Empowering Students of Color in Schools in the U.S.

Are educators empowering students of color in their schools? Students of color desire more support and resources to ensure they are prepared academically and in life. Educators should consider exploring what works best for supporting students of color from low-socioeconomic communities.

I, for years, made it my duty to work in communities similar to my background and upbringing because I desired to impact and influence students that looked like me directly. After completing my master's, having been a classroom teacher and school administrator, I decided to pursue an advanced doctoral degree. I was challenged in a significant way while writing my dissertation. Like many other scholars, I found myself stressed and frustrated some nights or weekends, attempting to find the right topic to focus on. In the spirit of this, I rooted it in my passion for education, my passion for students of color, and their lived experiences as they navigate the complexity of education and the adversities around them within their communities.

In completing my research study, seven themes emerged after interviewing several student participants from a local HBCU in Texas. All student participants had attended school in Texas, had once identified as low-socioeconomic status (SES) students, and had experienced adversities as children. My study concluded that the lack of support systems for low-SES students led to extreme stress and emotional distress that in and of itself became a barrier to success for students from low-SES communities. My study highlighted the urgent need for secondary schools in low-SES communities to investigate the needs of their low-SES students and provide them with the appropriate support needed to thrive academically and in life.

What Now?

I’m sure you’re wondering about the recommendations and additional research I worked on after completing this study. Well, let me tell you! I was fired up after completing my study and decided to do some additional research and speak with more students, a few educators, and even my siblings. I wanted to build my contextual knowledge further so that I could help more educators and parents indeed be able to support students of color. After further building my knowledge and skills, I concluded that schools, administrators, and senior leadership teams needed to do more, and some of this required them to construct contextual knowledge and be trained. Below are two areas of focus?divided into?categories (Phase 1) Administration/Senior Leadership Charge, (Phase 2) Implementation of Practices. I want you to know that I am building a playbook and will soon do some outreach to help schools and school districts lean in by supporting Black students on their educational journey to achieving success, whether in college, career or beyond.

Phase 1: Administration/Senior Leadership Charge:

1. Understanding the Landscape:?Regional leaders and school administration must begin building their knowledge around low-SES students of color communities. This includes learning about the community's and educators' needs and challenges, interrogating students' enrollment data, and reviewing data and policies to influence change.
2. Challenging the status quo:?Regional leaders and school administration must think outside the box when supporting students of color. Leaders must intentionally meet the needs of our students, families, and learning. This means that leaders must challenge federal and state education policies, reimagine educational equity, and reinforce student achievement, academic excellence, and rigor through a lens of equity and through understanding the lived experiences of students of color from low-SES communities.
3. Implementing a Culture of Brave and Belonging Spaces:?Often, schools where students of color attend use the word safe. However, safe is defined differently depending on cultural background and race. Safe for White and Asian students is not the same for all students of color. According to recent research,?Black students also report feeling less safe at school ?than White and Asian students. Specifically, Black students often are concerned about the challenges outside of schools, such as drugs, gang activity, policing, guns, or even abuse. Most of the time, students of color desire places where they can feel like they have a voice — they can vocalize their challenges outside of school and experience empathy and recognition for who they are. It would be critical for leaders to attend Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training, develop skills to acknowledge their own biases and begin to assess gaps within current practices, systems, and processes that would support creating brave and belonging spaces.

Phase 2: Implementation of Practices:

1. Building Capacity:?Educators (specifically White educators) need ongoing professional learning regarding explicit culturally relevant instruction, the importance of students of color's well-being, effectively building trust and rapport with students of color, and maintaining realistic and fair expectations.
2. Creating Plans & Increasing Support Staff:?Schools must create personalized learning and support plans by increasing the number of counselors and mentors available to meet with students to address their needs in schools that predominantly serve students of color.
3. Fostering Inclusive & Culturally Relevant Learning Environments:?Schools must create environments that foster and encourage inclusivity, provide ongoing support for students of color learning, and train staff (academic, administrative, and support) to understand the dimensions of socioeconomic disadvantage, which will help administer learning better and instill educational discipline.
4. Funding:?Schools lacked funding in resources and tools to support students of color needs. School districts must obtain funds for low-SES communities and their schools to support students of color in achieving their potential. Resources and tools included quality books, tech, food, programming, and more.

(Whew, that was a lot! Trust me, that took some knee-deep conversations and research. There’s way more to come soon.)

Despite all my research, one thing still stuck out to me was how students define academic and life success. Student participants described success in a manner congruent with their lived experiences throughout their primary and secondary education. Below I listed some themes I pulled from student conversations and categorized them by metaphors of being Black in America. The following included:

• This is the American way:?That success meant working extra hard to get ahead in order to be considered someone important.
• Oppression at its finest:?They had to take on more than they could bear to succeed. Despite their limited opportunities, they persisted.
• The Hustle Mentality:?Because they didn't have much adult support in school or sometimes at home, students had to find ways to take care of themselves through emotional support, learning from previous adversities to do better in the future, taking on a variety of roles and responsibilities and doing all they could to make it day-by-day to reach success in life.
• Surviving in America:?They must have a purpose or hope to make it regardless of whatever they are going through. Student participants felt that we all go through things, so their story is equally the same as their White friends stories.

Now, this last statement I grapple with a lot. I cannot entirely agree that Black people’s stories and struggles are equally the same. To this day, Black people fight for betterment in life. Regardless, the student participants’ stories from my study resonated with me, and I empathize with all of them. I know the feeling of fighting to feel like you are more than enough. Being Black in America is hard, especially for our Black students.

Empowering Students of Color!

Let’s get more into empowering. I want you to understand that empowering students of color is critical to their overall success. Empowering students through the exchange of information between adults affirms students’ value. Empowerment comprises three important components: critical consciousness, positive identity, and social action. These three components play a key role in the pillar of success, such as education, career, family, community, and society, which all make up the success of a student feeling empowered.

Despite these three important components of empowerment. Critical consciousness is an area educators should focus on to support students of color. Critical consciousness challenges awareness and rejection of poverty or adverse living conditions. It forces educators to focus on an in-depth understanding of the world, specifically for students of color from low-SES communities. Critical consciousness challenges educators' perception or view of social and political contradictions related to people of color in America or students of color in general. Implementing the critical conscious framework requires educators to reflect, examine motivators, and act. Based on my findings, I'll share a quick snapshot of the model I developed below called the Critical Consciousness Educator Equity Charge (CCEEC). This model is connected to?The Society for Research in Child Development , where children's development perspectives are explored. The CCEEC model is a framework that challenges educators through a series of questions that then challenges them to apply it through reflecting and practicing.

The CCEEC framework challenges educators to undergo reflective processing, which is a slow and deliberate process. I suggest you review the framework below and think of ways you or your school could work to improve supporting students of color. You may have more questions than answers. For now, I aim to only introduce this framework in hopes you would like to learn more. I encourage you to research or connect with me, and I’d love to support you or your school.

Critical Consciousness Educator Equity Charge

See You on the Flip Side!

As I mentioned early on, I am super passionate about this work. Our students of color need people who stand up for their rights and challenge the status quo. I've been that student and found power in having support from one educator that significantly impacted my life. It takes just one educator to say, "you can do it," or one to say, "I believe in you," to make a difference in a student's life. It feels good to be empowered by someone who cares.

My commitment over the next few months and years is to research this topic further — understand the needs of our Black and Brown students, and begin to teach more about the model of empowering through critical consciousness.

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Looking forward to sharing more soon!

In service, love and community,