“What’s the stuff in our shopping cart that we carry from our lived experiences, growing up and that we continue to maintain, that come into the areas of our schooling that we do with our children?” said Fergus, an associate professor of urban education and policy at Temple University who has worked with more than 75 school districts on educational equity and school reform. 

As the nation faces a pandemic of racism, Fergus explained how an educator’s lifelong mindset can harm low-income and minority students. He laid out five strategies to combat bias-based beliefs and develop better school practices. 

The Insidious Nature of Ingrained Beliefs

There are disproportionate numbers of students from low-income and minority backgrounds who experience behavioral referrals, suspensions, and tracking, he said. The root of these patterns originated centuries ago, when white colonists enslaved and brutalized Black and Native American peoples. Over time, a person’s “whiteness” determined their status in American society and became the ideal social identity, whether consciously or subconsciously. 

“We are mired in continuous ways in which we do [things], whether it’s schooling, policing, or healthcare systems,” said Fergus. “I think we’ve come to recognize over the last eight months that in all of those areas there’s still a manifestation of oppressive habits and where those habits come from.” 

These ideologies infiltrate the way we interpret images, too, Fergus said. He pointed to a Texas geography textbook published by McGraw-Hill in 2015 that characterized slaves as “workers.” An article about a victim from Hurricane Katrina in 2005 describes a dark-skinned man as “looting” a grocery store, whereas another article describes two white-skinned people as “finding” food. These are among the many subtle acts that uphold the social identity of whiteness and subordinate others, said Fergus. And sometimes, we do it to ourselves. 

“We maintain it through our own personal networks. Who do we hang out with? Where do we live? Who do we have lunch with?” Fergus said. “All of those things sustain the manner in which we keep things within our shopping carts, and we don’t complicate them enough.”

Interrupting the Status Quo: Five Strategies

The solution is grounded in social psychology research, or a “developmental journey” that everyone—especially educators—can use, said Fergus. He described five strategies to challenge our implicit bias-based beliefs: counter-stereotypic imaging, individuating, perspective taking, intergroup contact, and improved decision-making. 

Counter-stereotypic imaging means countering negative biases by saturating your environment with diverse pictures, images, and symbols and being intentional about the books and posters your students view in your classroom, even on a virtual Zoom lesson, said Fergus, who elaborates on these ideas in his book, Solving Disproportionality and Achieving Equity, (Corwin, 2016). 

Individuating is having regular one-on-one conversations with people from different backgrounds to see them for their individual qualities instead of part of a stereotypic group, Fergus said. 

Perspective taking means walking in the shoes of “the perceived other.” If a student skips class or punches another student, said Fergus, ask them, “What’s happened to you? What made you behave this way?” instead of “What’s wrong with you?”

Inter-group contact is using the power of positive, sustained dialogue with individuals across different groups to expand your perspective, said Fergus, showing photos of comedian Ellen DeGeneres and former president George W. Bush sitting together at an NFL game and rapper Snoop Dogg and media mogul Martha Stewart cooking side by side. 

Lastly, improved decision-making is slowing down your initial reaction to someone and asking yourself what assumptions you’ve made about that person’s cultural identity, gender, and background. “There’s an onslaught of information that you read because of the stereotypes that live within your shopping carts, and you make behavioral decisions,” Fergus said. “How do we slow down those habits so that we are interrupting the stereotype that we carry?”

Applying Fergus’ Strategy to Bronx Schools

At the end of Fergus’ presentation, four leaders in the Bronx spoke about how they are using his work to improve equity in their schools: Meisha Ross Porter, GSE ’21, executive superintendent for the Bronx; Denise Williams, instructional lead for equity and access for the Bronx Central Office and a first-year student in Fordham’s Ed.D. program; Lori Baker, principal of the Walt Disney Magnet STEAM School; and Harry Sherman, principal of Castle Hill Middle School. The panel was moderated by Elisabeth Stosich, Ed.D., assistant professor at Fordham’s Graduate School of Education. 

