The library is not simply a repository of books but also, along with other institutions, is a place for the synthesis of national and local culture.
Examining libraries as outposts for societal advancement and justice in Kosovo
[In this book,] you will find pedagogical approaches that honor and draw upon the rich racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity of families and communities to make learning more accessible, culturally relevant, and sustaining.
MAGAZINE OF THE UCLA SCHOOL OF EDUCATION AND INFORMATION STUDIES
Embodying the principles of individual responsibility and social justice, an ethic of caring, and commitment to the communities we serve.
2 Message from the Dean
4 Reflections on the Public School and the Social Fabric
An excerpt from Mike Rose’s book chapter which explores the late author’s long-standing work on public schools as multi-dimensional social systems.
8 Q&A with Mike Rose: “The Mind at Work” Revisits Cognitive Demands of Service Industries
“The Mind at Work,” released in 2014, a scholarly look at workers in service industries, is all the more poignant as these professionals continue to serve the public through a global pandemic. With humanity and grace, the book tells the story of “blue collar” professions and the individuals who keep society moving and thriving.
12 Training a Nation’s Librarians: Examining Libraries as Outposts for Societal Advancement and Justice in Kosovo
A look at the work of Information Studies faculty Rob Montoya and Greg Leazer, who along with Sean Pessin, doctoral student, are piloting Kosovo’s first National Library Training Program.
16 Preparing and Sustaining Social Justice Educators
An excerpt from the new book edited by Annamarie Francois, executive director of UCLA’s Center X, and Karen Hunter Quartz, faculty member and director, UCLA Center for Community Schooling, addressing the need for and challenge of developing and supporting educators who are not only committed to racial and social justice for their students, but possess the deep knowledge and skills needed for high-quality instruction and learning.
SPRING 2022
Christina Christie, Ph.D. UCLA Wasserman Dean & Professor of Education, UCLA School of Education and Information Studies
Laura Lindberg
Executive Director External Relations, UCLA School of Education and Information Studies
EDITOR
Leigh Leveen
Senior Director of Marketing and Communications UCLA School of Education and Information Studies lleveen@support.ucla.edu
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Joanie Harmon Director of Communications UCLA School of Education and Information Studies harmon@gseis.ucla.edu
John McDonald Director, Sudikoff Family Institute jmcdonald@gseis.ucla.edu
DESIGN
Robin Weisz Design
© 2022, by The Regents of the University of California seis.ucla.edu
There is little doubt that when historians look back at this time they will view it as a turning point in history rife with incredible challenges—the pandemic, misinformation, political divisiveness, racism, nationalism, massive movements of people, climate change and growing disparities in wealth. But they will also note advances in science and technology—in immunology, in knowledge sharing, in faceto-face communication over distances, in hybrid instruction and in space travel. While very significant though, advances in knowledge and technologies are only as good as the ends they serve.
Future generations will judge whether we steered towards human betterment or towards further human dissolution; towards social transformation or social transgression. Education, ethics,
leadership and governance will all be implicated in their judgments along with the judicious use of knowledge and information—each affording choice and thereby demanding good judgment.
In this issue we highlight scholarship that recognizes and embraces schools and libraries as sites for the transformation of societies towards ideals of social justice, ethics, and democracy. It is here that the next generation will acquire the tools necessary for good judgment to steer rightly in the direction of human betterment and upliftment.
In this light, we present excerpts from a new and timely publication, Preparing and Sustaining Social Justice Educators, edited by Annamarie Francois, executive director of UCLA’s Center X, and Karen Hunter Quartz, faculty member and director, UCLA Center for Community Schooling. As they aptly observe “schools are the moral, political, and social centers of our democracy.” We also present Professor Robert Montoya’s work on a national library training program in Kosovo. Finally, we present excerpts from our accomplished faculty member whose works soundly resonate ideals of social justice and democracy. But here we do so by fateful circumstance rather than by explicit design.
While preparing this issue for publication, our most dear colleague and my dear friend and mentor, Mike Rose, passed away. While all deaths are untimely, this one felt particularly so as there were no serious indications of ill health. The loss was immense for all of us. His intellect along with his kindness made him a fond colleague who lifted spirits with his humor and light heartedness. His dedication to his craft in humility and without pretension and airs even in the midst of national recognition endeared him to many. As a reviewer of one of his books aptly put it: “He’s the real thing: a teacher, a writer, a one-time street kid who has lived the kind of life his students have lived.” He will very much be missed. As a tribute to him but also as pieces that celebrate schools as
sites of social transformation, we include selections from his repertoire of works.
Drawing from 30 years of collective work in the Los Angeles community, and from the founding of Center X, Francois and Quartz provide a tapestry of challenging professional work that seeks to “disrupt educational inequality in urban communities.”
Their approach is grounded in research about deeper learning, community development, and school reform. As they state in their book, they are making “the case that high-quality public education relies on the recruitment, professional development, and retention of educators ready to navigate complex systemic and structural inequities to best serve vulnerable student populations.”
UCLA Center X is central to our school’s commitment to teacher education and professional development across the state, while the UCLA Center for Community Schooling is home to much of the work that is done in our two Community Schools, UCLA Community School, established in 2009, and Mann UCLA Community School in South Los Angeles. Francois and Quartz are joined by 27 other educators and researchers affiliated with UCLA telling the story of Center X and making the case for social justice education. Together they share the experience of Center X in hopes that it ignites the imagination about what is possible. We include here the Introduction of their book.
This issue also highlights the work that Rob Montoya, assistant professor in Information Studies and the new director of the California Rare Book School, is doing in Kosovo in support of establishing a national library training program in the country, as they recover from years of war. Montoya has worked with the University of Prishtina to create the first bachelor’s degree program in library science in the country, preparing for the project by interviewing librarians all over Kosovo, in all sectors of librarianship from school libraries, public libraries, and academic libraries.
Founded in Los Angeles in 2005, the California Rare Book School (CalRBS) is a non-degree education program dedicated to providing the knowledge and skills required by collectors and professionals working in all aspects of the library, special collection, archives, museums, and rare book community, as well as for students interested in entering the field of justice studies, library ethics, critical librarianship, and rare book conservation and preservation. The program offers workshops, lectures, classes, and certificates aimed at professionals and members of the public who care about the artifacts of the past, the documents of the present, and their potential to change the course of our future.
