Education Post

People are calling for more accountability of charter schools when traditional public schools have been allowed to fly under the radar for years. I mean, don’t we want accountability for all schools?

What if Robert E. Lee Elementary School was named after Tulsa’s distinguished American historian, John Hope Franklin? It is not a far-fetched idea if you think about it. It is a thought that reinforces this need for reconciliation.

“If a principal or a teacher finds out that a certain child is undocumented, or his or her family members are undocumented, do you feel that the principal or teacher is responsible to call ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and to have that family reported?”

Her response? “Sir, I think that’s a school decision. That’s a local community decision. And again, I refer to the fact that we have laws and we also are compassionate.”

I pray that my students will be so lucky enough to arrive in a classroom with a culturally competent teacher who looks like them and is passionately and unapologetically black. And should they not land in a class with a teacher who does not share the same racial ancestry, my next prayer is that they will encounter a benevolent teacher who will love and celebrate them as I have done. I pray they will gain a wonderful pedagogue or role model who will tell them that the sky is the limit for them and that they can be whatever their heart so desires.

A lingering cultural construct that brands Black boys as “bad dudes” and Black girls as young “angry Black women” stems from the same dark ignorance that caused the 1921 Tulsa Massacre and decades of racist policies passed by state legislators and policy makers. The truth is, they were the architects for what are now today’s educational equality gaps

But if your child receives a rejection letter, the cloud of depression instantly appears as a dark cloud over the entire house. And like clockworks, the tears began to fall for the student who see themselves as unworthy.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. symbolically ends at the Frisco Railroad tracks, where it was once nearly illegal for any black person to cross the tracks without permission or permits. Why didn’t the White city officials want to embrace Dr. King’s Dream by extending the street through to south Tulsa?