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Using Black Educational History to Make Equity-Based Decisions

Sat, April 13, 1:15 to 2:45pm, Pennsylvania Convention Center, Floor: Level 100, Room 119B

Abstract

The first presentation will introduce a model for preparing school leaders for reflective, systematic, equity-based, and present-day decision-making by unpacking major events in Black educational history. For the symposium, the presenter will focus on Brown I (1954), Brown II (1955), and their aftermath.

Both African-centered and historical analysis perspectives are used to frame this model, as it uses Sankofa Theory (Temple, 2010) to “learn from or build on the past” (Quarcoo, 1972, p. 17) and Neustadt’s (2011) ideas about using history to help public officials make better decisions in their work. Methodologically, the model returns to Brown I and II due to the seismic shifts they caused in the American educational and political landscapes as major equity projects.

Given that Neustadt’s framework (2011) suggests that “we second-guess only people who have already second-guessed themselves (p. xiv), the materials used in the model address the unfulfilled promises of the Brown rulings (Anderson, 2004; Orfield & Eaton, 1996). Of Brown I and II, the model asks candidates whether the decision-makers on both sides, within the boundaries of their time and place contexts, could have done better to ensure a better chance at equity in the long-term. If so, how? And what generalizations could aspiring school-leaders extrapolate for their own use?

To address the model’s prompts, students are exposed to the historical contexts surrounding Brown I and II’s decision-makers and their decisions. Specifically, the strategies Black educators used to advance their equity agenda (Siddle Walker, 2018), and the methods White officials used to accept and reject integration (Taylor et. al, 2023). Candidates will also use Neustadt’s (2011) skill-driven methods to explore various ways one can consider historical events as a part of their decision-making process in current educational contexts.

Of note, the model will be implemented in an educational leadership program in the Deep South, specifically in a state where school segregation remained in the state’s constitution until 2020 and with its own rich Black educational history. The model will be integrated into existing policy and ethics coursework; and, and an action research project (Mertler, 2021) conducted to determine its skill-building efficacy when using historical events - like school desegregation - to prepare school leaders for equity-centered leadership.

One of the significant benefits of the proposed model is that it involves reflection through imagination. In this case, envisioning how the events leading to and following Brown I and II might have played out if some of the characters made different decisions. Whereas some historians might find such imagining painfully presentist (Sweet, 2022), Black historians have long understood that the past does not stand stagnant and alone (Blain, 2022), not when the persistence of racial injustice and inequity remains all around us, especially in our schools and school systems. The model, then, provides leadership candidates the opportunity to 1) openly explore and complicate historical contexts surrounding school desegregation and resegregation, 2) juxtapose and (re)consider their own equity initiatives; and, 3) hopefully better plan for equitable outcomes.

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