Professor Montoya looks forward to bringing his examinations of libraries as outposts for societal advancement and justice to his work at UCLA and its local community, with his creation of the new Library, Ethics and Justice Lab, which includes among its aims learning how to better serve specific populations of color in the local Los Angeles community.
Mike Rose joined the faculty at UCLA School of Education and Information Studies in 1994 having already published numerous works on central issues in education, including his highly praised Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educationally Underprepared. His works often challenged prevailing narratives and national conversations that seemed to drown out subtleties and lived realities. They were an antidote to the wholesale, broad brush portrayals that denied the humanity and very real experiences of participants. With respect to Lives on the Boundary, a New York Times reviewer put it well: “Vividly written … tears apart all of society’s prejudices about the academic abilities of the underprivileged.”
He was at once master of literary technique but at the same time rigorous in his methods—thick description, triangulation, member checking, meticulous documentation, and reflexivity. In Possible Lives, for example, through
literary imagination and ethnographic rigor he brought the vibrancy of classrooms and the teaching and learning within their walls to life. Equally importantly, in all his works on education he was a champion of the promise of quality, public education for all.
Included in these pages is an excerpt of Mike’s final work, “Reflections on the Public School and the Social Fabric” to appear in Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, edited by David C. Berliner and Carl Hermanns (New York: Teachers College Press, 2021). Here he examines education as an intricate human endeavor. In the excerpt, we witness the subtlety of his vision in his perspectives on education inequality in our society.
We also include an interview with Mike that was done around the time of the second publication of his The Mind at Work, a treatise on the intellectual accomplishments of the American worker. Diving deep into his personal experiences and immigrant family he tells us “I want[ed] to demonstrate the considerable cognitive demands of blue-collar and service work and what it takes to do such work well … we as a society tend to underestimate and undervalue the smarts involved in such work.”
The works included here embrace schools and libraries as centers of social transformation. As Francois and Quartz put it: “When we work to change schools we are working to change society.” Generations after this remarkable period in history we and those we educate will be judged. Did we turn rightly towards cherished human ideals or did we falter from lack of conviction, commitment and resolve? A study of exemplars such as those included here followed by choice and good judgment lie before us. Let us make choices and judgments that will be looked upon favorably by generations to come.
In unity, Tina
BY MIKE ROSE
There are over 130,000 public K–12 schools in the United States.1 All of these have their origins in Horace Mann’s revolutionary reimagining of schooling. Before Mann, most schools in the United States were private, religious, or charity-based institutions of limited reach; Mann’s vision was of a universal common school, free to all children, not attached to church, funded by the public, for the public. Under his leadership as the first Secretary of Education for the state of Massachusetts and his subsequent advocacy, lecturing and writing, schools proliferated throughout Massachusetts and other northern states. Mann was a Mid-Nineteenth Century social reformer, so elements of his world view are certainly ripe for criticism—for example, that universal schooling could level economic inequality—but he still achieved something extraordinary: he generated a new idea into public consciousness. The public school became part of the American social fabric and the American identity.
While this tight connection of school and society is one of our country’s grand democratic achievements, the connection also results in school enacting our society’s capital sins: racial segregation; assaults on culture and language; gender, race, and class biases encoded in curriculum.
The public school has evolved into a complex, multi-dimensional institution. To examine this institution as it exists today and to help us further consider Bobby Sherman’s2 high school and Dyett and its community,3 I’m going to adapt a technique from a classic article by historian David Tyack on a topic related to the present one, “Ways of Seeing: An Essay on the History of Compulsory Schooling.”4 Tyack sets out to explain the development of compulsory school in our country by applying five different conceptual frameworks or “ways of seeing” to the emergence of legislation from the Mid-Nineteenth through the early Twentieth Centuries requiring that children attend school. Each of the frameworks reveals certain political, economic, or sociological-organizational aspects of the rise of compulsory schooling while downplaying or missing others, for as rhetorician Kenneth Burke, whom Tyack quotes, puts it: “a way of seeing is always a way of not seeing.”5 Tyack argues that each of these conceptual frameworks draws on different kinds of evidence and “depicts different levels of social reality” and, therefore, by strategically combining them we gain “a wider and more accurate perception” of how and why compulsory schooling developed as it did. In practice, in its dayto-day functioning, the American public school is an amalgam of what is revealed by the ways of seeing I’m going to present, but for analytic purposes, let us take each in turn.
Public schools are governmental and legal institutions and therefore originate in legislation and foundational documents. Both Bobby Sherman’s high school and Dyett Middle School began as site-specific proposals. They, like all schools, exist in bureaucratic systems of administration and managerial authority, and decisions made about one school have the potential to affect other schools in the district. They are supported with public funds which are subject to oversight, and they have codified legal obligations and protections for employees and for students. Though school systems function according to the principles of modernity’s organizational rationality, they are also subject to the turbulence of regional and national politics, which affects funding, regulations, and the
content of curriculum. Because public school funding in the United States depends heavily on local property taxes, broader patterns of economic inequality get reflected in a particular school’s budget. And, finally, in our time, there has been resistance to the structures of school bureaucracy with attempts to create alternative management structures, such as charter schools, which, whatever their merits, affect the funding and enrollment of other schools in the district.
Like all institutions, schools have a purpose, are goal-driven. The public school’s primary purpose is to educate, so it exists in a policy web of curriculum frameworks and standards; textbooks and instructional materials and technologies; student grades, certificates, and assessments; teachers’ contracts and union negotiations; counseling and advising practices, and more. None of these elements is static, but subject to change for a host of reasons, from budget allocations to emerging societal demands—in our time, for example, there are calls for more math and science, for instruction in computer technology and literacy, for courses on the histories of non-dominant groups, and for compensatory programs to address inequality. The class I visited at Dyett was part of a program to enhance the education of low-income Students of Color.
