Visionary Schools: Liberating At-Risk Students, Transforming a Nation

By Dr. Malcolm J. Bryant

With a direct, urgent, and passionate tone, Visionary Schools was written as an educational manual to encourage school transformation. It challenges college teacher education programs and teacher trainees to be daring and liberate students from race and class, colonial capitalism, militarism, and climate catastrophe. Solving these issue

• Language: English
• Publisher: Consciousvision
• Release date: Feb 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781649906236

Dr. Malcolm J. Bryant

Malcolm Bryant is a native of Memphis, Tennessee. He received the A Better Chance scholarship to the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. He completed his doctoral dissertation for the EdD in Education from the University of Massachusetts in Boston. He taught at the University of Massachusetts/Boston and dedicated 26 years to educating at-risk students in the Boston public schools concentrating on English and the Humanities. A founding member of the Community Academy Alternative School staff in Boston, Dr. Bryant also supports, advocates and fundraises for the African Inland Church School and Social Services Center of Matungulu, Kenya East Africa. His hobbies include international travel, developing real estate, critical writing, poetry, philosophy, and autobiographies reflecting the best in humanity. Boston, Massachusetts is his adopted home.

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Introduction

Since the endgame is beginning, Africans have experimented against terror tactics; many thousands are gone, heart and book burnings, discovering elusive freedom, searching for and defining humanity.

F

or more than two decades, my colleagues, students, and I have battled mediocrity together, educators in the purest sense of the word. The decades on the frontline of redirecting the lives of at-risk, African and Latinx (African means African-American and Latinx) students form the basis of this text’s instructions. Students are at risk because their birth country enslaved and miseducated their ancestors and severely limited access to knowledge. I refer to this condition as noncitizenship. The word liberatory relates to education and counseling designed for at-risk African and Latinx students and is implicit throughout the text.

I applied for and accepted the English teacher position at the Community Academy Alternative School (CA) for expulsion students. The school included Mathematics, History, Psychology, and Science as its significant subjects. The culturally responsive psychological counselor sets the standard for redirecting student consciousness towards ‘decolonizing’ their cognition, self-identity, and self-image. The staff attempted to support this counseling strategy in every class, and students accepted it. One female former student remembered:

Coming from an exam school and transitioning into Community Academy not because I was a kid with behavioral problems, but I was transferred out after becoming pregnant at 16. On my first day, I saw staff and students looking professional. I loved attending Community Academy, especially English! Malcolm (Dr. Bryant) challenged us all; no matter what anyone thought of you, only you define you! He challenged you to not only read and do the assignments but to go above and beyond to ensure you understood what you were reading! Malcolm was a devoted teacher whom always motivated me to do more as long as you worked hard and participated. If you were there and just wasting time, he’d ensure you knew it as well! He made sure you didn’t waste time! He pushed a lot of us! When you walked into his class, you knew he meant business!

Anika Terry,

former student

CA implemented a dress code, attendance continued to rise, and space in the Roxbury Boys and Girls Club, already limited, was stressful for everyone. Instruction in the core courses continued, field trips ensued, and the school became the best-kept secret in Boston. Many veteran educators predicted a gloomy, fleeting future, but Community Academy excelled at educating and counseling primarily African and Latinx students. I had found my place for service to my community. One student recalled studying at CA:

Community Academy I was a senior in High school that had just got expelled from my secondary school for weapons and constant behavior issues. When I arrived at Community Academy, I brought all of my beliefs and assumptions about the academic environment. I thought I would continue my approach to education as I had before getting to Community Academy. I thought I would continue to cut classes, disrupt the academic environment, and take a hands-off approach to my responsibility for obtaining an education. I was pleasantly mistaken. The support staff and educators challenged the student body to be better, at times without saying a word. They modeled the beauty of blackness with their fashion, energy, education, and confidence in the world. They shook my hand firmly and embraced me with hugs that communicated to my spirit that I was loved, valued, and welcomed.

They also held me accountable for carrying myself with respect and dignity. Brother Malcolm gave me the assignment to write a position paper for the first time in my high school experience. I scribbled some stuff and turned it in. Brother Malcolm returned my essay with many red marks and instructed me to rewrite the paper, and I ended up rewriting the paper three times before receiving the final grade of a C. Some might read this and say, C! If so, you have missed the point! It wasn’t the grade that mattered most; it was the fact that Brother Malcolm saw the writer in me, long before I could see it in myself.

