Education Week - May 10, 2017 - 25

cators to help students develop patience and
self-regulation skills. Trainers also encourage teachers to re-examine student behaviors they may see as defiance or insubordination and which frequently lead to conflict.
These changes went hand in hand with a
renewed commitment to restorative justice,
which prioritizes resolution and understanding between the victims and perpetrators of misbehavior, rather than punishment
and retribution.
In Oakland, too, the impact is striking, including in some dramatic improvements in
graduation rates for students of color.
While our approaches have differed, the
fundamental notions behind them are the
same: When schools dig in on the underlying reasons why kids violate norms, rather
than reflexively and automatically punishing
and sending kids away, outcomes can change
quickly and dramatically. It's especially important for everyone in a school to dig deep
to decrease head-to-head conflict and understand behaviors that are often quickly
labeled insubordination or disrespect.
Secondly, social-emotional learning isn't
just about helping kids. It also helps adults
contend with the inevitable and sometimes
extraordinary stresses of teaching and leading in schools that, in turn, contend with very
stressed neighborhoods.
Finally, schools have to be willing to adapt
and rethink, to reduce hierarchy, and to learn
from the wider world of organizations and
companies that have become flatter.
It's thrilling to see leaders around this
country-including many of our fellow superintendents and state schools chiefs as part of
Chiefs for Change-embracing these ideas.

ers make up more than 90 percent of the
instructional staff. Our low-income black
students essentially close the achievement
gap with their white counterparts in English classes by the end of 5th grade, and our
suspension rate is below 3 percent. We eschew zero-tolerance policies and respond to
discordant behavior with mindfulness and
cognitive-based therapeutic practices. Student agency, not control, is the goal.
More black teachers and school leaders
would not only improve student achievement,
they would also improve suspension rates. The
Brookings Institution found in February that
a more diverse teaching force would virtually
eliminate the need for suspension, even for the
most underresourced students. This is in part
because black teachers are far less likely to
characterize black student behavior as problematic and to suspend or expel students.
Black parents, students, legislators, and
educators have long viewed Brown v. Board of
Education as a victory, but it is the spirit of the
ruling-that all children deserve an excellent
education-we should pursue. As Carter G.
Woodson, the black educator and often-credited founder of Black History Month, suggested
so many years ago, when it comes to reversing the failure of educating black students, we
must stop looking to the beneficiaries of white
supremacy for salvation, and instead be led by
black teachers and black schools to solve this
problem. And now the data say so, too. n

Greater numbers of
black teachers and
leaders
significantly
improve the
academic
achievement of
black students,
particularly from
low-income
households."

Charters Play 'Important
Role' in OER Movement
To the Editor:
"Scaling Up Open Resources,"
an article from the special report
Navigating New Curriculum Choices
(March 29, 2017), brought attention
to a growing field that is trying
to address a great inefficiency in
education. Millions of teachers are
working, individually, to sift through
the proliferation of educational content
on the internet.
In addition to the organizations
this article mentions, charter schools
are emerging as key players in the
OER landscape. Some charter school
operators, including mine, Match
Education; Achievement First; and
Edward Brooke are already sharing
their curriculum materials. For years,
these schools have understood the
limitations of traditional textbooks in
providing rigorous, standards-based
curriculum. With the autonomy to
rethink how and what teachers teach,
many charters have created and
curated a bank of resources that have
proven effective in the classroom. By
sharing what they have learned, these
charters fulfill their original promise to
be a source of innovation in education.
But to be relevant in this space,
charter schools will need to do more
than just open up their online files. At
Match, for example, we are investing
$1 million a year in our open-source
curriculum website, Match Fishtank,
where teachers can view and download
the lesson plans, assessments, and
grading rubrics our teachers use in
class every day.
We are new to this crowded field but
are encouraged by the early feedback
we've received from teachers working
in traditional and charter schools alike.
With the right investments, charters
can play an important role in the
advancement of OER.

RAFIQ R. KALAM ID-DIN II is the co-founder and
managing partner of Ember Charter School for Mindful
Education in the Brooklyn borough of New York City,
where he serves as a teacher and co-school leader. He is a
2017 Ford Public Voices Fellow.

Claire Kaplan
Executive Director, Match Export
Match Education
Boston, Mass.

Teacher-Led Schools Offer
Innovative Approach

Getty

The disparity between black and white students is often obscured by reporting a school's
overall academic-achievement results. When
scores at integrated schools are broken down
by race, it becomes clear that wealthy white
students pump up results, thus masking the
ways schools continue to fail their low-income
black students.
Integration is not the only solution educators
have explored to close the racial achievement
gap. Some charter schools with a high number
of low-income black students have seen impressive outcomes, but at a cost to their students.
These schools, staffed mostly by white teachers,
achieve results through two objectionable tactics: intensive test preparation and "no excuses"
behavior-management policies. The former can
lead to a narrow schooling experience, the latter to extremely high suspension rates, particularly for black boys. By undermining students'
sense of agency and self-esteem, these solutions
do more harm than good, no matter how much
they may increase test scores.
The solution is perfectly clear: Greater numbers of black teachers and leaders significantly
improve the academic achievement of black
students, particularly from low-income households. A 2004 study by the National Bureau
of Economic Research found that when black
teachers taught black students from kindergarten to 3rd grade, the gap in children's reading and math scores closed, respectively, by 71
percent and 65 percent.
However, in public schools nationwide,
roughly 7 percent of teachers are black. We
must make the recruiting and retaining of
black teachers a top priority.
At the Brooklyn charter school where I,
a black man, lead and teach, black teach-

LETTERS to
the EDITOR

Reinventing power dynamics isn't the way
we've been trained to think and act as school
people. It's understandably difficult to modify the way we respond when students challenge our authority or do things that could
endanger other students or adults. But none
of this is about tolerating dangerous or problematic behavior. It's about understanding it
to find better solutions.
When we come together with a commitment to do that, we don't just transform the

possibilities for our students. We transform
ourselves as well. n
ROBERT W. RUNCIE is the superintendent of
schools in Broward County, Fla. ANTWAN WILSON
is the chancellor of the District of Columbia Public
Schools and previously served as the superintendent
of schools in Oakland, Calif. They are both members
of Chiefs for Change, a coalition of state and district
education leaders committed to excellence and
equity for all students.

To the Editor:
I appreciated reading "In Minn. and
U.S., Teacher-Led Schools Take Root"
(April 19, 2017), about this movement
and specifically the work done by
teachers at Impact Academy at Orchard
Lake in Lakeville, Minn. I work at The
Metropolitan Career and Technical
Center, a high school also known as The
Met, in Providence, R.I. As an innovative
career-and-technical-education program,
we tend to be out ahead of many
educational initiatives, thanks to a
relatively flat structure that encourages
sharing of ideas and our nontraditional
philosophy and guiding principles of
student-centered learning.
However, it is the school-leadership
graduate program I am currently
enrolled in that gives me the greatest
appreciation of the article. In spite of
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Education Week - May 10, 2017

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