When I was growing up, my parents’ record collection included the 1965 album That was the Year that Was, by Tom Lehrer, the Harvard-educated math professor and piano-playing comedian, famous for his wry, satirical songs about politics and social issues. In his song “New Math,” he even poked fun at the progressive educators of the day, who wanted kids to learn mathematical concepts, not just procedures. “In the new approach,” he joked, “the important thing is to understand what you’re doing rather than to get the right answer.”
The song came back to me in the late 1990s when I was a system leader in Plainfield, New Jersey, and we were overhauling the elementary math curriculum. Recalling Lehrer’s tune, I was prepared to roll my eyes at the newest version of the new math. But as I visited classrooms and saw how students were engaged in problem solving, playing games, and collaborating, I was impressed. I wish I had learned math that way, I told the superintendent.
I was never a strong math student myself. I had trouble memorizing operations and solving problems quickly. It wasn’t until I became a school system leader and had to create and analyze budgets, that I finally learned how to apply math to the real world. In my K-12 years, I realized, I had been taught only to memorize formulas and follow procedures. Seeing our new math program in action and reviewing the research that backed it up made it clear that this was a better approach. Still, some parents were furious. It’s a pattern I’ve seen repeated many times since then: No matter how sensible the reform, many adults will fight it bitterly, railing against any approach that differs from the old, familiar ways of doing school.
Fear and resistance
Since the late 1980s, when Robert Moses, creator of the Algebra Project, defined mathematics instruction as a civil rights issue, student achievement in higher-level math courses has been viewed as a key benchmark of success and an indicator of a district’s commitment to equity. Districts have adopted new curricula, trained educators, and held teachers and schools accountable for students’ performance in algebra, geometry, and calculus. But, despite these efforts, math achievement hasn’t changed much, and too few Black and Latinx students, English learners, special education students, and students from low-income families take advanced mathematics classes. Parents and the public — and many educators — tend to accept the idea that some of us are math people and some aren’t, and that’s just the way it is. And efforts to reform math instruction are often met with fierce resistance, despite the research showing there are better ways to get more young people to achieve at higher levels.
No matter how sensible the reform, many adults will fight it bitterly, railing against any approach that differs from the old, familiar ways of doing school.
The divisiveness pales, however, in comparison to what’s currently happening with debates over critical race theory (CRT) and the attempts to remove certain books from school libraries and curricula. I refuse to believe that the majority of American parents are dead set against teaching students the true history of our nation and want to take books like Beloved off the shelves. The extreme right-wing of the Republican party has, once again, capitalized on parents’ fear of change to foment resistance to any efforts to end racist practices or promote equity, much like they did in the mid-1990s when they used the public’s fear of crime committed by so-called “superpredators” to promote increased policing and incarceration of young Black men.
There is an urgent need to address issues of institutional and systemic racism in our schools and public institutions, and educators across the country have embraced the call to be more equitable and culturally competent and to engage young people in getting a more well-rounded picture of the human condition. Our young people of color, our students with disabilities, and our non-native English speakers deserve to see people like them represented in the curriculum, and our white children benefit from widening their lens. Being introduced to a variety of perspectives through the study of history, literature, and other subjects gives students opportunities to reflect on their own circumstances and determine how they want to live out their values.
Yet, in light of the recent controversies, many educators are becoming afraid to push an equity agenda, even in school districts that haven’t yet seen any public conflict. Some of the recent legislation related to the teaching of CRT is written in such a way that it’s difficult for teachers and school leaders to know exactly what is or isn’t allowed (Kim, 2021), which puts system leaders who have been supporting equity and diversity in a difficult position. While they are the stewards of their communities’ values, they are also responsible for acting ethically and responsibly, and the tension between what’s good for kids and the public outcry over perceived misdoings is greater than what many leaders have ever experienced.
Meeting parents where they are
How can system leaders get ahead of these issues? The first step is to remember that most people are silent but reasonable. Year after year, our PDK Poll has shown that most parents have confidence in their child’s school. Educators, therefore, are starting from a position of relative strength, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. The question is how to leverage that position to counteract the few parents who insist on rejecting new approaches to math instruction, banning books they don’t like, and squelching genuine debate about how to teach U.S. history.
