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OUR CHILDREN CAN’T WAIT: The Urgency of Reinventing Education Policy in America
Article by John McDonald
Q&A and Excerpt from the Book Edited by Joseph P. Bishop
For too long, education policy has often ignored a growing body of evidence of how factors outside of school can impact learning and life chances for young people before they even get to the classroom.
“Our Children Can’t Wait: The Urgency of Reinventing Education Policy in America” makes the case that to address structural racism a national education agenda must center on community conditions like air quality, housing, public health, community safety, segregation and other issues as essential to improving learning opportunities, academic outcomes and the health and well-being of students. The book is edited by Joseph P. Bishop, executive director of the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools, housed at UCLA School of Education and Information Studies.
The book presents a new equity-focused road map for a comprehensive effort to enhance opportunities to learn and a redemptive path forward for reckoning with race in America.
UCLA Ed&IS: What’s this book about?
JOSEPH P. BISHOP: This book makes a strong argument of why the narrow, standards-based conceptions of education policy that have dominated Congress, state houses and school boards have mostly overlooked what matters for student health and development. More importantly, it lays out a plan of action at the local, state and federal level for moving towards more youth and community-led policy change that centers on equity and justice in school and outside of school.
“Our Children Can’t Wait” was written based on my experience training elected officials and working with civil rights groups, youth organizers, educators and philanthropy, seeing a need for a book that brought more comprehensive thinking on policy together in one place.
UCLA Ed&IS: What do you hope it will help people to understand?
BISHOP: This is a critical moment for our country to reckon with our relationship with race and racism, defined by harmful patterns of enslavement, discrimination and the largest justice system in the world. I hope this book helps connects the dots for readers, helping them understand that an entire playbook of prevention and strategic investments exists that will allow us to move away from policies that often replicate inequality in our country. We just haven’t had the foresight or courage to think more boldly about what education policy is, who it’s for and what it can achieve for our young people and families.
UCLA ED&IS: What do you hope the book will make happen?
BISHOP: I’ve been contacted by administrators, educators, policymakers, civil rights organizations and philanthropic groups who want to use “Our Children Can’t Wait” as an organizing framework for mobilization and transformation. I hope the book can act as a catalyst for people across the country to spark new conversations or to find affirmation in the ideas and scholarship packed in each chapter. Just because policies don’t prioritize issues or people doesn’t mean they don’t matter. Rather, just the opposite is true.
This reality is true for other policy areas outside of education that often haven’t been linked to an education agenda. This includes health services that can be made more readily available to families in schools and school systems, city transportation planning that prioritizes school routes, preventing student exposure to environmental pollutants, and affordable housing strategies that seek to dismantle heavily segregated, under-resourced neighborhoods.
EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER ONE
JUST PASSING THROUGH: SEAN’S STORY AS FUEL FOR NEW POLICIES
Sitting in a mustard-yellow classroom chair on the top floor of a drop-in center for unhoused youth, I look across the table at a young man in his early 20s. Sean, who identifies as Latino, is decked out in college football swag, new attire from the dropin center. At night, he is on his own without family or loved ones, sometimes sleeping on the street, couch surfing, or moving from one location to another. We speak after his long morning commute by bus across Los Angeles County. Sean shares with me that he attended six different districts and countless schools before he stopped going to school. When he talks about his schooling history, he describes a system in which he felt overlooked and uncared for: “I felt like I was passing through.”
Sean’s “passing through” reflects structural challenges in our society, realities that have come to define life in America for many youths, especially young people of color. Schools have a clear responsibility to play in the equation to support students but cannot tackle inherited issues of inequality alone. But to a large degree, Black- and Brown-majority schools and communities have been left to fend for themselves. The pandemic has made this abundantly clear. One principal recently shared with me just how much schools have been asked to do in response to COVID, especially in her school that serves mostly Latinx students.
The pandemic has highlighted what a school’s role in society truly means. Bottom line, it turned into an on-theground relief effort for our families. It turned into the place that our families went to in order to get news, in order to get resources, in order to get everything they needed to move forward. Everything.
When our students started losing their housing, we were doing their housing applications for renters’ relief. And when their parents lost their jobs, we were applying for new jobs for them. When family members passed away, we were trying to figure out how to help parents navigate through what it looked like to get a death certificate, to make arrangements, and to try and figure those things out and to get them started on a GoFundMe page.
This type of narrative is sorely lacking in policy discussions; it is one that places schools at the forefront of care and support for families, both in school and before and after the school bell rings. Often, the dominant policy response to supporting young people is what John Powell, a professor at UC Berkeley calls a “moat approach,” in which lawmakers construct moats or artificial barriers around issues or ourselves. This approach is all too common for interrelated issues like stable housing, neighborhood segregation, and education opportunities. For example, moat approaches like in-school-centered policy approaches are very common in education policy, especially at the federal level, as evident with No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which passed after the 9/11 attacks in the early 2000s, and Race to the Top (RTTT), Obama’s signature education strategy. Each has done little to change learning conditions or academic outcomes for the most disadvantaged students (Hussar et al., 2020). NCLB mandated state tests and accountability systems, and RTTT pushed states to develop higher standards and richer assessments, data systems to support instruction, great teachers and leaders, and a focus on supporting struggling schools. These were worthy pursuits, but each did little to acknowledge just how much conditions outside of schools can fundamentally alter life for young people by the time they reach the classroom. We expect young people to leave their challenges neatly outside the schoolhouse door.
