In fretting over schools, politicians are ignoring our biggest asset | Opinion

Years ago, Philadelphia waited with bated breath for Allen Iverson, nicknamed “The Answer,” to come and save Philadelphia basketball. He was a super talented player guided through his college days by legendary Georgetown University coach John Thompson on his way to the 76ers.

Iverson wasn’t just another great player — he was a transcendent talent with the potential to transform a franchise. He played in a way that seemed to break from the mold. Rather than simply executing the coach’s strategies to win, he manifested beautiful, poetic, daring basketball solutions nightly.

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In the same way, our ingenious students, our young people, can cocreate the solutions to our biggest challenges. However, during this educational crisis — brought on by the pandemic and heightened by the racial reckoning — we’ve once again become shortsighted toward our young people.

We’ve been wringing our hands about COVID-19 learning loss. We worry that exponentially more of our underserved younger students won’t reach critical reading and math benchmarks and that exponentially more of our underserved older students will drop out, their pathways to college further blocked, diminishing their motivations and dreams.

We’ve been trying to address educational inequities to stem these losses. We know all too well Black and brown students in marginalized communities are now bearing the brunt of inadequate technology, internet access, little to no basic training in typing and computer skills — not to mention canceled music, visual and performing arts, athletics, clubs, and other enrichments that aren’t nice-to-haves, but lifesaving for so many students.

All the while, we’ve been squandering the most vital resource at the center of it all: our young people.

Who better to tutor our youngest students than middle and high schoolers? Who better to mentor high schoolers than a college student, a near-peer, especially one who can mirror a future that includes a college education?

It’s likely the new Biden administration is considering a service corps of young people — an army of tutors, mentors, and future educators. How do you ensure the majority of qualified applicants aren’t just from white, wealthy communities that have historically benefited the most from resumé building opportunities like this, but rather young people who grew up in the same underserved communities that need them most?

How do you ensure that we are training not just future educators, but future educator-activists?

And how do you hurry all of this up?

I believe an answer is in intergenerational educational enterprises. They’re not new, nor is the research proving their efficacy. The African Freedom School I attended, Nidhamu Sasa, for my earliest education was based on this model. We called it nation-building servant leadership. My fellow educator-activists at the Center for Black Educator Development created an intergenerational educational enterprise based on this remarkable precedent, to address our nation’s racist history that’s created unconscionable achievement gaps

At our Freedom Schools Literacy Academy, expert Black educators coach aspiring Black college student-teachers and work with high school apprentices exploring careers in education — intergenerational work to provide underserved Black and brown elementary students the personalized literacy boost they each need while deepening their racial identity.

Our academy is based on the idea Black and brown students learn best within a context of cultural understanding, where educators don’t underestimate their ability to achieve while overdisciplining them, where educators serve as mirrors, and not just windows, to their world.

We believe a Black liberatory educational approach is critical for Black students’ school success. Studies show students’ higher racial/ethnic pride correlates with higher achievement measured by grades and test scores. And when Black students have Black teachers, they do better in school. When they have one Black teacher by third grade, they’re 13% more likely to enroll in college. With two Black teachers in the mix early on, that jumps to 32%. For Black boys from low-income households, their on-time high school dropout rates can plummet by up to 40%.

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We found that this approach helped our students avoid the “summer slide” — a 20% loss on average of school-year gains in reading — and the “COVID slide” amid the pandemic. Moreover, our college students and high schoolers not only felt psychologically healthier and emotionally nourished — all reported increased interest in teaching Black children. We know that fortifying the student-to-educator-activist pipeline is what we seek, because we know this is critical to teaching Black children superbly as a truly revolutionary act (to riff on a James Baldwin line).

We urge President Joe Biden’s team to study cultural pedagogies of Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities for more intergenerational educational models that can be integrated into public schooling. We can’t expect to create a more diverse pipeline of educators if we aren’t building a strong corps of diverse educators for children at every grade.

So let’s start now. President Biden has already made a huge commitment to supporting teachers. It is long past time that we had direct investment in our students truly scaled to the size of the challenges we face.

Sharif El-Mekki leads the Center for Black Educator Development, is the former principal of Mastery Charter School — Shoemaker Campus, founded the Fellowship — Black Male Educators for Social Justice, is a member of the “8 Black Hands” podcast, and blogs at Philly’s 7th Ward.