Year after year, our PDK Poll has shown that most parents have confidence in their child’s school.
One way to begin is to focus on the quality of the homework teachers assign. Parents rarely visit classrooms or review the curriculum, but they do often take note of the assignments and materials their children bring home from school, and they can tell if their kids are bored, struggling, or engaged with it. For many parents, in other words, homework is an important window into their child’s education (and while many critics argue that homework should be abolished, we can assume that it will remain standard practice in most schools for now). If teachers create homework assignments that are maximally engaging to students, and if children are excited about the books they’re reading, the historical events they’re studying, and the math problems they’re solving, then their parents will be more likely to recognize the value of that content. No, creating better homework won’t put a stop to anti-CRT book-banners. But it can help reasonable parents to see the value of assignments that may look very different from what they remember studying 20 or 30 years ago. The more their children seem engaged in their schoolwork, the less likely parents will be to join the critics when they cry foul.
Another priority for school system leaders is to insist on maximum transparency when it comes to the curriculum and the thinking that has gone into it. For instance, when my youngest son was entering 6th grade, he was given a list of choices for summer reading that didn’t have much cultural diversity. I went online and searched for the district-recommended list, but even though I’ve navigated a lot of school system websites, I had trouble finding it. When I eventually got my hands on the list, though, I saw that it did in fact include many age-appropriate books by diverse authors. My queries led the central office to communicate to the school about the need to expand kids’ horizons, and, lo and behold, students received an expanded list. The problem, in this case, wasn’t that district leaders had overlooked the value of diverse reading materials but that they hadn’t done enough to make their recommendations visible to teachers, parents, and students. District leaders need to take proactive steps to introduce the curriculum to parents and community members, show how it aligns to state standards, explain precisely what students will study, and — perhaps most important — why it will be valuable for them to study these things.
Another strategy is to invite parents to make regular visits to classrooms. While that can be a logistical challenge, it can be managed — for example, Liz Phillips, the legendary principal of PS 321 in Brooklyn, found ways to accommodate frequent parent visits even in an overcrowded elementary school that enrolled 1,500 students. She made it work, parents loved seeing what their children were learning, and the school built a much more trusting relationship with the community. Similarly, it’s always a powerful experience for school board members to learn about the curriculum directly from teachers who are actually implementing the approach. (There’s nothing like watching nine elected officials play with math manipulatives and try to solve a problem together.) So too is it important to reach out to local education reporters (where they still exist). For instance, in Stamford, Connecticut, when we rolled out our new approach to literacy instruction, reporter Maggie Gordon published a multipart series about the effort in the Stamford Advocate, which was enormously helpful in educating the community about the changes.
Finally, system leaders shouldn’t overlook the value of measuring parent satisfaction directly, by asking them to respond to a survey question like, “How likely are you to recommend your child’s school to another parent?” The answer, sometimes called a “net promoter score” (NPS), can help leaders gauge whether vocal criticism is just noise or something more serious. For instance, when we were trying to detrack the Stamford public schools and a small but vocal group of white parents pushed back against the effort, the NPS data revealed to our board members that the naysayers represented only a fraction of the community — every year, in fact, more and more parents gave positive recommendations to their child’s school. It was a perfect counter to the anti-equity parents who wanted the board to believe that their view was in the majority.
Still, there are no simple solutions to the crisis that too many schools are facing. And if right-wing Republicans have their way, many more systems will soon have elected board members who are there for the sole purpose of pushing their anti-equity agenda. As frightening and disheartening as this is, school and district leaders have an opportunity — and an obligation — to engage the people on the sidelines who just want their kids to be happy, safe, and learning the right stuff from people who care about them.
Reference
Kim, R. (2021). “Anti-critical race theory” laws and the assault on pedagogy. Phi Delta Kappan, 103 (1), 64-65.
This article appears in the February 2022 issue of Kappan, Vol. 103, No. 5, pp. 60-61.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joshua P. Starr
Joshua P. Starr is the managing partner at the International Center for Leadership in Education, a division of HMH, based in Boston, MA. He is the author of Equity-based Leadership: Leveraging Complexity to Transform School Systems.
