“Every shut eye ain’t sleep”—My 1950’s Brooklyn Elders

Let the phrase “DEI” die, for now. But let the educational learning and school leadership work of expanding the opportunity for all students to emotionally and intellectually thrive in our schools continue, if necessary, in a creative, albeit clandestine way. In a long battle against a determined, immoral, and brutal foe, sometimes a strategic retreat (different from surrender) or using an affirmative working-round-avoidance plan can be a powerful approach. The best school-based expanding opportunity tactic will lose its impact power and can be countered once it is known by the opponents of good and effective schooling for all; those “Make America Frightened of Progress and Change Folks” can be very persuasive. We advocates for the highest-quality educational experiences for all young people must continue to create dynamic learning spaces that look like present-day (not 1619-1950) America and strengthen our nation’s future competitive capacity.

Principals, especially those who work in academically high-achieving Title-1 schools, already know (the only way those schools can be high achieving) well how to strategically, stealthily, and quietly break, modify, and wisely ignore deleterious regulations, unhelpful rules, ignorance-based societal noise and any school district’s systemic inadequate belief systems that might cower and compromise on the undergirding principles that frame the very mission of public education. These affirmative actions are to ensure that their disenfranchised students can break through and win against the forces of low expectations and the purposeful dismissal of their humanity, these brave, highly valued, efficacious school leaders know how to overturn and flip the script of the many deadly narratives that seek to condemn too many students in our country to a skills deficient and disempowering learning experience.

In our present toxic political climate, school administrators should not put a target on their own backs by making a big rhetorical show of the necessary student-life-saving and intellectual growing through progressive educational ideas that must be actualized; to borrow a phrase from a famous US corporation, don’t talk about it–– just do it!

If a school is effectively educating, especially in STEM-CTE education, a politically marginalized (Title-1) student population, then that school is in danger because it is dangerous to the spirit and understanding of the self-destructive nature of the societal status quo. Sadly, its fiercest opponents will very likely include external and internal school-system stakeholders and governance managers who share a racial identity with the students. But, most notably, by extension, those school-based administrators of those highly functioning Title-1 schools are also in grave constant danger; therefore, read and absorb carefully: “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.” ––Matthew 10:16; NIV.

We have enough history of education information to know that any restrictive, separate and unequal, exclusionary and segregated educational space, obviously harms the least, left-out, and the despised “others” of our society. But as enlightened pedagogical professionals, we also know that the alleged “separate but quality” learning environments, are intellectually weakened spaces, that also hurt the learning capacity of the entitled students who occupy them since their educational experience is degraded, incomplete, and a distortion of how the growing diversified world around us operates; as the collective competitive capabilities of our nation are diminished by a decision to effectively educate (extremely pronounced in STEM education) only a tiny, ever-shrinking, percentage of our national population.

School administrators (APs, school-based supervisors, and principals), a simple ethical action to take, do a situation-by-situation, side-step-by-step, brilliant workaround, revisioning, reframing and refashioning of the current outside-of-education and inside-of-education pedagogically uninformed political debates around Diversity, Equity (to which I would add Equal access to quality education), and the Inclusionary expansion of opportunity for all students, regardless of zip code or socioeconomic status. For us, these sacred student-saving and educationally enriching operational values represent the essential moral rules, foundations, and infrastructure of a courageous leadership practice authentically acting in the Pre-K-12 schooling world; and, at the same time, we are benefiting a larger nation and world outside of our schools, that is desperately waiting and in need of the presently unwanted and untaped creativity, inventiveness, intelligences, and the great innate gifts and talents of all our nation’s children.

For our college and university professional colleagues, it’s essential to think bravely and act creatively in neutralizing the nation’s loudest, noxious voices of educational opportunity nullification. A significant part of my essential undergraduate and graduate learning experience, which ultimately led to me being a better informed and better performing professional educator and later an effective school administrator (and ultimately a better human being), was my mind-stimulating and rich resourceful encounters with humans who did not share my biographical profile. These encounters taught me that despite our differences in religious traditions, socio-economic status, racial identity, or cultural experiences, we all share many everyday human experiences. We are a struggling to survive and thrive human family, united in our mutually-dependent fertile diversity, and this realization has enriched my professional and personal life.

Therefore, we know that Diversity, Equity, and the Equality of Inclusionary access, like in the Pre-K-12 world, is a valid and necessary humanizing, empathizing, and socializing learning objective, or what type of callous and indifferent personalities, and false intellects are we preparing students to carry into an ever-shrinking and extremely-diversity skills dependent nation and world after graduating from our institutions?

Several elected officials have made the obnoxious and bigoted claim that the vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris, was a “DEI hire” despite her impressive list of career accomplishments, in other words, with the help of the intellectually lazy news media, and university officials cowered by malicious congressional hearings, they have taken control of the DEI concept and turned it into a phrase that could be an acceptable stand in for the derogatory word they would prefer to use —“N#%*er!”