Parents and educators: Know the history and stand together to make student achievement the priority

Education leader Spark Bookhart is on a mission to bring together parents, educators, and community members to address and change a racially-imbalanced school system.

Bookhart, convener of the Parent Power Lab, led a breakout session connecting the impact of race, place, and money as it relates to the history of Kansas City public schools at the sixth annual Amplify conference. Amplify is hosted by the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri, to bring together educators of color to discuss liberation, empowerment, and inclusion in education.

The Parent Power Lab, created with the support of SchoolSmartKC and the Kauffman Foundation, aims to maximize the power of parents to influence public education in a transformative way. Bookhart addressed the Amplify audience with a similar approach to discuss how policy has shaped our educational system and how parents and educators can work together to create more effective systems for students.

“I’m not an academic, not a professor, not a historian, not a scholar. I’m coming to you as an engaged parent,” Bookhart said.

As a parent, Bookhart is a dedicated student of the history of Kansas City Public Schools (KCPS). He breaks it down from its beginnings in the late 19th century during Reconstruction, through desegregation with the Brown vs. Board ruling in 1954, the Missouri Supreme Court’s passage of legislative statute H.B. 171 in 1957, the race riots of the late 1960s, the imposed property tax levies and state income taxes of the 1980s to attract white students back to KCPS, and how it all shaped the expanded education system we operate within today.

“You can’t talk about education without talking about race, place, and money. If you’re talking about education and you’re not talking about those three things, you’re not actually talking about public education in this country, particularly in Kansas City. Now, I don’t care where you’re from in the U.S.A. This story, while it is focused on Kansas City, it can be duplicated in any city in this country,” he said.

So, how do parents, educators, and community members address and change a racially-imbalanced school system that has been misaligned for more than six decades?

“I think pipelines are important.” Bookhart mentioned how Dr. Trinity Davis with Teachers Like Me, and Cornell Ellis with Brothers Liberating Our Communities are doing the work to support and increase the number of Black educators in Kansas City. He made space to address the decimation of the Black teaching force that existed prior to desegregation.

“We had the best of the best, the brightest of the brightest,” he said. “Elementary teachers had master’s degrees because of how important education was to Black families. They would go to these summer institutes, and they would earn their master’s over a couple summers, and not from rinky-dink universities, from the Ivy League, Brown, Columbia. So, you have Brown, Columbia, Hampton, Howard-trained master teachers in our third-, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade classes. I’m not talking about just in Kansas City, I’m talking about all over the Black educational landscape in the United States.”

He said what’s good for Black students is to have people in front of them, in the classroom, that know their value, have high standards for them and won’t accept anything less.

“Do I think white teachers can teach Black children? Of course. The problem is the white educational establishment that our children were forced into. Listen to it, I just said it. They had to get escorted into a building by army troops. What do you think? What kind of education do you think they got when they got inside the building?” he said.

“When we focus on student achievement, all of our children can learn – all of them – but we [have] to focus on student achievement and stop playing games.”

Bookhart emphasized the importance of the community working to support parents as they step in to advocate for students.

“The push has to come from community, not from ‘super parents.’ In the Parent Power Lab, what we do is we eschew the concept and notion of the super parent, the one that’s at all the meetings, that do all the things,” he said.

“No, you [have] to have legions at your back, and that’s what we’re trying to do with the Parent Power Lab. We’re never going into these spaces, half-cocked, under-resourced; we want to show up and express power,” Bookhart said. “You can’t have a world-class school system without highly engaged parents. It doesn’t exist.”

He said while some parents don’t have the same capacity as others, he has never met a parent that didn’t want the best for their child.

“We [have] to recognize that parents, no matter where they are on the educational spectrum, have agency, and you need to get them into a community where the community can support them. We created the Parent Power Lab for those parents. Not just those parents, but all parents, where you can have a safety net,” he said.

Bookhart said that when he looks at parents, especially at those who don’t know where to start to support their student, he sees himself. “I know that we can’t be stronger as a body if that person’s out there on their own. So, it’s really creating an institution where we’re all building our educational advocacy capacity.”

The Foundation hosted its sixth annual Amplify event recently, where educators of color convened to discuss equitable solutions to systemic problems in education, foster a sense of shared community, and develop leadership skills through equity perspectives. The theme for 2022 was “Forward-Focused: Toward a Paradigm of Liberation, Empowerment, and Inclusion.” Keynote speakers included local and national education thought leaders who shared their learned experiences and strategies for educators of color to move past survival into a thriving experience in their educational fields.

The annual Amplify KC event, Empowering KC’s Educators of Color for Student Success, has been supported by Kauffman since its inception in 2017. This convening is produced by the Amplify Community Advisory Committee to provide a safe space for educators of color to share ideas and magnify diverse voices. The Kauffman Foundation is dedicated to racial equity and believes the inclusion and elevation of leaders and educators of color is paramount to student success.