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Bucking the Status Quo: How to Make Education More Racially Equitable

by Tom Hanlon / Apr 12, 2024

Osly J. Flores

The question is not whether racism in our schools exists, but what we are going to do about it. The first step, says Osly J. Flores, is for education leaders to develop a race-conscious ethic.

An administrator in an urban school district shared in a meeting with other administrators that her son, who is Black, was followed around a store by a security guard.

The boy, quite understandably, was upset.

“Oh, that’s terrible!” a colleague told the woman. “I’m so sorry your son is experiencing that!” another said.

The woman paused and looked at her colleagues. “Yes,” she said, “you’re sorry because he is my son. You’re sorry because you know me. But what about all the other Black teenagers who have similar experiences? We need to think about them too.”

Race-Conscious Caring and Ethics

Osly J. Flores spends a lot of time thinking about people of color who are discriminated against and otherwise marginalized. He has written papers on race-conscious ethics and caring and anti-racist leadership, and is coauthoring a book, due out in spring 2025, on race-conscious caring and ethics.

“All educators come into the field of education with a caring for students,” says Flores, an assistant professor in Education Policy, Organization and Leadership in the College of Education. “I’m not trying to paint educators in a bad way. But their caring is different when it’s paired with a race consciousness.”

Race consciousness occurs when teachers understand that racism exists in education, when they acknowledge and draw on the racial and cultural backgrounds of their students, families, and community, and when they value culturally relevant pedagogies.

“I came to realize that when leaders are working to change the system, they need to have a strong ethical foundation,” Flores says. “My work is in pairing caring ethics and race consciousness. I noticed that most research in these two areas have been studied separately. I believe it’s important to merge these two together.”

The Negative Effect of Colorblindness

Flores has focused his research on race-conscious caring and ethics for ten years now. In that time, he’s interviewed many principals who want to tackle the opportunity gap for students of color and marginalized students, but they are hamstrung by their views on the gap.

“In one study where I interviewed twenty-two principals, I found that they were sharing a colorblind perspective,” he says. “When it came to questions about how they approach their work or their thinking around students of color, they were really color evasive. ‘I don’t see race,’ they said.”

Only a few, he added, were race conscious.

Being colorblind might sound good on the surface. Teachers who are “colorblind” say they don’t see color and treat all their students equally. But this requires teachers to ignore some of their students’ cultural and historical backgrounds and has a negative effect on students of color. When a teacher doesn’t see a student’s race, the student’s cultural values and lived experiences are negated, and racism is not considered as a factor in disparities among students.

Similarly, color evasion denotes a denial of racial discrimination, differences, and experiences by emphasizing sameness among all students.

“One principal in a suburban setting with only about five percent of her students being of color admitted that it had been a long time since she’d done any professional development to support students of color,” Flores says. “It’s not in her mindset to consider culturally responsive practices or have her teachers be culturally responsive.”

People who have a race-conscious, caring ethic see their responsibility in recognizing the historical significance and impact of race, and the asset that comes with that, Flores says. “It’s not just deficit thinking about communities of color,” he explains. “It’s recognizing that these communities have shown resilience and resistance, that they have value, they have assets. That’s where community-based caring comes in—recognizing that value and challenging certain status quos.”

The Struggle to Change the Status Quo

It's not easy challenging the status quo, he notes.

“Anytime school leaders are doing equity work, they’re going to encounter resistance,” Flores says. “And it’s gotten even more complex and challenging in the last ten years. We’re noticing greater resistance around the work about equity. It’s coming from communities, parents, school boards, teachers. They want to avoid culturally responsive issues of equity.”

The notion of equity in schools is a double-edged sword. As more and more people call for educators to address the opportunity gap in schools, more and more people are rising up to resist the required change.

“So, even though many education leaders have a greater understanding of equity issues, they are facing greater resistance that limits their actions,” Flores says. “Some schools are taking a preemptive approach, creating structures that limit how much discussions of change can happen. For example, teachers might have to go through a stringent process to get a new book adopted as part of their curriculum. It takes a while, so teachers need to be committed.”

Sometimes, he says, it just takes one person to create the resistance. “That’s the challenge of this work,” he notes.

The resistance is daunting enough that many administrators are leaving the field altogether, Flores adds. “It’s becoming very challenging. So, the question becomes, how do they maintain themselves around this work?”

Combating Racism and Promoting Equity

One answer to that question is through graduate programs—which, Flores says, are well positioned to help administrators become equity leaders. He teaches several graduate-level courses to educators who are preparing to become principals.

“I push them to think about these issues, to think about their ethical foundation and race consciousness and the opposition they will face, and many of them say this is the first time they’ve been prompted to think about these issues,” he says.

Another answer is found in the power of lived experiences.

“We put forth the idea of narrative ethics, of hearing actual stories and their impact,” Flores says. “We share the stories of leaders who are actually doing the work of equity. The material experiences of race are very important. We can learn from people who have been marginalized and how they have resisted that marginalization.”

Flores points to an administrator’s story that he shares with his students.

“I show them a video of a principal walking in a peace march with her elementary students,” he says. “They see the signs the students created and hear a short interview with the principal explaining why she marched. It’s really important to see people doing the work and see how they’re doing it and what we can learn from them.”

Flores encourages his students to find their network of people who can support them and to find their what. “As in what is informing you in this work,” he says. “Choose an equity issue that’s going to inform your ability to change a practice. That could be around students with disabilities, or LGBTQ, or racial equity.”

A third answer specifically for white leaders who want to maintain themselves in equity work despite the opposition they face is to seek out different cultural experiences.

“White school leaders are positively influenced when they seek to learn more about communities of color, have lived in communities of color, or have family members who hold marginalized identities,” Flores says.

Finding Hope

Equity and race consciousness in education (and everywhere) is an ongoing battle. Those who undertake it are susceptible to battle fatigue. Flores has seen his share of education leaders avoiding or ignoring the battle, and that wears on him.

“Yet, I’m grateful when I find those principals who are doing the work,” he says. “That gives me hope. Sometimes, higher education is the only time they have these conversations. In other places, they’re never pushed to think about these issues.

“So, I share with my students that we all come from different places with different experiences and different issues. My focus is to give them an opportunity to learn about these issues and take what they learn so that when they’re an administrator and they see that not many students of color are in their advanced courses, they question that.”