Equally important as the content of curriculum are the institutional assumptions about ability, knowledge, and the social order that underlie it. The distinction between academic and vocational knowledge, the practice of curricular tracking, gifted and talented programs, honors courses are all based on theories of intelligence, the structure of knowledge, and the role of schooling in the social order. And although the fundamental purpose of the public school is to educate the young, within that meta-goal there are historically shifting goals concerning why we educate. For Horace Mann, a preeminent goal was to heal social fractures and level class differences through a common educational experience. There is in our history also a strong civic goal—we educate to create citizens—and an ethical-moral goal, to foster virtue and right action. (Mann also subscribed to these.) We educate, as well, to aid intellectual and
They, like all schools, exist in bureaucratic systems of administration and managerial authority, and decisions made about one school have the potential to affect other schools in the district. They are supported with public funds which are subject to oversight, and they have codified legal obligations and protections for employees and for students.
social development. And we educate to enable people to participate in the economy—a prevalent goal in the contemporary United States.
Public schools are physical structures. Each has an address, sits on a parcel of land with geographical coordinates, is of a certain size, spatial configuration, and architectural design. Within its boundaries are buildings, classrooms, seats, walkways, benches, tables, and possibly landscaped spaces, playgrounds, and athletic fields. These physical features affect the flow of social life in the school, and can reflect levels of funding and of political and/or community support. Other features of the built or natural environment—which can change over time—surround the school and affect both the function and perception of it. The removal of public housing projects close to Dyett significantly reduced its enrollment, and low enrollment would become a factor in the decision to close the school.
By virtue of its location in a community, the school is embedded in the social and economic dynamics of that community. Current employment patterns and job opportunities, demographics, and political decisions affect a school’s reputation, enrollment, workplace satisfaction, and a host of student characteristics from security about housing and food to beliefs about opportunity. Bobby Sherman was in high school when coal was in decline, and that had to affect his sense of the future in Martin, Kentucky, a place tied to his identity. There is a history to this current reality which has an effect on the present. Earlier economic conditions, demographics, and political and policy decisions live on affecting current educational and administrative practices as well as narratives and attitudes about the school. The designation of Dyett as a “failing school” and its scheduled closing was rooted in the demolition of public housing, changing demographics, and earlier administrative decisions to convert it from a middle school to a general admission high school.
The school is a multidimensional social system rich in human interaction. The continuous and fluid relationships among students, teachers, aides, counselors, and coaches are central to the
school’s educational mission. And there are other planes of interaction as well: among custodians and groundskeepers, food service workers, administrative staff, yard monitors, security, and, one hopes, nurses and librarians. Professionals from outside the school’s regular staff—social workers to speech therapists—as well as parents and other caregivers also enter this social system. And because schools are porous, social norms and structures beyond the school involving race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability can be replicated within the school or, with effort, revised or resisted. There is much life lived on any given day which in small ways and large affects the experience of attending or working at the school.
With the increasing application of technocratic frameworks to social and institutional life during the Twentieth Century and into our time, it becomes feasible to view schools as quantifiable systems, represented by numbers, tallies, metrics. Some school phenomena lend themselves to counting, though counting alone won’t capture their meaning: budgets and expenditures, seating capacity, attendance, truancy, and graduation rates. Other phenomena that are more complex have been converted to numbers, for example using standardized test scores in reading and math to measure learning or teacher quality. Numbers provide precision, an air of certainty when faced with multi-layered and often politically messy policy decisions. Declining attendance and low standardized test scores were key metrics used in the decision to close Dyett.
And schools can be thought of as part of the social fabric of a community, serving civic and social needs: providing venues for public meetings and political debate, polls, festivities, and, during crises, shelter, distribution hubs, sites of comfort. But, of course, it is as an educational institution that the school becomes embedded in community and family life. Young people spend critical years of cognitive and social development in school, learning about themselves, others, and the world. To varying degrees, parents participate in their children’s schooling; if nothing else, kids bring their school experiences home with them, affecting family dynamics. Because children come of age in school, school lives on in them, sometimes to damaging effect and sometimes positively, as was the case for Bobby Sherman Dingas. And over the years schools become part of community history and memory, at times with vital local meaning, as we can assume with Bobby Sherman’s high school in a small coal-mining town, and as we saw with the protest activities surrounding the threatened closure of Dyett in Chicago.
It might not be possible to consider all or most of these perspectives when making major policy decisions about a school—to open it, modify it, or close it—but involving multiple perspectives should be the goal. The more ways we have of seeing a school, the more information from more vantage points we have, the richer and more comprehensive our understanding will be. As a rule, public policy decisions in our technocratic age tend to focus on the structural-bureaucratic and quantitative dimensions of the institutions or phenomena in question—that which can be formalized, graphed, measured. The other perspectives we’ve been considering, those dealing with economic, political, and social history and with the place of the school in a community’s social fabric, tend to be given short shrift or are ignored entirely.
1 National Center for Education Statistics, accessed August 17, 2020, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_105.50.asp?current=yes
2 Interview with Bobby Sherman from Martin, Kentucky from 1990, done while researching “Possible Lives.”
3 Dyett Middle School, named after Walter Henri Dyett, a legendary music teacher in the Bronzeville community of Chicago’s South Side was one of the public schools Mike Rose visited while researching “Possible Lives” in 1990
4 David Tyack, “Ways of Seeing: An Essay on the History of Compulsory Schooling,” Harvard Educational Review 46, no. 3 (August, 1976): 355–389.
5 Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change (New York: New Republic, 1935), quoted in Tyack, Ibid., 355
And schools can be thought of as part of the social fabric of a community, serving civic and social needs: providing venues for public meetings and political debate, polls, festivities, and, during crises, shelter, distribution hubs, sites of comfort. But, of course, it is as an educational institution that the school becomes embedded in community and family life.
Although the 10th anniversary edition of Mike Rose’s “The Mind at Work” was released in 2014, his scholarly look at workers in service industries is all the more poignant as these professionals continue to serve the public through a global pandemic. Professor Rose’s writing, imbued with his signature humanity and grace, tells the story of “blue collar” professions and the individuals who keep society moving and thriving.
Mike Rose’s stature as an expert on the cognitive, linguistic, and socio-historical factors that affect engagement with written language, reading and writing pedagogies for underserved student populations, and the educational histories of non-traditional college students and the barriers and opportunities they encounter, emerges from his blue-collar background as the son of a Los Angeles waitress and the nephew of railroad and auto workers in the Rust Belt of the northeastern United States.
Rose skillfully mined these humble beginnings for his 2005 treatise on the intellectual accomplishments of the American worker, “The Mind at Work” (New York: Penguin Books. 2nd Edition, 2014). The book has been lauded by no less than Studs Terkel as an “eloquent tribute to our working men and women.” Howard Gardner, author of “Changing Minds,” has noted that, “Thanks to Mike Rose’s impressive eye, the accomplishments of these workers are now visible.”
