Background

This project is a response to a shared disappointment in the educational options available to families in Southeast DC, the majority of whom are Black. Big and small governments in the United States claim schools to be places for children to learn and teachers to educate. What we, as teachers and parents, know is that schools are too often under-resourced, high stress environments where teachers are expected to manipulate and coerce children into compliance, for them to be fed information organized around a series of tests created by a $400 million dollar testing industry.

More specifically, there is a dearth of quality education in Southeast DC that is rooted in abolition, liberation and child led exploration. The public education system charged with servicing this majority Black community has failed. The Southeast section of the city which includes Ward 8 and part of Ward 7, has the highest percentage of children living in economic poverty, while simultaneously having the lowest percentage of what the city calls “high quality seats.”

While high-quality schools measured by attendance, re-enrollment and college acceptance*, is one metric that measures a particular set of achievements, those same places are not measured on the quality of freedom. Southeast residents not only deserve choice around schools deemed high achieving by the government, they also deserve access to thoughtful, loving, child-centered education.

As teacher and researcher David Stoval says about the relationships between schools and prisons, “it’s not a pipeline, it’s a nexus.” Many schools and all prisons operate under the same carceral logic-- obedience and compliance with adult mandated rules are rewarded, while many expressions of curiosity, resistance, joy or anger, are punished. Children are expected to accept manipulation and control from adults, and are shamed and excluded when they don’t. The logics of schools tasked to educate the descendants of enslaved peoples, the descendants of indigenous peoples, the descendants of white sharecroppers, and the descendant of refugees, are different than the logics of schools created for the descendants of the white owning class elite. Schools for Black and brown children operate not only as a funnel to prisons, but preparation for them.