Abstract
This address begins by acknowledging contemporary social problems plaguing the United States: mass deportations and the separation of immigrant families, school shootings, police murders of unarmed Black Americans, and violence against transgender, Jewish, Muslim, and Asian American people, to name a few. Also presented are several examples of “educational evils”—curricular, testing, and experiential harms that diverse students, educators, and families too often experience in K–12 and postsecondary contexts. A study of 14 education schools is used to highlight the insufficient preparation of practitioners and scholars to address racial problems in classrooms and elsewhere on campuses. Also, a social and digital media campaign emerging from a class project aimed at raising consciousness about workplace sexual harassment is presented as an example of how faculty members can assume greater responsibility for preparing students to disrupt harm. The address concludes with an articulation of who citizen-scholars are and the presentation of some specific actions they take.
Keywords
Mass shootings on campuses. Mass deportations and separating immigrant children from their families. Locking migrant children in cages along the southern border. Police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other unarmed Black citizens. Violent attacks on Asian and Asian American people. Tiki-torch-carrying White nationalists marching through the University of Virginia campus chanting racist and antisemitic hate, including, “Jews will not replace us.” These are just a few of myriad contemporary evils that plague the United States of America. Many of us despise evil. We want to rid it from people’s hearts and minds, from our society, and most certainly from our schools. Most of us do not think of ourselves as evil. Yet I ask us to consider the following: Is not complicity in the sustaining of structures and systems that cyclically reproduce evil just as evil as evil itself?
Most of us declared heartbreaking the Sandy Hook shootings that resulted in the murders of 20 elementary school children and six educators in December 2012. But what have we since done to significantly reduce the likelihood of this particular brand of evil ever occurring again in a K–12 school, on a college campus, in a shopping mall, in a movie theater, in a supermarket, or in a place of religious worship? Or anywhere else in our society, where we are poisoned by the evils of school shootings, gun violence, and mass casualties? Can we, incredibly smart people, do more to help with this particular form of evil? So many of us have deemed the separation of families and detaining of migrant children inexcusably cruel but not cruel enough for us to connect with other scholars, lawyers, human rights organizations, policy groups, and other advocates to get these kids better treatment. Some of us have. But so many more of us smart people who know so much about children and their development are needed in this crisis.
The January 6 Capitol insurrection was evil and inescapably racialized. But was it evil enough for us to play some role in ensuring that it does not get whitewashed or otherwise sanitized in future editions of history and social studies textbooks? We have acknowledged that the attacks on immigrants, Muslims, Jews, transgender people, and Asian Americans come from a place of evil. Sympathy, empathy, and acknowledgment are good, but individual and collective action is better. Collective action better positions us to defeat evil.
I sent an email to AERA members in June 2020 following Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd. In it, I called for us to do more with what we know, to use our research to do something about the police killings of unarmed Black people. I also called for us to form interdisciplinary research partnerships with scholars in criminal justice and other fields. Hundreds of AERA members very generously wrote back to me saying how moved they were by my call to action. But were they moved enough to actually take action? In an association of more than 25,000 members, I most certainly appreciate that not everyone shares the same political view as me on this. As was never the case at any point during my yearlong AERA presidential tenure, I can assure you that it is not my aim now to divide us along racial or politically partisan lines or in any other way. Instead, I am insisting that we, as citizens and as scholars, have a responsibility to destroy evil in all its forms, including what I am characterizing here as an “evil education.”
Acknowledging Educational Evils
An evil education purposely neglects to teach students truths about colonization and the attempted genocide of Indigenous people. It purposely neglects to teach children and students and learners truths about the brutal enslavement of African peoples here in the Americas. It denies them truths about other acts of domestic terrorism in the history of these United States. King (1992), Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández (2013), Banks (2019), and other scholars affirm this. An evil education denies students of color access to same-race teachers who can affirm their brilliance, their belongingness, and their cultural intelligence and who can serve as inspirational, same-race role models. An evil education also denies students of color White teachers who are equipped to affirm their brilliance, their belongingness, and their cultural intelligence through curriculum, pedagogy, and relationships with them and their families. Hollins (2015), Howard (2020), and other scholars affirm this.