Fergus’ research prompted the Walt Disney Magnet STEAM School to take a look at their own student statistics. Baker said her school realized that the percentage of girls being referred for interventions was higher than boys, but boys were more frequently pushed into self-contained classes. As a result, the school changed its referral system and helped educators better understand the response to intervention process. 

Sherman said that white educational leaders like himself need to surround themselves with multiple perspectives to help them effectively serve their students. 

“Awareness of my own learning and my own blind spots and the power of having a close accountability partner who I can be real with, who can help me see those blind spots so that I can do the work better, is essential,” said Sherman, who praised his assistant principal. “I don’t need to go out there and be perfect, but I need to be able to be transparent about my own learning and growth and not be asking people to do things that I’m not doing.” 

The panel agreed that one of their biggest obstacles in achieving racial reform right now is the COVID-19 pandemic. Porter said that educators cannot allow the “persistent problem” to be overtaken by the virus. Williams recalled some advice that a GSE professor, Margaret Terry Orr, once gave her: “Time is a value choice. You choose what you spend time on.” 

“There are so many things being asked of us right now, but you have to be able to see past this moment,” Williams said. “It’s about organizing our efforts to see beyond the pandemic, to deal with this problem of systemic racism that’s been a pandemic for hundreds of years.”

The Barbara L. Jackson lecture series is named in honor of the late Barbara L. Jackson, who served as a professor in the Division of Educational Leadership, Administration, and Policy at the Graduate School of Education for more than two decades and as chair of the division from 1997 to 2003. 

Watch the full lecture in the video below: 

“Reforming Education Reform: Leadership and Transmitting Inequality in Schools” was the title of the Dec. 7 talk at Fordham by James Earl Davis, PhD, holder of the Bernard C. Watson Endowed Chair in Urban Education at Temple University.

He was delivering the third annual Barbara L. Jackson, EdD, Lecture, named for the late professor and division chair in Fordham’s Graduate School of Education. Davis called her a “national treasure” and exemplar of the kind of questioning spirit that school leaders need.

“I have an enduring fondness and appreciation for [Professor] Jackson and her place in the tradition of race and gender studies that shattered long-held assumptions about what mattered academically and intellectually,” he said.

Jackson’s “career and contributions [are]an important model for all of us,” he said. “Her contributions were at the center of disrupting the status quo of inequalities in school leadership throughout the educational pipeline.”

Black boys, like canaries in a coal mine, “signal what’s most toxic about how we do schooling” and how it’s reformed, he said.

He said there’s scant evidence that they’re helped by “educational reform as it’s currently operationalized,” citing charter schools, magnet schools, vouchers, incentive pay for teachers, and other examples. “We have much to learn about how to produce more equitable educational outcomes, particularly for low-income minoritized students who continue to challenge our best practices and policies.”

“Too many of these students experience academic death and also physical death at the hands of systems more interested in protecting self-interest,” he said.

He emphasized the role of school leadership, which he said can either reduce or perpetuate inequality in elementary and higher education alike.

He also called for more nuanced study of schools’ role in addressing inequality. Studies that show schools playing only a small role in perpetuating racial and class-based disparities tend to rely only on standardized test scores, he said. He pointed to one recent study that spotlights high schools’ varying rates of sending students to college, saying it could give new insight into schools’ impact on inequality.

When an audience member asked how educators steeped in current reform efforts can step outside them and consider other options, Davis invoked Barbara Jackson, who, he said, would call for “deep self-reflection and a willingness to lose the comfortability of your position in your school, and getting the credit for pushing a traditional reform model.”

Reforming reform calls for more research into what traditional reforms are producing inequalities, he said.

“I didn’t want to suggest that all education reform was bad,” he said. “We have growing evidence of a number of whole school reform initiatives—sort of broad system and systemic initiatives—where we’re getting some positive effects. But just to take a reform initiative and to say it’s going to be effective in all settings, in all schools, with all students—that is so naïve and dangerous.”

