what we do understand and don’t understand about the world and ended up reinforcing a lot of the stereotypes, a lot of the behaviors that if we recognize none of us would do. And the system we’re in does not create the space or time for teachers to be meditative self-thinking, to work with each other, to learn those things. So it’s very complicated, but it comes through everything you do in this field as basic as developmentally appropriate, is this culturally appropriate?

Chris Riback:聽Its central.

Julie Olsen Edwards:聽It’s everything you do. It’s not a curriculum.

Chris Riback: So let’s talk about the curriculum 鈥� and I know it’s not a curriculum 鈥� let’s talk about the aspects of what it should contain, because you recently wrote a piece titled Understanding Anti-Biased Education: Bringing the Four Core Goals to Every Facet of Your Curriculum. It’s not a curriculum, but you bring the goals to the curriculum. I understand teacher, yes-

Julie Olsen Edwards: You learn well.

Chris Riback:聽Well thank you. What are the Four Core Goals?

Julie Olsen Edwards:聽I said them just now, but I’ll be more specific. The children need to learn that who they are-

Chris Riback: Identity.

Julie Olsen Edwards:聽Who their family is, identity, who they are, who their family is, is a good thing. Not a superior thing.

Chris Riback:聽Yes.

Julie Olsen Edwards:聽But a good thing. Second one is diversity.

Chris Riback:聽Diversity, yes.

Julie Olsen Edwards:聽We are different, this is exciting, it is something to embrace. Third one is justice. Is it fair, is it not? And the final one is activism and the shorthand version of that is, “I’m okay, you’re okay, that’s not okay. Okay, what are we going to do about it?” So shorthand.

Chris Riback:聽So let’s get practical. How can this be integrated into actual curriculum?

Julie Olsen Edwards:聽Just about any curriculum you do has a space where you can talk about how we are all the same and we are all different and everything we do with children can carry that message, all the way from simple things like we all like to play at the blocks, we build differently with the blocks. Everybody’s different in their own way. We all like to eat, we eat different foods-

Chris Riback:聽You can really think about each activity.

Julie Olsen Edwards: Every activity.

Chris Riback:聽 But think about it through the Anti-Bias Lines.

Julie Olsen Edwards: Carries that message and every activity carries the opportunity to help children move to, is this fair? Is this say, fairness is safety for children. We figured there’s one rule for our classroom, which is everybody’s feelings, things, behavior is safe here. This is a safe place for children and for families. Once you’ve got that rule established, you don’t need any others. They all fall into that.

Chris Riback:聽What reactions do you get? Is there ever any pushback?

Julie Olsen Edwards: There’s always pushback. We’re talking about things that are, I mean nothing is more important to parents and their children and it’s pretty scary when their children start learning things that may not match the family’s values. Teachers struggle with, isn’t our children too young to care about issues like bias? Aren’t you putting ideas in their head when we talk about this isn’t fair, this is fair. But children don’t learn prejudice from learning about, they learn prejudice from prejudice behavior.

Chris Riback: Modeling.

Julie Olsen Edwards:聽They don’t learn it from we are all different, we are the same, we deserve to be treated for who we are.

Chris Riback: You began your early childhood education career working as a Family Care and Family Childcare Provider. You work for Head Start, you taught in private and public preschools and parent cooperatives, kindergarten, reading and elementary schools.

Julie Olsen Edwards:聽I鈥檓 old.

Chris Riback:聽No, no. You are accomplished.

Julie Olsen Edwards: Thank you.

Chris Riback:聽The older I get, the more I focus on being accomplished not aging. Even community teen mothers you’ve worked with 鈥� you have worked in a range of areas, some uncomfortable areas, some areas where I’m sure success as one wants to define it was hard to attain. What kept you going?

Julie Olsen Edwards: The same thing that started me. I was absolutely amazed at what the young children’s capacity to learn their creativity, their intelligence, this huge capacity human children have. And I also was teaching remedial reading to adults who are illiterate and I thought, what happened? How come we all start with this wide capacity? And for so many of us, the path through education is a path of learning where we’re stupid, what we can’t do, what we’re afraid of, and it tied to a whole political view of the world. What do we need to do to make sure that children can become fully human, can take all of that capacity they come to us with and utilize that. And that’s what drives me, that’s what’s driven my work for 60 years.

Chris Riback:聽Leaving the world a better place isn’t such a bad thing to do, is it?

Julie Olsen Edwards:聽No, it’s not a bad thing?

Chris Riback:聽Julie, thank you.

Julie Olsen Edwards: Thank you very much.

Chris Riback:聽Thank you for what you’ve done, thank you for coming by the studio.聽