An evil education places teachers with fewer than 3 months of formal preparation into the highest need contexts—schools, communities, and children that the majority of these teachers will abandon in 2 to 3 years. An evil education defaults to deficit mindsets as it pertains to people of color and communities of color. An evil education suspends Black girls, boys, and genderqueer youth for stupid shit, like talking too much, while their White peers get away with the same and at times worse behaviors. Skiba et al. (2016), Winn (2018), and other scholars affirm this. An evil education misdiagnosis far too many students of color for special education. It underidentifies brilliant students of color for gifted and talented programs. Ford (2013) and other scholars affirm this.
An evil education traumatizes far too many students of color with white supremacist standardized tests that repeatedly tell them they are not smart, their cultural intelligence is not valuable, and their potential is limited. Au (2009) and other scholars affirm this. And go back and watch Amy Stewart Wells’ breathtaking AERA presidential address, which included a 25-minute theatrical performance about test-induced anxiety and other emotional effects of standardized tests on students (American Educational Research Association, 2019). Epic Theater Ensemble, a youth group, researched and wrote the play; they performed it live on stage at the 2019 AERA Annual Meeting.
An evil education continually erases Indigenous, Asian American, Pacific Islander, and multiracial students and educators. It keeps telling the lie of separate but equal schooling. It normalizes segregated schooling and its corresponding resource disparities. Walker (1996), Orfield and Frankenberg (2014), Ryan (2010), and other scholars affirm this. An evil education sends college graduates into the world year after year after year having learned far too little. In some instances, nothing at all about white supremacy, implicit bias, racism, sexism, sexual harassment, sexual assault, homophobia, heterosexism, transphobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, xenophobia, and myriad other phobias and isms. Later in this address, I highlight findings from my own research on the underpreparation of college graduates to confront these important social and human justice issues to affirm this. But first, I offer one recent case example of how an evil education sends teachers, counselors, and education leaders into schools who do racist things.
Teachers Dangling a Terrorism Tool
Summerwind Elementary School is located in Los Angeles County, California—specifically, in Palmdale, just over an hour from my home. A photo emerged of four Summerwind teachers holding a noose at the school. They were smiling. Black parents and others were outraged because nooses for centuries were used to hang and kill Black people in the United States. For many Black families, it is a well-known tool for terrorism, torture, and murder. Nothing about it makes us smile. A Los Angeles Times article was written about the incident (Shalby, 2019), and most local television stations covered it. As absurd as the decision to pose with a noose was, the person who photographed the teachers, Dr. Linda Brandts, was at the time Summerwind’s principal. She and the teachers were placed on administrative leave while the incident was being investigated. Brandts subsequently resigned.
I do not know Dr. Brandts, but I presume she was a teacher at some point before becoming a principal. I know that she has a doctorate, but I do not know from what university. Here are four questions for our collective consideration as educators and education researchers. First, did not these five educators learn anything about the lynching of Black bodies at any point in their own K–12 schooling experiences, in the general education curriculum when they were in college, or in their teacher preparation programs? Second, did Brandts learn anything about lynching in her principal certification or doctoral programs? Third, did the district superintendent learn how to lead in moments of racial crisis such as this one in the educational leadership program that prepared her, him, or them for the superintendency? The answer to all three questions is probably not. Thus, we—the preparers of teachers and education leaders, the scholars who research their preparation and practices—are partly responsible for the harm that these educators inflicted on Black students and their families in Palmdale. Here is the fourth question: Was this incident in the Palmdale Unified School District a one-off, isolated occurrence? The answer is no.
My PhD advisee James Bridgeforth and I wrote about the Summerwind Elementary School situation a few days after it occurred (Harper & Bridgeforth, 2019). In our Education Week article, we not only highlighted this particular incident but also furnished examples of several others like it all across the United States. James and I both are from Georgia. We know that there are particular stereotypes about the American South. One of those stereotypes is that it is notoriously racist. That is true. However, it is not the only notoriously racist place in the country. Therefore, we quite intentionally chose examples that geographically spanned the U.S. map; absurdly racist things that educators (not students or community members) had recently done in schools. Because there were so many, James and I confessed in the title of our article that the Summerwind noose incident did not surprise us. We were not aiming to normalize it; but to us, it resembled so many other educator-involved incidents. James has since handcrafted a data set that includes more than 500 such incidents occurring in K–12 schools all across the country between 2014 and 2019.
Incontestably, there are too many educator-involved racist incidents, too much peer-to-peer racial violence, and far too many other manifestations of racial injustice in K–12 schools and on college and university campuses. As scholars who study various dimensions of these things, can we not do more? Can we not accept more responsibility for these crises and the harm they inflict on students of color, teachers of color, staff and administrators of color, and other racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse families and community members? In the next section, I draw from my own research as I attempt to help us understand how schools of education are responsible for the mishandling of racial incidents on campuses.
