Teaching Black Lives Matter is part of education - just like celebrating Christmas | Opinion

When I was an elementary school student — lo these many years ago — we spent a lot of time studying and learning. But we didn’t only study. We celebrated Halloween. And Christmas and Thanksgiving. The only time I ever participated in a maypole dance was in Mrs. Davidson’s first grade classroom at Walnut School in Emporia. My third grade teacher even brought sausage to class on Feb. 2. (Ground. Hogs. Day. Get it?)

We weren’t relentless machines, drilling in math and (ugh) cursive constantly. We were also learning how to celebrate and responsibly live in our community.

That’s what local public schools have always done.

I thought about that old history after the head of a conservative “parents group” went before a U.S. Senate committee earlier this month — and took a shot at Cordley Elementary School in Lawrence for organizing a much-publicized 2023 Black Lives Matter event for students when really they should have been learning math.

That’s right. It was another tedious attack on “woke” education.

“Children are in school for approximately seven hours each day — yet rather than spending finite classroom time making up learning loss, classes now spend hours each day on extraneous programming related to identity politics,” harrumphed Nicki Neily of Parents Defending Education.

Cordley, she said, held that BLM march even though it’s a “a school where only 32% of students are proficient in math and 52% are proficient in reading.”

Shocking, right?

It was certainly surprising to Becca Munro, a Lawrence psychiatrist whose daughter is about to enter fifth grade at Cordley.

“I’m so proud of our school,” she said this week.

Here’s the thing: The generic conservative critique of public education that Neily used to criticize Cordley — that American teachers are indoctrinating students in lefty groupthink while failing to actually educate their students — falters at a couple of points.

The first is this: Americans love their local schools. A Gallup poll last fall found that just 36% of respondents are satisfied with the education system, but 76% think their own kids are getting a pretty good education.

That certainly seems to be the case at Cordley. “I think Cordley’s a great school,” said Munro.

Which leads to the second point: Every school is different.

And Cordley definitely is different. It’s a Title I school, meaning that 40% or more of its students qualify for free or reduced lunches. That almost certainly explains the test scores that Neilly cited — plenty of research shows that student achievement suffers when kids and their families are struggling to put food on the table.

It’s also a pretty diverse school. Lawrence’s population is 75% white, but Cordley’s minority enrollment stands at 47%, with Black and Latino student populations twice as large as the surrounding community.

Which is why Cordley educators see embracing events such as the occasional Black Lives Matter march and other similar programming as essential to reaching students where they’re at.

“Engaging in culturally responsive instruction and taking action to support our diverse community do not distract us from our learning,” Cordley Principal Becky Reaver said in an email, “but rather enhance it and provide the inspiration and motivation that often inspire our students in ways we could not have predicted.”

That’s what Cordley parents want. “I think feeling safe and included in your school, and included in your community, puts you in the best place to absorb information,” Munro told me. And it’s what the community seems to want — Lawrence, you may have heard, is considerably more liberal than most places in Kansas.

Why should this matter to you? Because critiques like Neily’s are being used to undermine public education, both in Kansas and across the country. They’re at the heart of GOP efforts in the Kansas Legislature to use vouchers to divert funding to homeschoolers and private religious schools.

That criticism isn’t fair to Cordley, though. And it’s probably not fair to your local school, either.

Schools must of course educate kids in reading and math — and Cordley, despite its challenges, is doing that. But that has never been the entirety of its mission. Which is why “we will continue to provide these relevant learning experiences for our scholars,” Lawrence Public Schools Superintendent Anthony Lewis said in a statement.

The occasional marches will continue, in other words.

“The school of course provides education,” Munro said, “but there’s so many other valuable things a school offers.”

Joel Mathis is a regular Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle Opinion correspondent. Formerly a writer and editor at Kansas newspapers, he served nine years as a syndicated columnist.