In this 2014 interview, UCLA Ed&IS discussed the influences that shaped this seminal work and its 10th anniversary edition with Professor Rose, including his observation of professionals whose manual labors are rarely recognized but essential to everyday life, the value of vocational education, and some of the mental demands that blue-collar work and writing have in common.
Ed&IS: In a nutshell, what is “The Mind at Work” about?
Mike Rose: I want to demonstrate the considerable cognitive demands of blue-collar and service work and what it takes to do such work well. Because of cultural and class biases, the dynamics of occupational status, and our current (understandable) enchantment with high technology, we as a society tend to underestimate and undervalue the smarts involved in such work.
This undervaluing contributes to some big problems, I think, in education, in the way work is organized, in job training, and in our civic life as social class divides are exacerbated by our attitudes about work and intelligence.
Ed&IS: How did your family’s experience inspire and inform the book?
Rose: My mother was a waitress all her working life. My uncles worked in classic Rust Belt industries, rail and auto. I grew up watching and hearing stories about blue-collar work, and that was the work that kept food on our table. So, I developed a deep respect for that work, and got to see up close the thought and skills it took to do it well.
As I went through college and then graduate school, I encountered a lot of discussions of intelligence, some of which was pretty demeaning in terms of social class or physical work. I found myself comparing or testing what I heard with what I knew to be true from my experience. “The Mind at Work” is a kind of culmination, I suppose, of that reflection, an attempt to use all the methodological tools I have learned over the years to document the significant cognitive content of blue-collar and service work, and from that documentation to further explore broader issues like intelligence, the nature of work, and education and social class.
Rose: I was lucky that my editor believes that the book is as relevant today—maybe more so—than when it was published in 2004. The topics in the book are certainly in the news today— the nature of work in our time, the skills workers possess, vocational education, and definitions of intelligence. And the whole question of social class is in the news, as we seem to have rediscovered economic inequality.
Ed&IS: Though the book is about the cognitive demands of blue-collar and service work, it, as you say, also addresses broader educational and social issues such as the nature of intelligence itself. What is your concern about the way we define intelligence?
Rose: As a country, we seem to be obsessed with intelligence, with measuring it, with boosting our kids’ intelligence via products like Baby Einstein, with getting “smarter” workers into the new “smart” workplace. But the odd thing is that we tend to rely on a fairly narrow way of determining intelligence: we identify it with a score on a standard intelligence test (an I.Q. score) and with the traditional school-based task.
If one does well on an intelligence test, or in school, that clearly indicates some kind of cognitive competence. But if one doesn’t do well—and, historically, poor performers would include low-income, working people—then the meaning of the score is much less clear. To do well tells us something about intelligence—and, usually, schooling—but not to do well provides much less information about intellectual capacity, although that poor performance may speak volumes about educational opportunity.
What struck me as I did the research for ‘The Mind at Work’ was the number of instances of reasoning, of problem-solving, and of learning that fell outside of what gets assessed in an intelligence test or the traditional school curriculum.
What struck me as I did the research for “The Mind at Work” was the number of instances of reasoning, of problem-solving, and of learning that fell outside of what gets assessed in an intelligence test or the traditional school curriculum. There is the waitress at rush hour prioritizing on the fly a number of demands from customers, the kitchen, and the manager. And the plumber diagnosing a problem by feeling with his hands the pipes he can’t see behind an old wall. And the hair stylist figuring out the cut a customer wants through talk and gesture. These kinds of smarts surround us, yet might not be considered when we talk about intelligence.
Ed&IS: Some of the scenes in your book are from high school or community college vocational courses, and the work the students are doing is pretty impressive. How did vocational education get such a bad reputation?
Rose: This is a complicated question, for, in some ways, that bad reputation is deserved. The problem starts with the creation of the large, comprehensive high school at the beginning of the 20th century. The curriculum was divided into tracks: a track for the college bound, a general track, and a vocational track. Sadly, the vocational track became the place where many working-class and immigrant children were placed. The philosopher John Dewey referred to the practice as “social predestination.”
The vocational track was intended to prepare students for the world of work, but overall didn’t do that very well either. One reason for the poor record was that a number of programs emphasized basic job training and didn’t address the intellectual content of occupations, the kind of content I try to reveal.
A lot has happened with vocational education, which is now called Career and Technical Education, over the past 30 or so years. To be brief, there has been considerable effort to upgrade the academic content of vocational courses, and the last 10 years or so has seen some real advances, especially with attempts to fuse computer technology into design, mechanics, and manufacturing courses. Health care is another promising area. And in the more traditional trade courses I studied—carpentry, welding, that sort of thing—the instructors emphasized the thinking behind the techniques students were learning.
But I think the huge challenge that faces us is how to undo the vocational-academic divide itself. The divide institutionalized what in some cases is a pretty arbitrary separation of kinds of knowledge and skill. To develop into a good cabinetmaker, for example, you need to know about mathematics, have a historical and aesthetic sensibility about tools and cabinetry, and understand things about economics and markets. The ideal occupational program would realize and build on these “academic” subjects within the context of the occupation itself. Dewey called for such an approach a century ago, and some contemporary programs are attempting it now, but such work is difficult, for so many institutional barriers and cultural biases constrain our educational imagination.
The vocational track was intended to prepare students for the world of work, but overall didn’t do that very well either. One reason for the poor record was that a number of programs emphasized basic job training and didn’t address the intellectual content of occupations.
Ed&IS: Let me close with this question. Is there any similarity between the skills you document in “The Mind at Work” and the skills it took to write the book itself?
Rose: Whew! What a way to end. This is a tricky question to answer, for it involves self-analysis that is hard to do and also the application of skills from one domain to a very difficult domain—a thorny issue in educational psychology. But with all those warnings, here goes.
Let me start close to home. I think I picked up from my folks a dogged determination. My mother was indomitable, worked hard as hell. Writing a book, or writing a dissertation, takes persistence, sometimes in the face of big-time ambiguity and uncertainty. I think it was Virginia Woolf who said that the hardest part of writing is putting the seat of your pants onto the seat of the chair.
