One Good Question with Ana Poncé: Is School Enough for Our Kids?

Ana Poncé

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?”

Our mission at Camino Nuevo is to prepare students to succeed in life; we want our kids to be compassionate leaders, critical thinkers, and problem solvers and to thrive in a culturally-connected and changing world. But we can’t do this work alone. We need families to be our partners. That’s why, from the beginning, when we opened our first school, one of our priorities was institutionalizing an authentic parent engagement program with a robust menu of support services. We try to get to know families and understand their needs. When a family needs help, our staff connects them with existing support services in our community. Our commitment to families is paying off: Nearly 100 percent of our students graduate and are college bound.

There is a perception that running an effective parent engagement and support services program costs millions of dollars. However, it’s all about the partnerships and how schools integrate the support structures into the day.  For example, our schools are able to offer mental health counseling because we partner with a nonprofit mental health provider in the community. We also partner with graduate schools that provide us with interns. Through this partnership model, we can provide services to about 2,000 youth at a fraction of the total cost. We have similar partnerships for our students to have access to the arts, science, mentoring, and afterschool programming. These resources and services are available in many communities.

“Without dedicated funding available, so many schools feel like they have to choose between academic supports and mental health supports.  Why not just rely on community agencies to respond to these needs?”

Schools don’t have to provide every direct service. However, it is time that schools embrace collaboration and coordination. As educators, we know when families are struggling because a family member will turn to a teacher or staff member they trust to ask for help. Sometimes we find out [about a need] because a student is acting out due to the stress or trauma imposed by a family’s situation. That’s when we can connect those families with support agencies. We’ve had situations, for example, when a child’s family member has been deported, our staff has connected the student and their family to support services because we know how traumatic this situation can be for everyone. We do the same when we hear of a family who may be at risk of being evicted from their home. Everyone — from school leaders to custodians to office assistants – is trained on the referral process as well as our partnership philosophy. So, if a school’s office manager hears about a family in need, that person knows something can be done about it and knows who can connect the family to the services they need. 

“When we grow up in under-served communities and teach/lead in those same communities, we want to provide our students more access than we had.  Is that enough?  Does today's generation of (insert your demographic here) need something different than we did?”

It gives me pause when I hear people say “Is that enough?” What is enough? What does that mean? Ten years ago I was meeting with a program officer who asked when our work would be “done” in the MacArthur Park community. [laughter]What’s happening here, in terms of the consequences of poverty, is so beyond what we can do as a school.  When I think about what is enough, I know that school is not enough.  We have a lot more to do and we need a lot more of us to do it.  I believe that we need to create culturally reflective environments where our children are seeing themselves, and who they can become, on a daily basis.  As People of Color, we come into the education space and some stay for a few years, others stay longer.  I don’t think we are doing enough in diversifying the education workforce.  I believe we need to do more to prepare people of color for college success so that we can recruit more teachers of color, more leaders of color in education and education adjacent fields.

It’s important that our communities support more of us coming back in some way.  It doesn’t mean that you have to come back and live in the same community. You can “come back” in different ways – teach or lead in a school site, work in an education nonprofit.  Our kids need to see us come back and inspire them. When they see people who look like them in positions of influence (principals, C-level organizational leaders, key board members) and engaging in different activities (in college fairs, arts programs, ethnic studies classes) – their perception of what is possible for them begins to change.Camino Nuevo students are getting a lot more, in many ways, than I or my peers did back in the day, when high school completion was the exception, not the norm, for kids like me. Is it enough?  In some ways it is; more personalized attention, more wrap-around services, more enrichment opportunities, more access to higher education. However, our kids still need more because the system is so broken and set up against their success.  Our students need more than a solid educational foundation to make them competitive and to help them navigate the system.  Higher education needs to rethink how it supports first-generation college student to completion.  We have a solid track record of getting our kids to pursue higher education options and many of them are encountering significant barriers that most often are not academically related.  What we are doing at CNCA is great and it is a lot “more,” but I don’t believe that it is enough because of the barriers our kids continue to face every day due to systemic injustice.