Education Schools as Culprits in the Endurance of Evil
I designed and conducted a qualitative research study of graduate programs in higher education, student affairs, and community college leadership. All of these programs were located in schools/colleges of education across the nation. Specifically, I interviewed students and recent graduates from 14 education schools, all located within research universities. The interviews were with 138 master’s and PhD students who were currently enrolled, early career practitioners who had graduated from those programs within the past 5 to 6 years and were engaged in professional practice, and tenure-track assistant professors who had earned their doctorates from those programs and immediately transitioned to full-time faculty roles.
Ultimately, I was interested in learning what they learned about race, racism, racial equity, and racial problem-solving in graduate degree programs in their respective schools of education. The currently enrolled master’s students almost unanimously told me that they had learned about outdated 1970s and 1980s racial identity models in their student development theory courses. Beyond that, a few reported some version of this: Well, there was also the elective on, say, multiculturalism in higher ed or diversity in higher ed. And there were the one or two weeks that we talked about race, but then we had to move on to class, gender, sexuality, ability, and all the other dimensions of diversity, inclusion, multiculturalism, and so on. But yeah, we did spend a week or two talking about race.
Many also noted that they learned much more about race in courses taught by faculty of color relative to other classes in their graduate programs. Reportedly, these often were the only classrooms where they would engage in deeply substantive, meaningful conversations about race, racism, racial inequity, and racial injustice. The challenge is that in way too many higher education graduate programs, that instructor is the lone faculty member of color and their race- or diversity-focused courses are not required.
Participants who were early career practitioners—those who had completed their master’s degrees in higher education, student affairs, or community college leadership and were 5 or 6 years into their careers—said to me, I realized just how little I learned about race in my master’s program when I got to my first job and there were all sorts of racial problems, racial inequities, racial climate situations that I was utterly unprepared for. I didn’t know what to do. I had to wing it because I didn’t learn these things in my school of education, in my master’s degree program that was supposed to prepare me to be a leader on a college campus.
The currently enrolled PhD students said things like, We read these articles from peer-reviewed journals time and time again, and the data tables show us that there are gaps. There are these gaps between different racial and ethnic groups on, say, college access or student engagement or graduation rates or whatever. But yeah, that’s pretty much it. We learned that there are the gaps through the data tables. We don’t actually learn what to do about the gaps. We understand that we’re not preparing to become practitioners—we’re PhD students, we’re going to become professors or researchers—but even still, we just merely learn about gaps.
Noteworthy is that some PhD students graduate from these programs and go on to become faculty members.
The last group that I interviewed were a couple of years into tenure-track assistant professorships in higher ed, student affairs, and community college leadership programs. They had all graduated within 5 years from those same 14 education school programs from which I sampled the master’s and PhD students. These colleagues of ours, some of whom are AERA members, said, When I started in the professoriate, I didn’t know how to make good use of racial tension when it arose in our class discussions. I didn’t really know how to teach my own students about this because I myself was never taught. So look, I have the right values. My heart and mind are in the right place. I really want to be excellent at this, but I’m kind of sort of winging it until I can figure it out. I engaged in a bunch of trial and error on this.
Ultimately, here is what I concluded in this particular research project, having interviewed faculty members and practitioners who were graduates of programs in schools and colleges of education: Racial inequity in higher education persists, at least in part, because the people who are expected to do something about those inequities don’t know what to do. Why do they not know what to do? Because we never taught them what to do. We are responsible when they mishandle race in their classrooms, when they mishandle racial inequity, and the miscarriage of racial justice on their campuses. We are responsible.
Illiteracy on Racism, Sexual Harassment, and Sexual Assault
More than 50,000 people were in my home throughout the COVID-19 pandemic for live virtual professional learning experiences offered through the USC Race and Equity Center’s portfolio of professional learning offerings in our K–12, higher education, and corporate portfolios. There is a session that I often do on how to talk about race in schools, on college campuses, and in organizations spanning a multitude of industries. In that session, I ask educators and business professionals alike to anonymously respond to a poll item: “My school has serious racial problems.” On average, 81% of K–12 school teachers and leaders agree. In higher ed, 84% of faculty and staff participants agree or strongly agree. In the corporate portfolio, almost always more than 80% of professionals across all levels say the same in response to a similar question about racial problems in their contexts. These are mostly White participants, which reflects the demographics of these workplaces.