Michael E. Dantley, Ed.D., professor and former dean of Loyola University Chicago’s School of Education, will deliver the Second Annual Dr. Barbara L. Jackson, Ed.D., Lecture, titled “Leadership and Social Justice: The Power and Place for a Critical Spirituality.”

Dantley will speak at the E. Gerald Corrigan Conference Center at the Lincoln Center campus at 6 p.m. More information, along with a registration link, can be found online.

Dantley’s research focus is prophetic justice, a more vision-driven notion of justice that’s informed by “both a present and a future trajectory,” he said.

“What it is all about is having the ability, as an educational leader, to kind of denude, or expose, the inequities that are rampant in our schools, especially for children of color and children of poverty,” he said. “It’s about calling out those things that really need to be exposed as being unjust, but then also creating strategies to deal with them.”

Examples might include teaching strategies that are relevant to students’ heritages and cultural traditions, harnessing the resources in schools’ communities, focusing lessons on community problems, and taking a more activist approach to promoting equity in schools, he said.

This activism requires a more radical idea of social justice, not the “let’s just like each other” version that some are promoting, he said.

“There are some things about the system that are not ‘likable,’ that have to be changed. The mere fact that the majority of children in special education are often black and Latino males, that’s got to be looked at,” he said. “Why are teachers with very little experience often placed in urban schools and in schools that are more challenging? That’s got to be examined.”

“We’ve got to become activists about contextualizing education in an equitable environment,” he said.

“These people don’t know it, but they’re about ready to go to church,” was what civil rights activist Clarence Jones said before Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his I Have A Dream speech.

The same could have been said about Olga Welch, Ed.D., dean of education at Duquesne University, upon delivering the first Barbara L. Jackson Memorial Lecture at Fordham. Welch, who evoked King’s oratory, as well as the messages of Gandhi and Mother Teresa, roused a crowd of educators to their feet with her talk on Nov. 19. The Graduate School of Education sponsored the event.

Welch cited the lecture’s namesake, Barbara L. Jackson, Ed.D. as the perfect example of “transcendent leadership.” Jackson, who died last year, was a professor in the Division of Educational Leadership, Administration, and Policy from 1987 to 2008, as served as chair from 1997 to 2003.

Though Welch’s lecture on leadership was clearly steeped in research, the stirring content and cadenced delivery moved the crowd at the Corrigan Conference Center.

“Managers are people who do the right thing; leaders are people who do things right,” said Walch, who probed what transcendent leadership might look like and how it should be implemented.

She said that leaders are being scrutinized in unprecedented ways and that, nowadays, powerful people  move “with the caution of alley cats” instead of taking calculated risks. In education, she said that the shifting landscape makes leadership particularly complex.

She called on educators to adopt the path of “righteous extremism” that King espoused in Letter from Birmingham Jail some 50 years ago. Part of this path, she said, is to listen closely to the communities they serve; as King said, 
”We are caught in an escapable network of mutuality.”

“The sense of a shared destiny must be up close, not detached by protocol,” she said. “We must bring a sense of outrage.”

Leaders must be visionary, yet practical enough to be revolutionary. She suggested that a “traveling leadership theory” needs to be steeped in research and center on the leader’s identity: elegant slogans and picturesque language are simply not efficient, and a leader must engage on an authentic and personal level.

“An inauthentic leader can’t lead,” she said, adding there was “nothing inauthentic about Jesus, Gandhi, or Mother Teresa.”

Two great downfalls of a leader are indecisiveness in times of crisis, and dead certainty at times of complexity. And healthy ego shouldn’t be misconstrued as narcissism; leaders need to develop a positive self-regard, she said.

“Making mistakes is part of leadership, but the best leaders are vision centered,” she said.

GSE is launching a new scholarship fund in her honor. This award will be given to a student who demonstrates financial need, academic merit, and is enrolled in a program in educational leadership at GSE with a preference given to a student with a strong interest in urban education. For more information contact Michelle Adams at [email protected].