“Not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
James Baldwin
All of us in the Inspiring Educators community are heartsick together in June of 2020. We stand in humility before the suffering we have seen in the killings of unarmed Black Americans at the hands of the police. We recognize the limits in our understanding of the challenge of what it means to be Black in America; we commit to continuing to educate ourselves about systemic racism and working to break the vicious cycle of poverty, discrimination, and race-based oppression that stains the promise of America.
As an organization that deals primarily with inequity in the education system, our mission has always been to “dramatically improve student outcomes in underserved communities by building the capacity of school leaders to inspire their teams and communities.” We understand that white supremacy plays an integral role in the creation and perpetuation of educational inequity. Our country’s education system continually fails its Black students, who, on average, attend schools with disproportionately low graduation rates, disproportionately high rates of teacher turnover and significantly fewer resources overall.
With these embodiments of inequity (and many more) in mind as the backdrop to our work:
We commit ourselves to a more just and equitable world through the work we do with leaders who educate Black students along with students from other marginalized communities. In partnering with IE, leaders strengthen the necessary skills to establish and maintain positive school climates that promote the retention of teachers and enable their students to succeed.
We are devoted to supporting professional pipelines that cultivate and train school leaders- especially Black leaders- around the country. We aim to continue to bring professional development to institutions that identify helping this generation and the next to distinguish, analyze, and interrupt racism as central to their mission.
Our partners are at the vanguard of educating the next generation around racism. They recognize the importance of educating the “whole child” within the context of educating Black students: an effective education includes (but is not limited to) rigorous academic instruction, access to networks and resources that create a path to opportunity, and the combination of social-emotional skills along with an anti-oppression lens to understand and combat the individual, institutional and systemic racism we see every day.
Currently, as our partners are planning for school re-openings, we are supporting leaders to engage in social-emotional learning and skill-building that will allow them to model resilience and to create safe and welcoming environments for students, who will return to school having experienced trauma over the past several months of school closures.
We pledge to continue to diversify leadership of our own organization and educate ourselves on how to be better allies to Black Americans in all our relationships and in the fight for change.
We are inspired by the educators we work with and look forward to partnering with others in this movement, for the next generation of children (and of our land) deserve nothing less.