This was simply the norm at Community Academy. Staff saw each of us as valuable when some of us did not believe in ourselves. They made us feel proud of who we were then and at the same time called us forward into whom we were going to be, with the looks in their eyes and the energy of their spirits. When I look back for heroes in my life that planted the seeds of becoming a black man with convictions for my freedom to be lived out on purpose, I look to Community Academy. They represented role models for how we should aspire to live free.

Jason Cross,

former student

Students entered the alternative school program enraged about administrative dismissals and infractions such as fist-fights, spitting, pushing, bumping into, or accidentally hitting or embarrassing a teacher. Students might be the victims of violence from other students and have to defend themselves. Many students fought outside of the school and were swept up by school police for their presence, observing an incident. There were occasions where staff or school police might find a razor, knife, or other sharp-edged instruments, and the student faces expulsion. In the most extreme cases, students would be caught with illegal firearms or charged with discharging a gun after school, suspended then eventually expelled. In other severe cases, the school district would assign students to alternative settings after an arrest outside of school for attempted murder with a firearm. These cases were uncommon but indicative of students assigned to Community Academy.

Teachers trained each other (tactics to be listed and explained) to educate students who did not regularly attend school. There were groups of students who attended school for years but achieved minimal course credits (The Auditor), sat reverentially in class, disrupted at a moment’s notice, ate lunch, and participated in field trips (Social Butterfly), then left school as if never present. It would be ten years or more of schooling without receiving a single credit towards graduation. For this group of students, at-risk alternatives exist as a system of compensatory excellence.

For Africans, life in America began in violence, regrettable but true. Too many environments disrupt learning and distract students. Community Academy kept its doors open and its teaching strategies flexible and demanding. For the initial three years of its existence, the school educated students and received professional learning visitations from several other school districts to observe and assess our model. It had become champions of the school for at-risk students! Violence was rare, though voices raised in anger were frequent.

A public school was reimagined, coordinated, and staff collaborated on strategies and tactics to fascinate the local court system, the sending schools, and patrol officers who supervised students. These judges, counselors, and probation officers witnessed our miracles, marveled at the efficiency, and routinely referred to teachers as saints. One visiting juvenile court judge strolled through the school and commented openly, you people have worked a miracle. The juvenile court judge had presided over the cases of many of our students who came into his court careless, angry, shocked, disheveled, and apathetically clutching anti-adult conceptions of school and life success. Street gangs, drug dealers, illicit earnings of all genres, and the police officers have too much importance in their lives. The combined effects of street socialization, the police, and now the judges made life a Sisyphean circle of detention, prison, mediocrity, addiction, and hopelessness that only saints and their helpers could mitigate. Over time I became convinced:

Education for at-risk and African and Latinx students is comparable to training soldiers to organize and mobilize their contemporaries for transforming the American social system under the leadership of the African and Latinx working class. It is deliberate.

I write this text in the spirit of David Walker’s Appeal (1830), a treatise exhorting Africans to end slavery in America by any available means, armed with the same force and urgency. As there is no history analogous to the enslavement, breeding, discrimination, rape, lynching, segregation, and miseducation of Africans anywhere in the world, a new system of education must emerge. They are agents for their destiny, who eventually transform society for leadership by the African and Latinx working class. Furthermore, I quote John Dewey (1922 p. 248) on Africans and education in America he states: [A]ny people held in subjection and at great disadvantage economically and politically, he states, is bound to show the consequences. It is kept back while the other people go ahead. Then the dominant group finds plenty of facts to quote in support of their belief in their own superiority. Dewey cut straight and steadfast to the facts of life for at-risk families as the dominant White settler class perpetuates privilege and advantage. The complicated and dangerous Jericho road was clear.

My Edward Said moment was the beginning of the war between my institutional restrictions and secular activism.

Liberation is Imperative!

Education creates citizens who question authority, apply science and reason for using solutions to their circumstances, and alter them for the collective benefit. A liberatory educational style is transformative as it reflects and renews itself to improve the life, outlook, and destiny of at-risk students dramatically. There is practical guidance in this text. The decolonization strategies within these pages run parallel to Freire‘s (1972) critical pedagogy.