If I may, let me talk a little bit more about my forebears. My folks had little formal education, but they were terrific storytellers; I grew up hearing tales about the old days and the old country, full of vivid characters, and gestures and sound effects—all that. I think my exposure to those stories influenced my writing. Finally, I was immersed in the lives of immigrant, working-class people, so I absorbed a kind of knowledge—not bookbased and not theoretical, but experiential— that I know affects the way I see the world and write about it.
Some of the types of work I observed— carpentry, for example—requires planning, thinking things through, and anticipating problems. A lot of the work—from hair styling to plumbing—also requires an attention to detail and being methodical. Waitressing or working in a shop or factory requires managing the flow of work—hugely important if you want to keep from being overwhelmed and exhausting yourself.
Now let me be clear, these skills develop in particular occupations and are rooted in the knowledge and experience one gains in those occupations. But in a general sense researching and writing a book also requires planning, attending to detail and being methodical, and managing the flow of work.
Let me close by flipping the script and suggesting that some of the skills and qualities we tend to identify only within activities like writing a book are also found—again in a general sense—in the occupations I explore in “The Mind at Work.” The work I observed is laden with mathematics, written language, and other symbols. Welding, for example, involves mathematical calculations, symbols for types of welds, instructions, labels, work orders, standards, and codes. Words and numbers are embedded in its practice.
And welding, like so many other kinds of work, is also an aesthetic activity. An expert can tell things about the functional quality of a weld by how it looks, but also, to the expert, the look of a weld matters on its own terms as well. In a community college program I observed, students would praise a weld as “pretty” or “beautiful.” “It’s like calligraphy … or signatures,” the instructor told me. “I can show you how to do it, but you develop a style of your own.” So it is with writing a book.
In Fall 2021, UCLA IS Professors Robert D. Montoya and Gregory Leazer, and Sean Pessin, a doctoral student in the UCLA Department of Information Studies, piloted Kosovo’s first National Library Training Program, as conducted through the National Library of Kosovo. The six weeks of specialized training in key areas of library and information studies titled, “The Libraries Supporting Kosovo’s Communities (LSKC): Establishing A National Library Training Program in Information and Cultural Literacies” is supported by a U.S. State Department and U.S. Embassy, Kosovo, grant for “Making Kosovo ‘My Home’ through Education, Inclusion and Anti-Corruption Actions.”
Through the project, Leazer, Montoya, and Pessin have addressed the State Department’s goals of education, anti-corruption, and inclusion as advocates on critical issues that affect Kosovo’s libraries and their positive effects on society as well as issues surrounding the profession of librarianship itself, with its needs for regulation, accountability, and good governance.
“The library is not simply a repository of books but also, along with other institutions, is a place for the synthesis of national and local culture,” says Professor Leazer.
Over the course of three weeks, Montoya, Leazer, and Pessin taught three courses that emphasized the ethical and justice-oriented nature of librarianship and the information professions. Montoya notes that, “Libraries have the capacity to make direct and significant impacts on people’s lives. The courses were meant to illustrate how librarianship may function as a global profession, but professional practice works at the level of the local, often in spaces like classrooms and community spaces.”
Pessin adds, “I am very moved by the openness with which we were invited to share space with librarians from all over Kosovo, and visiting cultural institutions in Pristina, Prizren, Kruja, and Tirana. Creating spaces organized for democratic learning teaches not only people with access to those places, but also every other place that those people participate in and co-create, including we who are returning to UCLA.”
The courses also brought attention to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, a series of goals that can guide humanity forward toward a more sustainable, healthy, and ecologically balanced future. In this way, libraries of all types should be seen as spaces that catalyze broader, global movements.
“It has been a deep honor to work with the National Library in its unique role to bring Kosovar culture to global communities, and a means for Kosovars to learn about the world,” Leazer says.
The grant visit ended with a 77th Anniversary event for the National Library of Kosovo. As part of the ceremony, the National Library of Kosovo awarded Montoya the Pjetër Bogdani Prize for distinguished and impactful service to the National Library of Kosovo. Professor Montoya is only the second individual to receive this honor from the National Library for contributions to library and library science between 2017–21.
In addition, Montoya received the Eliot Engel Jubilee Prize from the U.S. Embassy of Kosovo, named after the U.S. Representative from New York’s 16th congressional district, in honor of his contributions to cultural heritage in Kosovo. The event also featured an exhibit curated by Pessin, titled “Kosovo: My Home,” that showcased a variety of book-objects produced by participating librarians in his course. Leazer, Montoya, and Pessin will return to Kosovo in March 2022 to teach four more courses. Together these courses will constitute a new, formally accredited national continuing education program.
For the last five years, Professor Montoya has worked with the University of Pristina to create the first bachelor’s degree program in library and information studies at the University of Pristina, based on interviews of librarians all over
Kosovo, encompassing librarianship in schools, public libraries, and academia.
“To train the nation’s librarians, I needed to make sure I wasn’t just importing an American model, which history has told us is bound to fail,” he says. “I really wanted to get a sense of what communities needed. But I also needed a sense of how Kosovo’s libraries were connected to the broader notions of political engagement and democratic activity, as well as local and international governmental arenas.
“The bachelor’s program is going to establish a long line of qualified future librarians. But currently, in Kosovo’s libraries, there are many individuals who … care about their work but they don’t have the professional training they need to grow and flourish. The second project, the National Library of Kosovo Training Program, gives an opportunity for us to make a direct impact to professionals currently working in libraries. Kosovo is
also in need of better labor practices, coordinated national library assessment mechanisms, and they need to professionalize the field of librarianship. It’s a big task but I’m excited to be doing this with my UCLA Ed & IS colleagues. I see it as one of the most important things I can do as a scholar and member of the global library community.”
Montoya was selected as a Fulbright Specialist in 2017, and received an invitation by the United States Embassy to develop a national library training program in Kosovo. His research, which is focused on information representation and positionality; critical, ethical, and justice-oriented LIS work; and domestic and international library development, gives him a unique insight into the needs of Kosovo’s libraries and how they can preserve democratic activity. Montoya says that his research has revealed the importance of Kosovo’s libraries as “spaces for the enactment and the production of justice and ethical social principles.”
“At the beginning stages of building a country, libraries are really essential in promoting democratic ideals such as public participation, equal representation, and governmental accountability to community needs, in addition to all the things we normally associate with libraries like supporting literacy education,
reading skills, and working with public schools,” he says.