Ana’s One Good Question: As a nation, we’re struggling with low college completion rates. We’re seeing a slight increase in graduation rates for Latinos, but a lot of our kids start college and don’t finish.  Education leaders and opinion influencers are rethinking the goals of K-12. I’m really concerned that more folks are thinking about creating alternate pathways for Latinos that don’t include a college education. That’s constantly on my mind. I know that my students, my kids will need a college degree to be competitive and to be on the path to leadership and influential positions. I am committed to educating all our kids to be leaders in their communities and in their fields. When we start creating watered-down pathways to a job, we’re not setting our students up to be leaders. What does that say about what we’re really trying to do?  I’m personally committed to figuring out how we move 'average students' to attain higher levels of success beyond being at top of class.  Jumping to alternative pathways is a quick solution. But let’s think about the consequences and examine what we as educators and what our institutions are not getting right. Let’s not blame the kids just yet. Let’s turn the mirror on ourselves.

Ana Ponce is the Chief Executive Officer of Camino Nuevo Charter Academy (CNCA), a network of high performing charter schools serving more than 3,500 Pre-K through 12th grade students in the greater MacArthur Park neighborhood near Downtown Los Angeles. CNCA schools are recognized as models for serving predominantly Latino English Language Learners and have won various awards and distinctions including the Title 1 Academic Achievement Award, the California Association of Bilingual Education Seal of Excellence, the California Distinguished Schools award, and the Effective Practice Incentive Community (EPIC) award. Born in Mexico, Ana is committed to providing high quality educational options for immigrant families in the neighborhood where she grew up.An alumnus of Teach for America, she spent three years in the classroom before becoming one of the founding teachers and administrators at The Accelerated School, the first independent charter school in South Los Angeles. Under her instructional leadership, The Accelerated School was named “Elementary School of the Year” by Time magazine in 2001. Ms. Ponce earned her undergraduate degree from Middlebury College and a master's degree in Bilingual-Bicultural Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. She earned her administrative Tier 1 credential and second master's degree from UCLA through the Principal's Leadership Institute (PLI) and earned a Doctorate in Educational Leadership from Loyola Marymount University. A veteran of the charter school movement in California, she serves on the Board of the California Charter Schools Association. 

One Good Question with Denese Shervington: How do We Re-Engage the Black Middle Class in Public Education?

Denese Shervington

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 think the investment is in trying to find a formula that can get more kids children in line so that they won’t be a nuisance anymore. We’re not creating learners and thinkers.  We’re creating an underclass of Black children who can step in line and can continue to serve the service industry in New Orleans. It’s really hard as a middle class Black person here, because then you have to question your own stuff.  Enough of us in the Black middle class have gotten out of public education, and now we’re oppressing those youth and families who still rely on public education. When I go into the schools and see the kids, I hurt.

I’m too old to not speak the truth.Schools here now are such a disappointment. My kids went to public schools in New Orleans.  At that time, in the 80s,90s, early 2000s, if you were poor but you had encouragement around education in the home or your community, you could still go to the public schools and be ok. You can’t do that anymore.  Our schools are actually traumatizing the children.  I was in an elementary school two weeks ago observing kindergarten and 1st graders. They were nervous.  I can’t imagine how you learn when you are so nervous.  A few kids, based on their personality style, those who do well under pressure, will do well, but that’s not most children.  They had to stand in a line and do these rote things like « track the teachers with your eyes.”  The schools do these standard things that they think creates discipline, but it’s not personalized.  It feels like you’re in a military school, or, at worse, in a prison.

The Black middle class, we have abandoned our children.  I don’t know any Black middle class parents who are sending our kids to these schools, they’re sending their kids to the private schools. That means we don’t care about what’s going on with those who are less able to advocate for themselves.  I don’t think that White middle class New Orleanians would tolerate that kind of treatment to their children either.  It bothers me when we’re talking about how great the charter schools are here when this basic level of humanity does not exist.