Noteworthy here is that these professionals, who recognize the existence of serious racial issues, all went to school. White nationalists went to school. So did mass shooters, the murderers of trans women of color, and the elected officials pushing anti-trans legislation across many states. Those trying to suppress my mama’s vote in Georgia—they went to school, too. The attackers of Asian Americans, the sexual harassers of women and men in the workplace, they went to school, and some even went to college. Derek Chauvin, George Floyd’s murderer, has a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. So, what did we teach these people? More importantly, what did we teach their teachers? Can we not do more? Should not our research inform the development of curriculum in education and the professions?
I am a longtime, very proud member of AERA Divisions G and J, but when you are president, you have the enormous privilege of serving all divisions. I have especially enjoyed getting to know the work of AERA Division I: Education in the Professions. Their work resonates with me because I live half my life in an ed school and the other half in a school of business. I am deeply concerned about professional preparation across all domains. As I think about our colleagues in Division I, I reflect on the shootings of unarmed Black people. Can we not use what we know to shape curriculum in police academies? I also think about the Black maternal health crisis. Can we not better inform medical and nursing school curricula to help prevent it? And when it comes to workplace sexual harassment, shouldn’t business schools be doing more?
Here at the USC Marshall School of Business, we are stepping up. In collaboration with the USC Race and Equity Center, we are launching a campaign titled, “It’s Not Okay.” In this social and digital media campaign, MBA students share examples of workplace sexual harassment and draw attention to behaviors that are not acceptable. This project emerged from the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion course that I teach. In one video, MBA student Cecilia Sanchez, declares: “It is not okay to sexualize women in your workplace. It is not okay to stare your co-worker up and down. It is not okay to give your co-workers shoulder massages.” This is just one of dozens of examples that my students offered to specify what constitutes sexual harassment and therefore is not okay at work (or anyplace else).
The inspiration for this campaign was inspired by my research on workplace climate, my business school teaching, and the news I consume about sexual harassment. For years, my research has documented horrifying experiences, mostly from women but also from men and genderqueer individuals. I wanted to respond to what I have consistently found in my data. This campaign was also inspired by a moment in my MBA classroom 3 years ago. I was teaching about sexual harassment, and about 20 minutes into the class, a student raised her hand and said, Shaun, I’m really frustrated. In my 2 years in this MBA program, this is the first time we’ve talked about sexual harassment in the workplace. I’m glad we’re talking about it now, but as someone graduating soon, I’m upset that this is my first learning opportunity on this topic.
That hit me hard. It connected back to my research—no wonder I hear sexual harassment stories so often. People do not learn about this in school. No wonder they go into the workplace and harass others; no one ever explicitly taught them what is line-crossing and inappropriate. That makes their former professors responsible. As a citizen, as a scholar, as a teacher, and as a man, I felt it was time for me to accept responsibility for this and to do something about it in partnership with my talented MBA students and center colleagues.
To be sure, in the field of education, we also send graduates into schools and other education workplace settings without proper preparation on this particular issue. How much do we teach them about sexual harassment? We just assume they know right from wrong, appropriate from inappropriate. Occurrences of sexual harassment and sexual assault at conferences is just one of many indicators that not all professionals know where the line crosses from appropriate to inappropriate. We should not assume. This can, should, and must be taught. The use of case studies could be helpful. In my class this semester, our standalone lesson on sexual harassment coincidentally occurred just weeks after news broke about New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (see Rubinstein & McKinley, 2020). Governor Cuomo maintains that he did not realize that his comments, the things he was saying to women with whom he was working, were inappropriate. I have heard this before from men, sometimes friends of mine and at lots of other times from participants in my research studies, that they did not realize that similar kinds of statements and actions were inappropriate. As educators, the preparers of educators, and people who study the preparation and practice of educators, let us not presume that graduates of our programs and colleagues in our profession know what’s okay and what’s not okay. Teaching about this is just one of many actions we must take.