This reality is true for other policy areas outside of education that often haven’t been linked to an education agenda. This includes health services that can be made more readily available to families in schools and school systems, city transportation planning that prioritizes school routes, preventing student exposure to environmental pollutants, and affordable housing strategies that seek to dismantle heavily segregated, under-resourced neighborhoods. Each represents key investments to support greater mobility for families and to change the educational, social, and economic trajectory for future generations. Examples of how a new policy thinking is taking shape across the United States—one that takes a radically different approach—are explored more in this book.
The pandemic has highlighted what a school’s role in society truly means. . . . Bottom line, it turned into an on-theground relief effort for our families. It turned into the place that our families went to in order to get news, in order to get resources, in order to get everything they needed to move forward. Everything.
Our Children Can’t Wait presents a clear path forward for our country, by bridging scholarship, ideas, and original thinking on education policy as a vehicle for dismantling inequality, thereby setting a redemptive path forward for reckoning with race in America. Over 50 million students are served in K–12 nationally; 14,000 school districts and 130,000 schools can provide a powerful connection point for education services, health services, social services, job training, and even delivery of hot meals to so many families (Irwin et al., 2021). A different policy approach for lifting young people and families is backed up by significant evidence showing that a variety of “out-of-school” factors (e.g., prenatal influences; inadequate medical, dental, and vision care; food insecurity; environmental pollutants; family relations and stress; neighborhood conditions) are the strongest contributors by as much as two-thirds to the persistence of academic disparities among students (Berliner, 2009; Johnson, 2014). A broader conception of education policy that takes in-school (e.g., educator capacity, curriculum, funding, school climate) and out-of-school factors (neighborhood conditions, public health, safety, etc.) into consideration simultaneously, not as mutually exclusive approaches to building school systems anchored in racial equity and justice, has become a national necessity (Bishop & Noguera, 2019). The subsequent chapters not only provide the political, social, and historical context for rethinking policy but also draw linkages between out-of-school factors and the policies needed to radically change education outcomes for a new majority population.
A BEYOND-SCHOOLS APPROACH IN THE COVID LANDSCAPE
Default policy approaches have become especially inadequate during a global pandemic (COVID-19) that has taken the lives of more than 1,000,000 Americans, when the U.S. Surgeon General has warned of an unprecedented mental-health crisis for youth (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2021), and an estimated 167,000 young people have lost a parent or caregiver because of the virus (Stolberg, 2021; Treglia et al., 2021). One school district leader described the reality, explaining just how much broader social inequities have bled into the experiences of students, staff, and families over the past several school years.
The pandemic has brought in all the inequities that exist in the system that supports students, the ecosystem that is surrounding student learning. We think of schools as places where the students come to the classroom, but the school is not alone. It’s not a one isolated ecosystem; the school lives within the context of the community. So, all the factors that affect the health, economic crisis, any type of context of outcomes that happen in the community and especially to parents and families, employment—all of the social-economic factors that live with it outside the sphere of the school affect the school.
This narrative is reflected in social patterns across the country. Stark differences in unemployment and infection rates for people of color affected by COVID-19 have resurfaced enduring racial tensions and America’s unequal playing field (Kuhfeld et al., 2020). Poverty rates are growing in states such as California, Hawaii, Nevada, and Rhode Island with spiking unemployment numbers because of COVID-19 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020). Child poverty patterns remain stubbornly persistent, affecting 13 million young people (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2020).
In our K–12 school system, one of two students, or over 30 million youth, are from low-income families (Southern Education Foundation, 2015). Student demographic patterns suggest that schools are becoming increasingly racially and ethnically diverse, reflecting changes in the broader population (Schaeffer, 2021). However, more public school students attend schools where at least half of their peers are the same race or ethnicity (Schaeffer, 2021), pointing to significant implications for the political and cultural landscape in which policy decisions take shape. Student homelessness is on the rise nationally by 15% over the last 3 years, totaling over 1.3 million students (National Center for Homeless Education, 2021). States like California have seen a 48% increase over the last decade in kindergarten to high school students experiencing homelessness, with 7 out of 10 unhoused students being Latinx (Bishop et al., 2020).
The next several chapters in the book set the stage for understanding how a legacy of slavery and discrimination in the United States have been cemented by largely harmful policies that have reinforced social and educational inequities. Authors challenge readers to consider deeper questions about who policies have been crafted for, or “policies for whom?,” exploring the lack of policy focus on our youngest learners, and the sciences of learning and development provide the impetus for a new policy foundation. Understanding this foundational set of issues in the early chapters requires policymakers and educators to reflect on the origins of education policy in order to shape a new path forward in key places like school-board meetings, city councils, state legislatures, and in the halls of Congress.
https://ourchildrencantwait.com/