Professor Montoya brings his examinations of libraries as outposts for societal advancement and justice to UCLA with his creation of the new Library, Ethics, and Justice Lab; Pessin is a fellow of the Lab and serves as its project manager. The Lab’s aims include learning how to better serve specific populations of color in the local Los Angeles community; the role of libraries as agents of individual and community advancement and a supporter of democracy; and how to convince policy and decision makers that libraries are essential for all aspects of society.
As director of the California Rare Book School, Montoya will strive to integrate these same values into the continuing education program’s curriculum.
“CalRBS is one of the country’s finest continuing education programs for librarians and rare book specialists,” he says. “I want to work to expand the program into new areas and to think about how it can take the lead in providing a critical and justice-oriented framework in some of its courses.
“In the last many years, the library, special collections, and rare book professions have made great progress in the areas of diversity, equity, and justice. But we are a long way from where
we need to be, and I think CalRBS can be an important driving force in making change happen,” says Montoya. “Making these changes locally at an institution like UCLA has the capacity to make our global community more just. It’s amazing to have the opportunity to do this. In this way, my humanitarian and development work in Kosovo; the research partnerships facilitated by the Library, Ethics, and Justice Lab; and my vision for CalRBS work together to imagine a future-oriented, globally conscious, and critical approach to librarianship.”
Besim Kokollari, established opinion leaders specialist in the Public Diplomacy Section of the U.S. Embassy in Kosovo, says, “The U.S. Embassy in Kosovo has supported the National Library of Kosovo since early 2002 in a host of areas, including management, staff professional development, exchanges, electronic resources, and funding grants. More than twenty U.S. library experts have traveled to Kosovo since 2003 on various U.S. government sponsored programs, including the U.S. Speaker program or the Fulbright Specialist program. With the U.S. speakers program, we have managed to expose Kosovo libraries to the U.S. library practices, development and technology, and helped them build professional and institutional cooperation. With the
Fulbright Specialist program, we have supported Kosovo libraries with longer-term expertise to initiate structural changes in their library management and practices. Dr. Robert Montoya’s engagement with local librarians is a good example of our interventions in Kosovo’s libraries. First, he arrived to Kosovo through the U.S. speaker program to speak on various events during the Library Week in Kosovo in 2018. It was an excellent opportunity for him to meet librarians throughout Kosovo, establish relationships, and share his expertise and knowledge on library trainings. He then continued his engagement with Kosovo through the U.S. Fulbright Specialist program and a U.S. Speaker funding grant to develop and implement what is considered the first formal and professional library training in Kosovo. We are very proud with this and other achievement made in Kosovo’s libraries. And, we look forward to seeing more positive changes so that libraries in Kosovo modernize their services to benefit their local and international patrons.”
Robert Montoya (’03, B.A. American Literature and Culture; ’15, M.L.I.S.; ’17 Ph.D.) is an assistant professor of the UCLA Department of Information Studies in the Masters of Library Science program and the new director of the California Rare Book School (calrbs.org) which is housed at UCLA. In addition, he is the founding director of the new Library, Ethics, and Justice Lab at UCLA.
Montoya’s forthcoming book, Power of Position: Knowledge Organization and the Biodiversity
Sciences, to be published by The MIT Press in May 2022, deals with knowledge organization and its intersections with politics, biodiversity studies and science, technology, and society studies. The book is based on his dissertation, “Contingent Consensus: Documentary Control in Biodiversity Classifications.” His dissertation research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the Beta-Phi-Mu International Library and Information Studies Honor Society, and the Litwin Books Award for Ongoing Dissertation Research in the Philosophy of Information.
Professor Montoya has held professional positions in special collections and archives since 2007, including his service as head of public services for Library Special Collections (LSC) at UCLA, where he led the LSC’s reference, reader services, instruction, outreach, duplication services, and scholarly communication and publishing.
Greg Leazer is an associate professor in the UCLA Department of Information Studies in the Masters of Library Science program. He was recently awarded the ALSC Research Agenda Pilot Grant which offers seed funds to help develop, conduct, and disseminate emerging research that aligns with priority areas outlined in the ALSC Research Agenda. Leazer is the associate director of the new Library, Ethics, and Justice Lab at UCLA and the former chair of the UCLA Department of Information Studies.
Sean Pessin is a doctoral student in the UCLA Department of Information Studies, faculty at CSUN College of Humanities, and director, CSUN Book Arts Lab. He earned a B.A. and M.A. at California State University Northridge and an M.F.A. from Otis College of Art and Design. As a lecturer at CSUN and the Colburn School, he teaches a variety of courses including Comics and Graphic Novels, Literary Magazine, Fairy Tales, and First-Year Composition among others. He oversees the production of The Northridge Review. In 2017 he founded the Book Arts Laboratory at CSUN which assists students with all their book-shaped special projects, including class anthologies, artist books, and chapbooks. His chapbook on TED Talks, Thank You for Listening, was published by Mindmade Books in 2017, and he has a new chapbook forthcoming from Magra Books.
… they need to professionalize the field of librarianship. It’s a big task but I’m excited to be doing this with my UCLA Ed&IS colleagues. I see it as one of the most important things I can do as a scholar and member of the global library community.
ProfessorRobert Montoya
“Preparing and Sustaining Social Justice Educators” spotlights the challenging and necessary work of fostering social justice in schools. Integral to this work are the teachers and school leaders who enact the principles of social justice—racial equity, cultural inclusivity, and identity acceptance—daily in their classrooms.
Drawing on the experience of co-editors Annamarie Francois, Karen Hunter Quartz, and their colleagues and partners at UCLA Center X, the book illuminates the need for and challenge of developing and supporting educators who are not only committed to racial and social justice for their students, but possess the deep knowledge and skills needed for high-quality instruction and learning, and the perspective and resilience to disrupt educational inequality in pursuit of opportunity and justice.
The book presents an intersectional approach to educational justice, grounded in research about deeper learning, community development, and school reform. Throughout the book, the contributors detail professional activities proven to sustain social justice educators. They show, for example, how effective teacher coaching encourages educators to confront their explicit and implicit biases, to engage in critical conversations and self-reflection, and to assess teacher performance through a social justice lens. The book illustrates how professional learning collaborations promote diverse, antiracist, and socially responsible learning communities. Case studies at three university-partnered K–12 schools in Los Angeles demonstrate the benefits of these professional alliances and practices.
