The Schott Foundation is proud to add our name, alongside our longtime partners and allies, to this open letter to Dr. Miguel Cardona, President Biden’s pick for Secretary of Education. It’s time to follow up on candidate Biden’s promise on standardized tests: cancel the spring 2021 testing mandate.
Dr. John H. Jackson
Schott President & CEO
Bishop Dr. William Barber’s homily at the Inaugural Prayer Service this morning was a powerful call to “break the chains of injustice,” to move America toward a Third Reconstruction. He proclaimed love is our salvation — love that must be proven in action.
We rejoice in his inspiring words. And in his fierce movement-building leadership, grounded in love, of Repairers of the Breach and the Poor People’s Campaign.
2020 was a year of quarantines and lockdowns, historic elections and popular rebellions. But amid the difficulties, communities and advocates achieved some real wins. Here are eight policy victories from last year that we at Schott are carrying with us as inspiration for the struggles ahead.
The violent attack on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021 was a stark reminder of America’s historic tensions and struggles. The storming of the Capitol came amid a Pro-Trump protest, by a predominantly white and male group of domestic terrorists. Their white privilege assured they could go beyond the police barriers of perimeter and enter the Capitol Building. In the end, many people were injured and five killed, including a Capitol police officer.
Derrick Johnson
Congratulations on your nomination to be U.S. education secretary, Miguel Cardona. You are poised to take this position at a critical point in American history. As you know well, for generations we have lived through a system of separate and unequal education. COVID-19 has greatly exacerbated the learning loss disparities experienced by children of color. Now, with Congress failing to deliver to schools, educators, students and parents the much needed learning and PPE resources, and states cutting their 2021 budgets, things are primed to get a lot worse.
As the year ends, we are looking back at the many challenges and the fierce organizing — and equally fierce love — that our partners brought to meet them.
The story of America is the power of common people coming together around a vision of opportunity, democracy, and a better way of life for generations to come. However, from our earliest beginnings, that vision was executed with instruments of brutal and legalized oppression, heavily fueled by racial bias, which for centuries has metastasized through every system of American life: healthcare, education, employment, policing, faith, technology, and infrastructure.
The Schott Foundation applauds President-elect Biden’s selection of Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond to lead the Department of Education transition team. Dr. Darling-Hammond is a highly-qualified leader who has a proven track record of success working with public schools, parents, educators and youth to provide all students a high quality education. As a professor at Stanford, founder of the Learning Policy Institute, and president of the California State Board of Education, her work has always been informed by a passion to tackle the root causes of racial and class inequities in public education.
While the sacred obligation of democracy must be honored by counting every last ballot, it’s clear that Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris have won the presidential election. The results this year are historic: the first woman Vice President, the daughter of African American and Asian immigrants, and the highest voter turnout in our nation’s history.
The urgency of the moment cannot be overstated. The challenges facing the new administration are monumental. More than 200,000 Americans — disproportionately Black and Latinx — have died due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This public health disaster has shuttered businesses, schools, and places of worship while draining the coffers of the very state and local agencies on the front lines combating it. The open wound of racist police violence demands a proper reckoning. The impact of these and other tragedies was needlessly magnified by the failures of the federal executive branch.
During this national moment of affirming that Black Lives Matter, we must acknowledge that our methods of ensuring Black children have a fair opportunity to learn have been ineffective. While we are at a critical moment of assessing and addressing the universal harms of systemic racism, we cannot leave out the impact of racism on learning outcomes for Black students. If our desire to liberate US policies and practices from systemic racism is sincere, we must also liberate our systems of learning.
When Black Americans were brought to the United States as slaves, education was discouraged. Black people were forbidden from learning to read or write, and a slave who could do so was subject to severe punishment or death. When Black people were eventually formally permitted to go to school, those schools were separated by race and remained unequal. Even decades after 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that Black and white children were legally allowed to go to school together, the tax bases of wealthier communities and discriminatory policies like redlining meant Black children were still largely relegated to schools that, once again, were separate and unequal.
