Our inequitable schools can't change in time for our kids. If it was going to happen soon, it would be happening right now, and it's not.

I don’t know how to write about education anymore.

Some might argue I never knew in the first place. Others might agree.

Most of what I have written on this blog has been, at its core, a series of questions — a search for answers.

How bad is the racial inequity in our schools? How did it get this way? What’s being done?

And it didn’t take long — a matter of a few months, really — for these questions to lead me to ask bigger, perhaps darker questions — but only because each answer led me further down the same pathway toward a fuller view of education as liberation.

Why do we school our kids in this way? Where did these methods come from? Are there other ways?

And what do we make of compulsory schooling in an age when we have been given such endlessly good reason to fear, resist and confront our government as an enemy of the people?

More than just asking idle questions, however, I have felt a responsibility to personally examine my life and my choices — and for my choices to align with a radical-if-necessary pursuit of true liberation for my kids and my family and myself.

What is my role in this violent inequity? How is the inequity in our schools connected to the inequity in our country and in our world? And where, then, does this inequity originate?

In searching for answers to these questions, I have read and watched and listened and talked about almost nothing else, and I’ve learned even more through first-hand experience. Through showing up and being a part of things when I felt called.

So, like I was saying, maybe I never knew how to write about education if this is where it led me. But I do know the difference between right and wrong, and I know the difference between letting myself off the hook and putting my foot down.

There has been endless talk over the years about the racial inequity in our schools, and about how unacceptable it is, and about what might be done to change it. This disgusting inequity has been a known reality since the 1950s, in fact, and we’ve done nothing but discuss it and fail to make any meaningful difference.

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Any shred of hope I was clinging to that it might happen soon — that our schools might somehow evolve quickly beyond their racism and classism and inequity — vanished soon after the 2020 quarantine. If people had ever acted with as much urgency and energy to stamp out racism in our school system as they did to get their kids back into school buildings during a pandemic, we’d be living in a different world.

Even as we saw more and more employers embrace effective, flexible work-at-home policies for their employees, we clung to a butts-in-seats mentality with our kids.

Even many parents who are outspoken critics of the systemic racism in our schools were eager to send their kids back into the same old mess.

We had the chance to change everything, and we didn’t do it. When push came to shove, we made fear-based decisions with our kids and their education. We retreated voluntarily to the familiar, supposedly unacceptable status quo.

And so I feel like I don’t know how to write about education anymore, because I feel completely alienated from the system that most people see as fundamental.

So even if I can’t convince you that compulsory schooling is inherently oppressive, or that our school system is an arm of the System of Oppression that is our country, or that our liberation depends on our independence from these systems of oppression, or that we must examine all the parts of ourselves and our lives — especially the way we are raising our kids — if we truly seek liberation from an oppressive capitalist-colonial system, then maybe I can convince you to look at the obvious evidence: This can’t change in time for your kids (if it can change at all). If it was going to happen soon, it would be happening right now, and it’s not.

For me and my family, we are not turning back to old ways that weren’t working. Even if it’s familiar and simple and alluring.

I want my children’s life and education to be more than a repeat of their parents’ old school wounds. Now is the time to be bold, to make decisions based in faith and a revolutionary view of education.

I’ll keep trying to write about education, but my focus has, with four kids at home, necessarily shifted from demanding radical change from a faceless system, to enacting radical change in my own life. This is a mission.

“Here’s our chance to act together,” as Bayo Akomolafe wrote in the foreword to the beautiful book “Raising Free People” by Akilah S. Richards, “to resolve a vile situation whereby education and learning got confused for each other, and children and childhood got colonized.”