Schools are beginning to implement trauma-informed care models to support students with chronic negative behaviors.  Is this work best for individual cases or can entire school communities benefit from trauma-informed pedagogies?

There are two things that all schools need to consider when implementing mental health supports: overall school climate and accurate diagnoses of root causes.If you want to deal with mental health, you can change 80% now by addressing the school climate.  Don’t feel sorry for poor black kids.  Love them and have really high expectations for them.  I’m borrowing from Andre Perry who says that you don’t have to punish our kids into learning.  The no excuses school models have a disrespect and disregard of our children’s humanity.  Start with changing those practices.

Eighty percent of our kids are being misdiagnosed in special education.  Most progressive school communities provide behavioral health, but the root causes are not behavioral, they’re emotional.  The behaviors are the end products of things happening inside.  These kids are traumatized.  When a kid is displaying a lot of behavioral dysfunction, it’s usually because there’s something happening that they don’t have any control over and they can’t communicate it.  They don’t have the language sophistication to talk about their feelings, so they show you.  Until a student is properly diagnosed, s/he won’t get the proper treatment.  This goes back to the first condition: you have to care about the student and love him/her as an individual to wonder why he’s misbehaving.

Schools with strong student support teams will, at the very least, ask about motivations for student behaviors before they start a functional behavioral assessment.  The majority of school-based practitioners have never heard of #Sadnotbad.  How do we get practitioners to understand this?

It’s like we’re trying to do “fast mental health.”  You really have to spend time building relationships for the children to trust you and feel safe.  If you start with the attitude that Black children are not inherently bad, or inferior, then it makes you want to do some stuff differently.  A high-level of love and caring means that you don’t stop at the first question.  You are driven to ask why and keep asking why until you really get to the source.   That heart is not unique to Black educators.  At Jean Gordon School, my children had a White principal who deeply believed that all children deserved to be loved, and cared for and educated.We also need to pay attention to our adolescents, male and female, who are gender non-conforming.  We’re doing a Twitter chat focused on LGBT teens for suicide prevention month.  If the kid is in a school where there is at least one adult with whom they can connect, it makes a difference.  We need a safe space for the kids to interrogate what’s going on in their lives.  One of our health educators tells the story of a kid, who was having a lot of challenges at school, asking “Can people be gay? Can boys be gay? Can I be gay?”  That could be a benefit of the TFA corps.  They are more likely to create safe space for kids to be different and may themselves be gender non-conforming.  Most traditional and/or older Black educators still struggle with this.Whenever I talk about trauma in schools in NOLA, it’s not just due to Katrina or community divides.  For many of these kids it’s about the intrafamilial violence that they’re experiencing around identity. Every community can benefit from these practices.

Denese’s One Good Question: For me, I think the progress is going to have to start with us. What do I contribute to the process of healing and becoming whole for us in the Black community?  This new integration has not served us : so, how do we get back to a collective consciousness and feel responsible for all of our children?   Mine have succeeded, yours will succeed.  But until every child has the capacity, your children could be dragged down by others.  These are all of our children.

Dr. Shervington has an intersectional career in psychiatry and public mental health. She is the President and CEO of The Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies (IWES), a community-based public health institute, and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Tulane University. At IWES, Dr. Shervington directs the community-based post-disaster mental health recovery division that she created in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. At Tulane, Dr. Shervington provides psychotherapy supervision for psychiatric residents. Dr. Shervington is a graduate of New York University School of Medicine. She completed her residency in Psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco, and is certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. Dr. Shervington also received a Masters of Public Health in Population Studies and Family Planning from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. In 2006, she was awarded the Isaac Slaughter Leadership award by the Black Psychiatrists of America. In 2012, she received the Jeanne Spurlock M.D. Minority Fellowship Award from the American Psychiatric Association.