CICELY’S KINDERGARTEN STUDENTS squirm in front of their Zoom screens. She is teaching students how to write a shopping list, using words and drawings. Later in the day, Cicely joins an online research seminar at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as part of her PhD program in Urban Schooling. During the check-in, she shares the shopping list and the joy she experienced seeing her students’ faces light up: “You can’t get a clearer perspective on life than through the eyes of a kindergartner.”
Cicely began her teaching career twenty-four years ago, in a school not far from where she grew up. During her first year of student teaching, she was robbed at gunpoint—a terrifying incident that clarified what she calls “a mission to help children see the range of possibilities for their lives so that they don’t see crime or this type of behavior as their only option.” She still lives and works in the same community, buying her groceries alongside her students’ parents. As a fifth-year teacher—when so many lose hope and leave the profession—Cicely said she was “too angry to leave.” After ten years, she reflected on what it means to stay in the same community: “Consistency is important, the kids see that people are committed to them.” Today, Cicely also mentors student teachers, organizes parent activists, conducts research, and leads professional learning. This book is about the community that supports and sustains educators like Cicely as they transform our public schools to create a more just, equitable, and humane society.
Schools are the moral, political, and social centers of our democracy. When we work to change schools, we are working to change society. In times when our nation’s core values are being challenged and our social contract grows ever more tenuous, we look to public schools for a brighter
future. In response to the global pandemic and racial violence that erupted in 2020, we saw schools step up to feed families, deliver health care, provide technology, and help young people unpack race, racism, and police violence. We witnessed teachers holding space during precious instructional time to take care of confused, frustrated, traumatized, and righteously angry young people. As they have for decades, educators like Cicely inspire the next generation to believe in democracy, the importance of their own voice, and the power of coming together in community to imagine a better future.
This book brings to life the challenging work of preparing and sustaining educators to disrupt educational inequality in urban communities. It is not a how-to guide. Nor is it a celebration of best practices. Rather, through grounded stories and examples from thirty years of collective work in Los Angeles, we illustrate the kind of professional activity you find in communities that view teaching and leading as progressive political acts of love guided by an antiracist, social justice agenda. You will find pedagogical approaches that honor and draw upon the rich
racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity of families and communities to make learning more accessible, culturally relevant, and sustaining. You will find deliberate activity intended to provoke deeper learning, engaged clinical practice and induction, and sustained professional development from “cradle to grave.” Activity that ensures educational quality and equity. You will find robust school university partnerships that work hard to center depth of knowledge, powerful pedagogies, and transformative school cultures. We share these stories knowing that they are part of a much larger narrative about the role of public education in disrupting pernicious inequalities in our society—a story line rooted in particular values, politics, and practices.
The UCLA campus is anchored by Royce Hall, named after Josiah Royce, a teacher whose students included W. E. B. Du Bois and T. S. Eliot. Royce was also a philosopher who stated, “My life means nothing, either theoretically or practically, unless I am a member of a community.” Royce developed the concept of “the beloved community” that shaped the civil rights work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who believed “our ultimate end must be the creation of the beloved
community.” Many educators take up this idea, such as bell hooks, who explains, “Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.” Center X is one of many beloved communities of educators across the globe. As a movement, we share the values of inclusion, respect, and love. We unite around a common set of beliefs about the importance of culture, identity, and justice.
We also unite in political struggle. We ask for trouble. Center X was created in response to the civil unrest and racial uprisings that followed the 1992 Rodney King verdict, and now, almost thirty years later, we continue the fight for racial justice in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many others. We are indebted to Black Lives Matter’s cofounder Patrisse Cullors, who, like Royce, anchors the work of our university. A celebrated alumna, Cullors makes her political stance clear: “While other people are trying to subjugate human beings, there’s a whole other group of people trying to liberate them, and I’m on that
side of history.” So is the Center X community. Teacher leaders, school principals, teacher educators, professional development experts, program directors, and researchers are committed to making schools and classrooms liberatory spaces of belonging, connection, and learning, particularly for young people whose lives have been shaped by poverty, racial violence and injustice, and trauma. A community that exists because we’ve seen firsthand how the multiple faces of bias, discrimination, and oppression affect the lives of our beloved students.
We are also a professional community of educators who understand teaching and learning practice. We know (and at times have unconsciously contributed to) classroom and leadership practices that present barriers to social and academic growth, as well as student agency. Dismantling these barriers is slow and steady work. Teachers and school leaders must prepare students to meet academic content standards, develop important socioemotional skills, and become critical thinkers and creative problem-solvers. Skills they will need to actively and productively contribute to what has become an increasingly fragile
Twenty-eight Center Xers came together to write this book to ensure we captured multiple perspectives on a rich thirty-year history of work together.
democracy. Skills they will need to solve the very complex problems their parents and teachers and principals are grappling with today.
Over the years, we have been criticized for being too value-driven, too political, and too radical in the classroom. To be sure, this work is contested by many and runs counter to policies that support fasttrack teacher preparation, scripted curricula, high-stakes standardized testing, and other efforts that deskill teachers and constrain their capacity to educate students. As the authors in this book attest, the work to push against the grain is tough intellectual work that is often hard and exhausting. We share Center X’s thirty years of experience in hopes that it ignites your imagination about what is possible in your own spheres of influence. We hope it provides other urban teacher educators with an opportunity to
reflect on and perhaps reimagine their curriculum and instruction. We hope that teacher education deans and directors, as well as school and district leaders, will find this book a valuable tool for creating authentic, community-dedicated, praxis-focused, and justice-oriented school-university partnerships. And, ultimately, we hope that policy makers at all levels of our educational system will use Center X’s experience to create programs and put forward legislation that increases public commitment to the education of our most vulnerable students.
