1st Edition
Black Educational Leadership From Silencing to Authenticity
This book explores Black educational leadership and the development of anti-racist, purpose-driven leadership identities. Recognizing that schools within the United States maintain racial disparities, the authors highlight Black leaders who transform school systems. With a focus on 13 leaders, this volume demonstrates how US schools exclude African American students and the impacts such exclusions have on Black school leaders. It clarifies parallel racism along the pathway to becoming teachers and school leaders, framing an educational pipeline designed to silence and mold educators into perpetrators of educational disparities. This book is designed for district administrators as well as faculty and students in Race and Ethnicity in Education, Urban Education, and Educational Leadership.
Foreword: Black Leadership in the Uncertain Time of Now; Chapter One: Black Leadership within Anti-Black Schools; Chapter Two: This is Who We Are; Chapter Three: But I Don’t Want to be a Principal: Intersectional Racism and Black Leadership Pathways; Chapter Four: They Don’t See Our Babies; Chapter Five: They Don’t See Me: Coping and The Double Duty of Authenticity ; Chapter Six: This is How We Do: Authentic Leadership; Epilogue: Where are They Now?
Biography
Rachelle Rogers-Ard has over 28 years’ experience as a classroom instructor, non-profit administrator, program manager, Adjunct Professor, and district administrator. Currently, Dr. Rogers-Ard is the Executive Director, People, Leadership and Development, with the Alameda County Office of Education and the founder and co-lead for the Grow Your Own Collective.
Christopher B. Knaus is Professor of Education at the University of Washington Tacoma. A global critical race practitioner, Dr. Knaus focuses on disrupting the intersectional racism of colonial schools and colleges, and investing in Black and Indigenous educational systems.
There are many books on educational leadership, but only a few, if any, truthfully tell the story of Black school leaders working to be pro-Black, pro-community, and address how anti-blackness shows up in our school system. Rogers-Ard & Knaus are bold, forthright, and charting a new path forward with their Authentic Leadership framework.
Bettina L. Love, Ph.D., Professor , University of Georgia
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It should trouble everyone that teachers and administrators in the nation's schools do not come close to reflecting the diversity of the United States. This book clearly shows that what's more distressing are the constant microaggressions and racism that Black educators and administrators of color face. It's so intense that they literally are sickened just trying to do their jobs of making our schools better for all children. A solution the book shares is the HEART model, which offers hope for Black and other educators of color as well as black and other families of color, praying that their children receive a good education.
-Lewis W. Diuguid, Longtime award-winning journalist, author, lecturer, diversity facilitator, media adviser and consultant
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This book is a must read for Black educational leaders needing to make an honest assessment of the damage they have sustained in educational settings steeped in anti-blackness in ways that result in healing, and the ability to chart a sustainable path forward. The authors are compassionately relentless in their stated intention of exposing racism, forcing the reader to first deal with things as they truly are so that we might imagine schools as they should be. This is precisely the right time for this message to find the individuals who need to hear it most.
-Steven Thurston Oliver, Ph.D., Professor, Salem State University
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In Black Educational Leadership, Rogers-Ard and Knaus successfully disrupt the normative anti-blackness that silently cloaks the extant educational leadership research literature. The authors assess the conditions prevalent across schools, diagnose root causes of their malfunction, prescribe a reasonable and measured treatment, and offer a hopeful prognosis for change. By centering the prophetic voices and professional experiences of black school administrators, the book offers vital guideposts for current and future K-12 practitioners, the curricular content of educational preparation programs, and the civic aims of community/social agents. Any engagement with this volume – casual or in depth – portends an unavoidable reframing of the ways in which we envision schools and the students who occupy them. Readers are presented real voices from battle-worn school personnel who view education as both content delivery and an act of social justice. The analysis of these disparate yet synchronous experiences are proffered in a cogently thematic structure and tempered by a reasonable likelihood of implementation. In a refreshing departure from most scholarship using critical race theory as a foundation, this book does not fall prey to declaiming grand euphemistic policy or practice recommendations unbounded by the real word contexts of our current educational systems. The authors give us a pragmatic framework with "H.E.A.R.T.". This book provides timely content and fertile context for improving the nation’s schools, especially those educational settings that house black and brown bodies.
-M. Christopher Brown II, Ph.D., Eighteenth President and Secretary to the Board of Regents and Professor of Education, Political Science, and Public Administration, Kentucky State University
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An amazing work. This book puts into words the complicated but all too common and damaging experiences of people of color working to make change in the education sector. This book serves as a blueprint for school administrators and leaders looking to create psychologically safe environments for staff and school leaders of color. The practical framework outlined in this book transcends regions, building size and curriculum - dive in and start with HEART!
-Bobby Humes, Director, Seattle Department of Human Resources
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Black Educational Leadership: From Silencing to Authenticity is a distillation of the power, knowledge and liberatory potential underlying the voices of Black educational leaders in community. Rogers-Ard and Knaus forward a model of authentic leadership preoccupied with sustaining and nurturing Black lives, as well as imagining possible futures where violence is no longer the defining characteristic of the relationship between minoritized communities and formal schooling.
-Tyson Marsh, Ph.D., Associate Professor, University of Washington Bothell