Citizen-Scholars in Action
I invite each of you to recognize that we are not merely scholars. We also are citizens of the places in which our scholarship is produced, disseminated, and ultimately used. This duality is what I am calling a “citizen-scholar.” Collectively, I am inviting us to acknowledge the roles we play in sustaining educational and social inequities. But more importantly, I am inviting us to imagine the difference we can make if we embrace our citizen-scholar identities, make our intelligence actionable, and do more with what we know. I present here nine things that citizen-scholars do and don’t do. Although this is not an exhaustive list, my hope is that these examples give you a sense of the embodiment of the citizen-scholar that I hope we all will feel inspired to become:
Citizen-scholars don’t watch the news and say, “Oh, how awful. I hope somebody does something about that tragedy.” Instead, a true citizen-scholar says, “I am that somebody.” They ask, “How can I help?” They turn heartbreak into a hierarchical linear modeling analysis, a catastrophe into a case study. They immediately jump into the fire to help extinguish it using what they know.
Citizen-scholars talk to the people. We do not just talk to each other. I so appreciate a great AERA annual meeting. I love sitting in paper sessions, hearing from graduate students and colleagues about the groundbreaking research they are doing. It is wonderful that we have this platform and space every year to talk with each other. But a true citizen-scholar does not just talk at AERA. We talk to the people. A true citizen-scholar asks the people what they need. They ask, “How can we be helpful to you? How can we bring what we know to this space to help accelerate your liberation?” That’s what a citizen-scholar does.
A citizen-scholar takes their research findings and applies them in communities. One inspiring example is Chris Emdin’s evidence-based Science Genius initiative, which uses the power of hip-hop music and culture to introduce youth to the wonder and beauty of science (Emdin, 2022).
Citizen-scholars take their knowledge about inequitable classroom practices to schools and figure out ways to correct educational inequities and students’ inequitable access to high-quality learning opportunities—and to make them culturally relevant, culturally resonant, and what Django Paris (2012) calls culturally sustaining.
Citizen-scholars see possibilities for usefulness in news stories about a social or educational miscarriage of justice and immediately make their intelligence actionable. For example, we all heard throughout the pandemic that there were long-standing racial and socioeconomic inequities before COVID, some of which the pandemic exacerbated. One of those inequities was access to reliable, high-quality internet and access to teachers who could deliver supplemental instruction. Among many actions, wealthy people invested in learning pods. That was great for families that could afford it. AERA Past President Gloria Ladson-Billings heard in the news and elsewhere that rich, mostly White folks were creating these pods. So, Gloria, in collaboration with others in one of the poorest communities in Madison, Wisconsin, created a learning pod for underserved school-age youth. Gloria took what she knew about successful teachers of African American children (Ladson-Billings, 2009) and what she knew about the education debt owed to minoritized communities (Ladson-Billings, 2006), and she got with others in her community to collaboratively create an intervention. That’s what a citizen-scholar does.
A citizen-scholar translates what they know for audiences beyond academia via op-eds, blog posts, podcasts, and various forms of social and digital media. They go to the school board meeting with facts in hand to be helpful in the shaping of local policy. They refuse to have their intelligence live entirely in academic journals and in the AERA conference paper repository.
A citizen-scholar does not hesitate to make an evidence-informed citizen’s arrest. They clap back with facts, evidence, and data in response to somebody saying something ludicrous or untrue on social media. They do not say, “Hey, maybe I shouldn’t get into it. I don’t want to start a Twitter fight.” If you know something to be true and yet do nothing to correct the misinformation, then you are just as complicit as the spreaders of that misinformation.
Citizen-scholars have way too much integrity to boldly declare that Black Lives Matter yet do far too little in their research, translational practice, and lives outside of work to actually liberate Black people. Instead of merely using the hashtag #StopAsianHate, they amplify the research of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) scholars to bring greater attention to the erasure and long-standing acts of educational violence against AAPI students in K–12 schools, postsecondary institutions, and our broader society.
Citizen-scholars relentlessly search for a vaccine, an aggressive treatment plan, a cure—like cancer researchers are on the hunt, the unrelenting hunt, for a cure. Like the COVID-19 scientists were on the hunt for a vaccine. We have to be on that same hunt for a vaccine, for a cure, for a treatment plan to treat the inequities and injustices that are cyclically reproduced in our schools and in our society.
Closing
On the first day of our 2021 AERA Annual Meeting, the Centers for Disease Control declared racism an epidemic. We must get to work like epidemiologists and reach across disciplinary fields and borders to fight for racial justice. That is what a citizen-scholar does. We must join with other scholars within and beyond our academic field to share responsibility for urgent problems in our society and evils in our educational system. Colleagues, as citizen-scholars, we share responsibility for racism, sexism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and every other ism and phobia that harms people here in the United States and around the world. We must take action. Our democracy, its school children and collegians, and our fellow citizens are counting on us to do more with what we know.