Twenty-eight Center Xers came together to write this book to ensure we captured multiple perspectives on a rich thirty-year history of work together. Part I of the story contains three chapters that set the stage. Chapter 1, our origin story, was published in 1996 by Jeannie Oakes, whom we affectionately think of
as the mother of Center X. Oakes sets forth a bold vision to make the rhetoric of social justice real by fundamentally changing the way the university prepares and supports educators. In this chapter, you’ll learn about the center’s seven guiding principles and the historic context that brought them to life. Chapter 2 picks up these principles in its portrayal of the current work of UCLA’s Teacher Education Program (TEP). Center X Executive Director Annamarie M. Francois and teacher education researcher Jarod Kawasaki draw on the rich tradition and experiences of community teachers to propose a set of abolitionist practices within teacher preparation. These practices bring together the lived experiences of aspiring teachers and K–12 students, as well as an understanding of sociopolitical context, to construct and enact an antiracist pedagogy. Chapter 3 takes up the pressing policy issue of measuring and evaluating
teacher quality. Veteran teacher educators Jaime J. Park, Imelda L. Nava, and Melissa S. Arias describe the development and use of a social justice classroom observation rubric designed to extend and deepen teacher learning.
In part II, we transition to the work of sustaining community teachers through ongoing professional learning partnerships. Chapter 4 describes an alternative approach to coaching that reframes the achievement gap as an equity gap that results from the unexamined explicit and implicit biases educators carry with them into the classroom and perpetuate in their practice. Coaching experts Tonikiaa Orange and Jo Ann Isken detail how school and classroom culture, structures, and pedagogies are often culturally oppressive and exacerbate inequalities, and they explore the need for educators to engage in critical conversations and self-reflection seldom found in conventional coaching models. Chapter 5 champions equity-guided, content-focused professional learning “cradle-tograve” opportunities for educators working for social justice. Longtime Center
X leaders Jody Z. Priselac and Megan L. Franke explore two research-practice partnerships grounded in a common vision of public schooling and
transformative relationships. In chapter 6, a team of researchers, content and professional development experts, and graduate student researchers look inside a research-practice partnership and describe how it deepened and sustained practice that centers students and leads to increased student agency. Chapter 7 turns to the process of preparing educational leaders for justice and the need for continued support and inquiry. John Rogers and Nancy Parachini, co-directors of the UCLA Principal Leadership Institute, amplify the voices and experiences of new and seasoned school leaders within and beyond their ongoing community of practice.
Part III introduces you to three beloved school communities. You’ll hear from the principals of these schools and the partners they work alongside. In chapter 8, Principal Ben Gertner teams up with TEP Director Emma Hipólito to tell the story of Roosevelt High School, a historic neighborhood school in the East Los Angeles community of Boyle Heights. They detail how the university has supported social justice work at the school over the past thirty years. In chapter 9, Principal Leyda Garcia and Assistant Principal Queena Kim partner with UCLA researchers Karen Hunter Quartz and Marisa Saunders to tell the UCLA Community School’s story, focusing on how this decade-old partnership in Los Angeles’s Koreatown community has created a democratic workplace culture where teachers want to work and stay. And in chapter 10, Principal Orlando Johnson and Assistant Principal Carla Estes join Center Xers Carrie Usui Johnson, Ung-Sang Lee, and Christine Shen in reporting on the Mann UCLA Community School—a new partnership with a South Los Angeles school slated for closure—contributing to the debate about how best to address the epidemic of school closures in neighborhoods of color.
In full circle, the book concludes with a powerful chapter by Jeannie Oakes, who reflects on what it now means to make the rhetoric of social justice real. In this very personal essay, Oakes reflects on the words she wrote in 1996 when Center X was “asking for
trouble.” She lifts up the words and legacy of congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis to frame the book’s themes, using reflections from the authors about what it means to make “good trouble, necessary trouble.” As they did more than twenty years ago, Oakes’s thoughtful words and critical analysis will inspire Center X’s journey forward.
Marian Wright Edelman reminds us, “We must always refill and ensure there is a critical mass of leaders and activists committed to nonviolence and racial and economic justice who will keep seeding and building transforming movements.” Center X remains committed to recruiting, developing, and retaining teachers and school leaders who are transforming public schools. We persist in this work because while we can identify urban schools that support the learning of their most vulnerable students well, high-quality public schooling remains elusive for far too many others. As it was in 1992, the recent racial violence and resulting civil unrest reminds us that the time is always now—and highquality teaching and leading continues to be our most powerful lever for change and justice. This is a lifetime of work. We invite you to join us—in beloved community—to make some good and necessary trouble.
In this very personal essay, (Jeannie) Oakes reflects on the words she wrote in 1996 when Center X was ‘asking for trouble.’ She lifts up the words and legacy of congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis to frame the book’s themes, using reflections from the authors about what it means to make ‘good trouble, necessary trouble.’
ANNAMARIE FRANCOIS is the executive director of UCLA’s Center X, where she guides the work of equity-driven educator preparation, development, and support for urban school communities, and is a faculty member in the UCLA Teacher Education Program. She has over thirty years of teaching, teacher leadership, and administrative leadership in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the charter school community, and UCLA’s Department of Education. Francois is currently the University of California representative on the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, advisor to the California State University Center to Close the Opportunity Gap, and board president of the Center for Powerful Public Schools. She is an active contributor to national, state, and local networks working to develop models for equity-driven, student-centered, antiracist practices within educator preparation programs. Her public scholarship, teaching, and service support educator development, critical multicultural education and culturally responsive literacies, and transformative school-university collaboration. She received her B.A. from UCLA; her M.A. in higher education, administration, and supervision from California State University, Northridge; and her Ed.D. in Educational Leadership from UCLA.
KAREN HUNTER QUARTZ directs the UCLA Center for Community Schooling and is a faculty member in the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. Her research, teaching, and service support community school development, teacher autonomy and retention, and educational reform. Quartz led the design team in 2007 to create the UCLA Community School and served in 2017 on the design team for a second site, the Mann UCLA Community School. She currently oversees a portfolio of research-practice partnerships at both schools, designed to advance democracy, inquiry, and change. She is recipient of the 2001 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association, the 2004 Outstanding Writing Award from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, the 2017 national Teacher-Powered Schools Initiative’s Advancement in Research Award, and the 2017 Outstanding Professional Teaching Award from the UCLA Department of Education. She received her B.A. from Huron College, M.A. in philosophy from the University of Western Ontario, and her Ph.D. in education from UCLA.
Center X was created in response to the civil unrest and racial uprisings that followed the 1992 Rodney King verdict, and now, almost thirty years later, we continue the fight for racial justice in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many others.
