Reparations in education

Reparations extend beyond monetary donation, compensation, and investment. Alternate forms of reparations are crucial to generating sustained racial equity and are essential in reconciling disparity in K-12 learning. Education is the foundation for progress and racialized educational injustices have further deepened the divide within institutions, white-centric boards and PACs that uphold whiteness by sustaining and supporting existing frameworks and curricula designed to benefit and excel white students. The education sector admits us in our most pivotal developmental stage through early childhood education and continues to “shape” us throughout the remainder of our developmental stages in a slow and insidious patriarchal indoctrination. Institutions subject predominantly black and POC students to inaccessibility, absence of choice, lack of opportunity, neglect, undereducation, and unethical punishments and suspensions. While white students often go unaddressed for engaging in dehumanizing and derogatory microaggressions, harassment and racist acts. How do we begin to address racialized educational injustices, and what do reparations look like within American institutions? 

What is within your scope or power to sacrifice, to facilitate or to offer beyond monetary reparations? Where can you enact and influence change? How can you counter CRT bans? Can you mobilize your position to educate and influence boards or committees? Reparations can mean giving up space (like we asked of Highland Park), creating space, sharing resources, offering services, contributing your talents and skills, shifting power or creating social change within your organization or community, creating accessibility, community care and more.