A History Lesson

The public school representatives from the cities of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Detroit, Michigan, and Baltimore, Maryland, sent teams of teachers to Community Academy in Boston, Massachusetts, in its second year to observe its program. For this author, the visit was impressive as it verified team-based effectiveness in African struggle. Visitors celebrated classroom behavior management strategies, hallway passage between classes, dress code, and our plan for ensuring achievement for the neediest, at-risk students. The visiting educators reviewed and queried the neediest students on behavior and academic achievement. Their interests included avoiding and diminishing gang and other violent activities, conducting extra-curricular activities, and presenting a robust sense of cultural and ethnic identity. Dedication, racial and cultural pride, soaring spirits, and love were requirements to expand student intellect! This school accomplished the impossible. The visiting educators marveled at student respect for staff. These students had been reassigned, out of sight, or discarded without education.

When our visitors observed student attentiveness to uniforms, rapid and peaceful passing from classes, and general respect for staff and administration, they requested a roundtable exchange of ideas, questions, and comments. They asked for lists of successful strategies for excellence to inform their alternative learning environments. They found it unbelievable that CA could complete a day without a violent incident, gang-related disagreements, dissatisfaction, and abuse of female staff, not to mention an entire year of the tension produced by the school and home demands. A visiting educator inquired about strategies to inspire compliance with free-reading, creative writing, reflective thinking, and overhead presentations. Historically, students rarely wrote more than two to three pages of text for any course on urgent issues of the day. Instead, they needed strategies for inspiring student free-writing to counter their obsession with playing sports, getting high on drugs, socializing, or violence to captivate their attention. They arrive home to a single parent overwhelmed by other children or discouraged from low wage employment stresses. The questions were sincere and professional. The resounding response was, It’s the staff.

If I had to summarize my experience at Community Academy in one word, it would be defiant. Ironically, it was defiance and lack of focus, direction, and self-determination that placed me at the front door of a program called Community Academy. It was a program inside a recreation center that I once played tag, basketball, and shot pool, but now I am forced to look at this space as a learning institution. The expectations of hard work and greater expectations were stated at the threshold. A Black woman led the team as the Principal and strong Black males as unafraid instructors to check me if needed. Then I met Malcolm. English was always my favorite subject, and growing up, I would often read the dictionary and the thesaurus to learn. However, Malcolm had no problems writing in bold, red lettering his thoughts and standards of excellence. Fluff! I remember hearing and reading referencing when you start an essay and say, I feel that, I believe, What I think the author is saying. His unapologetic demand for excellence from Black and Brown young men that he knew that society would not give breaks or show mercy on is what helped shape me into the man I am today."

Daniel Davis

former student

A unique, urban public school is competitive with any traditional school if it has a mindset for the cultural background, fundamental learning skills, and dedication to students who, through no fault of their own, have been neglected. Their basic academic instincts are subject to low expectations from schools, sporadic violence, popular media and culture, incredulous parenting, and no individual or collective group vision for the future. Accidents such as bouncing a basketball that unintentionally injures a student or teacher and gives the appearance of an assault or act of physical aggression and school administrators begin the suspension process. Students experience expulsion, and school leaders transfer them to a different learning environment. In any case, visiting educators were amazed by students’ behavior and curiosity about learning. Teacher sameness reinforced the fact that racial and ethnic knowledge and understanding would inspire them to change their behavior and eventually achieve excellence due to efficacy and fortitude. Here were some of the takeaways:

Require and maintain high standards for punctuality, behavior, language, hygiene, appearance, manners, course proficiency.

Teachers model expectations for behavior and achievement.

Counseling is on-demand, and psychological education is vital.

The school building is a sanctuary, and high achievement is a religion.

Students internalize that the staff is sensitive, dedicated, and student-centered.

The Visionary School (VS) embodies high academic standards and behavior management components designed for school districts to achieve academic excellence. The perspective derives from decades of gaining verifiable knowledge of at-risk, expulsion student achievement in the alternative school. I firmly believe that public schools best serve their students by teaching American history’s objective truths instilling justice for the African and Latinx working class’s empowerment and leadership.

