Twenty-five year ago, business-sponsored education reform began, calling itself a champion of racial equity and bringing standardized testing, school takeovers and closings, charter schools, top-down accountability measures, loss of recess, and diminished time for science, social studies and electives. Across the country and in Brookline, it has been a failure for students of color. As is inevitable, scores have plateaued and gaps persist between youth of color and their white counterparts. Brookline is now doubling-down on this flawed approach, hiring more administrators to move the needle on metrics. “Restorative Justice” is being discussed, but not yet how it will be fit into the stressful, over-scheduled, metric-driven school days. Administrators say that if psychological racial bias is eliminated and everyone perseveres, students of color can, and will, catch up with their more advantaged peers. But what if the metric-driven definition of success is actually exacerbating racial disadvantage, not diminishing it? There is little opportunity to question whether the prevailing definitions of achievement are getting us the schools our students deserve.

Last winter, four of us, all Brookline educators, visited NYC to meet teachers, students who are working with the community to seize on a principle borrowed from the disability rights movement: “nothing about us without us.” They are using Critical Participatory Action Research. The approach is premised on a belief in all people’s right to research. Together, they are questioning how schools empower students and how they diminish or marginalize them. In the process, they are generating their own goals for their schools and calling out expectations that ignore their voices and dreams. Working cross generationally, they are helping to design schooling that connects classrooms to the school, and school to the neighborhood and larger society. The unionized teachers have collectively bargained school day schedules and their role in designing transformative culture rooted in restorative justice practices. Students have time and space to help teach adults and one another how to respect and partner with one another in creating a just learning community that honors not only different cultures but also different kinds of educational knowledge and practice.

We are now launching our own CPAR project in Brookline with the help of Professor Patricia Krueger-Henney from UMASS Boston. The approach sees people as experts on their own lives, and communities as capable of doing strong, critical analyses of systems. We invite you to learn more about it and join us. This fall, about twenty Brookline community members—parents, students, educators, and others—will join together as “co-researchers” to consider questions such as:

In an ideal world, what would schools look like?
What is already working and should be prioritized?
What issues affecting preK-12+ students are most pressing?
What practices and priorities are keeping Brookline schools from being places of joy for children and adults alike?
What changes would make our schools places that continually foster a love of learning for all involved?
Whose voices are missing when decisions about our schools are being made, and how do we empower those voices to create schools our communities deserve?

Co-researchers will decide collaboratively on the most urgent issues, and then collect data through conversations with people who are most affected.

The findings will be shared with the school committee, the BEU, the administration, students, parents, and others. Young people will be offered the opportunity to express what they have learned through art. The BEU plans to use the research findings to inform the development of proposals for the next round of contract negotiations with the Brookline School Committee.

We envision a school system that belongs to us as community members, students, parents, and educators, and that embraces the knowledge, vision and solutions that come from listening to all voices.

JOIN US FOR AN INFORMATION SESSION TO LEARN MORE!

PICK ONE OF TWO SESSIONS ON WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 17

3:15-4:45

6:00-7:30

BOTH AT BIG (BROOKLINE INTERACTIVE GROUP STUDIOS)

Brookline High School Industrial Arts Building, top floor

46 Tappan Street (next to Brookline Hills T)

FOR INFO, OR TO RSVP, EMAIL US HERE. (Nothing.about.us.without.us.project@gmail.com)

Michelle Crawford-Cranmore; Remy Fernández-O’Brien; Bob Miller; Jason Murray, Jessica Wender-Shubow