One Good Question with Darren Isom: Are you Preparing Your Students to Become Your Peers?

Darren Isom headshot

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.”  These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

I back away from the “education” conversation because I think of my work as more about youth development than formal schooling.  The pivotal and catalytic moments in my own learning and development happened outside of the regular school day.  Even though I attended rigorous academic institutions throughout my life, it was my out of school experiences, often afterschool and summer activities and programs, that offered me the opportunities to suture my academic experiences and make them real and relevant.  I recognized my talent for writing outside of school and recognized my ability to lead and manage via summers working at Summerbridge/Breakthrough Collaborative.  We spend so much time thinking about academic performance and that comes from a place of privilege.  When you’re white and privileged, all you have to do is to be smart to succeed.  When you’re black, privileged or otherwise, you recognize that being smart is necessary but not sufficient.  Being able to navigate the world successfully and achieve both professionally and personally requires more than academic preparation.  I’m not saying we should downplay the role of academics, clearly they are critical, but we can’t sell kids this false promise that being smart is all that you need. Youth development makes kids fuller – it gives them the tools they need to navigate the world with those smarts.

Our education perspectives are really based on the education that we received, which then informs what we see as the drivers of success.  What we need to be asking ourselves is “What actual role do we want our youth to play in the world?” I educate the kids in our program expecting them to become my personal and professional peers.  I remember when my first student from Summerbridge went to Howard, my alma mater.  A fellow white teacher said “Isn’t that impressive!  Did you ever think that she could go to Howard?”  And I replied “That was the whole point of our working with her, no?”  We have in many ways these unarticulated hierarchies that manifest themselves in our expectations of our students.  Even when we’re serving kids to help them academically, we don’t do so with the belief that they’ll become our peers.  We do so with the expectation that they’ll “do well for their setting.” I feel very strongly about upward mobility.  That’s what America has meant for me and my family.  I don’t just believe in it, but I think that certain kids have obligations to it – folks are counting on them. We’re raising these kids with the expectation that they’re going to do magic – jumping numerous social tiers and integrating and succeeding in worlds their parents didn’t even know existed.  If we expect them to do magic, we have to be prepared to give them the tools, tricks, and confidence they need to do so successfully.

“It's become common for schools to position arts programs as supports for academic gains (i.e. music improves math), but is that the most important function of arts education?”

 Kids should be allowed to be kids.  You have your whole life to be an adult and adulting ain’t fun or easy.  I’m a cinephile and the theme that always gets me crying is when kids are forced into adult situations at a young age, like in Life is Beautiful.  Those situations are just so unfair.  Life is tough and you should have a good 15 years where you can be a child.  There’s something to be said about giving kids space to be playful and young and youthful.  We have to give children a space to dream before we start telling them what they can’t do.  You’ll spend your whole life with people telling you what you need to be, what you can’t do, where you can sit, where you can live.  Can you have some years to push the boundaries?  Children excel at having fun.  It’s an asset.  We should leverage it.

At Memphis Music Initiative, we give kids fun, meaningful, high-quality music opportunities.   Very often we go into black and brown schools with well-meaning white Boards and leadership and when we talk about what we’re trying to achieve, they’ll say “That sounds great, but we don’t want to distract the kids from academic learning with music and arts.”  It’s problematic because these same rich, white folks would never be on the Board of [insert fancy private school here] and characterize arts and music education as a distraction.In youth development, we should be working to create the world that we want our children to be in, not somebody else’s poor children.  You have to think about it selfishly.  Seeing music and arts engagement as a “distraction” speaks to a disconnect in how communities experience art.  Wealthy families see art as a distraction, a way to fill your free time, an activity of leisure.  As Black Americans – wealthy or not ­– art is much more than that.  It’s the way we navigate life, diffuse anger, celebrate successes – it’s a way of creating beauty in a world that’s often everything but.  A white home without music or art is simply bland or boring.  A black home without music or art is without joy.  Our ability to give our kids these opportunities is necessary in their development, critical to their joy.

An organization that I admire is the Sesame Street Foundation.  I’ve been enamored by their campaign to send puppet trucks to refugee camps as part of their belief that children have the right to be children no matter what their situation is and that the most dire and desperate situations only mandates these youthful opportunities for youth.   There’s a recent article questioning when schools became such joyless places  that resonated so strongly for me. As a child, I loved school, my school and teachers loved me.  I was good at school and my teachers did a stellar job of creating a protective environment for me – an awkward, nerdy, gay kid. As educational elites, we’re so busy experimenting with what schools for poor black kids should look like.  I just find all the experimentation really confusing.  We’re experimenting when we actually know what works. Why don’t we recreate for them the type of education that we had growing up? The kind that worked for us? The kind that made us smart, empowered, and world ready?  Are they not worthy of it?  Do we think that they can’t digest it? I recognize that education reformers would say that we haven’t changed schools since rip Van Winkle,  and question what we should be doing differently to prepare kids for a fast-changing world and not handicap them.  But what’s fundamentally broken?  Is it the model or the implementation that’s failed?

Darren’s One Good Question: There is something inherently wonderfully beautiful in all of us.  How do we support our youth to manifest that beauty? I worry that we are encouraging our black kids, our gay kids, our poor kids to literally cover elements of their beauty for the sake of integrating and giving them one path to success and forcing them to abandon their uniqueness, their greatest asset, to get there. How do we enable kids to embrace and showcase that thing of beauty while readying the world to accept and embrace it?