The leadership is a mission for the educator who confidently instructs students to liberate their thinking for White settler-colonial society’s ultimate renovation. He performs with a student-centered, culturally responsive, and progressive transfer of the obligation to investigate and challenge the status quo. The next task is grooming failing students for excellence in advocacy for freedom.

This enlightenment mission openly dismisses public school employees with a stake in liberal solutions to poverty, sustaining mediocrity, permanent employee status, and dependence. It chastises administrators, teachers, counselors, and paraprofessionals who find comfort in their professional relationship with a system of indoctrinating students to accept the history and practices of colonial White power and control.

This mission does not countenance the would-be administrator whose goal is prestige, political appointments, and economic gain, the striver or African and Latinx ‘first’ who relishes individual accomplishment over collective advancement. His or her passage occurs at the expense of thousands of students, who languish in ghettoes unprepared and incompetent. This individual dismisses his complicity in low achievement for the neediest of his community and other communities. The Visionary mission rejects this administrator at all costs.

This mission is not for the educator who is comfortable with the normalization of colonial White power. This educator instructs to contend with and replace an economic system that crushes human potential, perpetuates low wages, and maintains a privileged ruling class control of elected officials. In turn, the ruling class blames the poor and the working class for their condition. Educators teach equity, not unearned opportunity and privilege.

This mission rejects complacent content area teachers for whom student mediocrity in reading, writing, mathematics, and thinking skills is sufficient. They avoid teaching the whole student for self-determination and social consciousness. These teachers arrive late and discharge themselves early when students need individual attention.

This mission resists educators’ contentment with the strategies and tactics that school districts have implemented as if to nibble at the edges of the colossal problem of race and class. The mission acknowledges that colonial White power, even as it elects and promotes African and Latinx men and women to lead its professional, political, and economic institutions, capitalism must be eliminated.

A targeted, at-risk student population that sparks public education’s eventual transformation might be problematic for university-level college professors with aspirations for tenure safety. The rewards of publishing and department leadership never challenge status quo expectations for advancement. These chapters’ contents exist in contrast to conventional wisdom: Students and their families are the solutions, not the problem. In effect, the mission will not suffer any educator who apologizes, then absolves a wretched system of White corporate ruling class control. It is intolerable that mostly White females are the primary educators of the victims of colonial White power: African and Latinx, at-risk.

What Is the Rationale for Visionary Schools?

Mission and Purpose

Visionary Schools’ (VS) ultimate mission is to create, develop, maintain, and refine a public education unique in its delivery of services first to the at-risk and eventually all school districts across America. As an advocate of culturally responsive teaching (Gay, 2010), I purposefully designed this book as a vital tool for training overwhelmingly White female teachers in schools of education and professional development. Culturally responsive teaching and behavior management enhance White teachers’ skills for educating colonized populations, African and Latinx students, for their liberation.

Students in alternative schools have been expelled, suspended, and transferred for disciplinary, social disruptions, sporadic and premeditated violence, and safety reasons eroding quality education. Instruction for these students will be culturally competent and relevant, coupled with an essential guiding purpose: disseminating skills to destroy colonial White power’s effects and the unearned privileges perpetuated by it. Education should be a frontal eradication of superiority of skin complexion or class distinction. Education means abandoning all semblances of ‘race hucksterism‘or race reductionism, for one man/woman’s duty to the higher calling of consciously nurturing all human development. Full citizens can then introduce a social and economic system whose foundation respects and promotes leadership from every social sector.

At-risk students include violent, emotionally maladjusted, court-mandated, academically disadvantaged, and abused. These impediments require supplemental, targeted counseling, and direct instruction. The Visionary Schools’ rationale is to provide race and class-based academic solutions to the failures and setbacks that have haunted many at-risk students in traditional public schools across America.

Alternative School to Transformative Public Education

Public schooling maintains mediocrity, African self-hatred, and acceptance of colonial White power’s enduring and endemic nature and maintaining a permanent underclass. As an alternative to public education and the seed of liberation, VS prepares itself with American educational history, African-centered psychology, and evidence-based best practices to answer the question alternative to what? The school offers the unconventional response to the seemingly endless stream of functionally illiterate young men and women (Snyder & Dillow, 2015). It provides the elimination of the educational underclass of African and Latinx students suffering mediocre personal and professional lives. As a result, the Visionary School becomes the standard for America’s public-funded school system, educating underserved and