Prior to leading Memphis Music Initiative, Darren was a manager with the The Bridgespan Group where he was a strategic advisor to nonprofit and foundation leaders in youth and community development, foundation strategy and education policy.Before Bridgespan Darren worked in direct services in New York, with funding for public art and performance initiatives throughout the Times Square District (Times Square Alliance) and youth services (Groundwork).  Darren worked as the director of Global Logistics for CSI, an international trade finance group, where he managed strategy, organization, and change management projects in Belgium, Spain, France, The Netherlands, and Germany.A seventh generation New Orleans native, Darren is a graduate of Howard University, Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris, and Columbia Business School’s Institute for Nonprofit Management.  As a volunteer, Darren has been an activist around issues concerning disconnected youth and LGBT communities of color. He has served as an advisor to the leaders of several Bay Area and national foundations and currently serves on the board of Horizons Foundation.

One Good Question with Vania Masias: How to Disrupt the Victim Mentality when Investing in Youth Agency.

Vania Masias

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.”  These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question (outlined in About) and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

One of my dreams is that our methodology through arts becomes public policy in the public schools.  That’s my dream because every day I see the empowerment that our youth leaders have thanks to dance or arts.  I think the government, and people who have never danced, have no idea how powerful this tool is.  I just came back from Trujillo, another state in Peru.  I went with one of the “kids” who is 21 and has been with Angeles D1 for 5 years.  Five years ago, he was in to gangs.  He finished his public school, but school gave nothing to him.  He was emotionally devastated. He was into drugs, gangs, and jail.  Today, he just did a Tedx talk and he’s a leader of more than 200 kids in one of the most difficult communities in our region. He is a teacher and one of the best dancers in our company.  He learned to know himself and to start loving himself just as he is.  

When you dance you are just you — you are not your name, the daughter of so-and-so, the girl that went to this school.  When I dance, I am not in a social level, it’s just me, my soul, myself, my truth.  That’s really powerful.If I were to tell people where to invest in education: creativity, culture, arts.  I believe, because I dance and I choreograph, that every human being has a jewel.  We are so beautiful on the inside and through arts it's a beautiful thing to bring that beauty out.    Our education system was focused on the British empire, and that established norms around knowledge.  In that system, if you’re not good with math or literature, you’re kind of a pariah.  At Angeles D1, our focused education gives empowerment to the kids so teachers can see their potential and bring it out.  The arts allows you to bring those other gifts to the forefront.

“The Angeles D1 model has been heavily informed by the youth participants, their needs and vision. Your lessons on youth agency were very organic.  How would you recommend that adults planning programs for marginalized youth intentionally incorporate these lessons into their work?”

The first advice I will give is to get rid of guilt.  Growing up in a country where you have everything and then you see others who have nothing, that’s difficult.  One big mistake I made when I started the program, was that I thought I had to give everything to the youth without asking anything in return.  That mentality creates beggars and welfare dependency.  Don’t give the toys, teach them how to make the toys so that, afterwards, they can make it and sell it and it’s a development.  Otherwise, they will say “Poor me, I’m a victim,” and they will keep begging. You further the stigma that says you are poor, you won’t make it, so I’m solving your life.  I had to learn that and it was kind of difficult.  I felt guilt all the time and they knew that.  It was not healthy.I remember one day when 4 or 5 of the first generation dancers started stealing from the company.  That day, everything changed.  They weren’t stealing things, they stole the choreography that we made as a group, and they went somewhere else and charged for it.  I kicked them out of the group because that didn’t respect D1 values. 

Last week, on the way to Trujillo for the Tedx talk, we saw the same kids who stole from us.  They were in the exact same place, dancing under the same street light that they were 10 years ago.  I just turned and looked at our youth leader and started crying.  OMG.  There we were, a few blocks from the airport and he’s going to speak to a crowd of 200 professionals about his work yet we saw his peers in the exact same place.  We said nothing to each other.  It was evident.  They made the decision to not grow.  They wanted that life.  They just wanted to stay there.  It’s not wrong. It’s not good.  It’s just their decisions.When we want to communicate, we only see our side of things.  A question that helped me was “How can I reach them and generate confidence?’ I decided to go through urban culture to reach our youth.  I put myself in their place.  I tried to see what are they looking at and understand what’s gong on with them.  I hadn’t studied psychology, sociology, or anthropology to know what was going on with them.  I believed in dance.  When they moved, they were communicating something to me. So with that information, I could understand what they were seeing.  They put their eyes always down, they would never look at me. That gave me a lot of information and then I designed everything around that.  Let’s do clowning and get them to feel ridiculous. We never saw the other, to see and look is different.  We’re in such a rush, we never see each other.  When that happened, everything changed.

Vania’s One Good Question:  One of my lead dancers dreams of becoming mayor of his hometown, Tumbes, in northern Peru.  I see D1 as “The Hobbit” for him, a safe place that will support and encourage him.  As social organizations, can we develop the leaders of tomorrow to be pure and uncorrupted?

Vania Masias was born in Lima, Peru.  She graduated from Universidad del Pacifico and is a professional ballerina.  She was the principal ballerina in the municipal ballet for 7 years, with the most important roles in the classical repertory.  She then began a modern dance career with the Yvonne Von Mollendorf company, with international residencies in Europe and the Caribbean.  Vania was a principal ballerina in the National Ballet of Ireland and was selected for Cirque du Soleil.  In 2005, for family reasons, she returend to Lima and founded the Asociación Cultural D1 (de uno) and is currently the Executive Director.