With summer underway and students settled into break, it is worth recognizing the deep sigh of relief for Black families at this time of year.
Many Black parents carry an impossible societal burden. We navigate hostile systems while also fighting for housing stability, healthcare access, and economic survival—not only for our biological children, but also for the young people in our communities whom we claim as our own. We protect children from violence while advocating against discriminatory policing. We explain racism to our babies while trying to shield them from its daily assaults. These battles compound until the sheer volume of injustice leaves families depleted.
There is also another part of the school-year story that deserves naming: many parents are simply relieved they survived it. The constant calls to leave work. The demand to pick up a child over behavior that feels more like ordinary childhood than crisis. Witnessing bullying that breaks your heart. Watching a child’s curiosity slowly dim as they sludge through 180-plus days of schooling. That is not every child’s experience, but it is real, and we cannot ignore the fact that it happens or the conditions that make it possible.
For Black parents, school is rarely just a place of learning. It is often a site of daily negotiation, vigilance, and prayer. We are not only hoping our children achieve; we are hoping they are seen, protected, challenged, and nurtured. So something shifts when a child has an excellent teacher, a school that sees them, loves them, and holds high expectations for them. Suddenly, a parent has capacity that did not exist before. You are no longer spending every ounce of energy fighting the school in addition to fighting the world.
Too many people still act as if the answer is simply hiring more teachers into schools fundamentally shaped by disinvestment, harmful policy, and instability. Recruitment without transformation only pulls more adults into an anti-Black system and calls it progress. The real work is changing the conditions Black children and their educators are expected to survive and thrive in, so that teaching is not reduced to an act of triage inside a hostile environment.
This is precisely why the Center for Black Educator Development (CBED) teacher retention toolkit matters: schools cannot become places where children flourish if they refuse to become places where educators—especially educators of color—can stay, lead, and thrive.
School communities can choose to become places that connect families, educators, and community partners; that organize around shared goals for justice; and that use every meeting, policy, and practice to loosen the grip of inequity instead of tightening it. When principals and teachers move that way, schools stop acting like extensions of the status quo and start functioning as part of the infrastructure of resistance.
Too often, educators talk as though schools “have communities.” I prefer to think of it the other way around: communities have schools within them. That distinction matters. It reminds those of us who work inside school buildings that we are not the center of the story. We are guests, and it behooves us to act like it—to do the kind of work that honors the people, histories, and relationships already rooted there. Many educators are, in fact, visitors to those communities, not the other way around, no matter how often power dynamics tempt us to behave as if the school owns the neighborhood.
Quality education is not separate from the rest of our struggle; it is part of the foundation that makes that struggle possible. When our children sit in classrooms where they are unseen, where expectations are low, or where they are treated as problems to be controlled, families are forced into constant emergency mode. We are advocating in meetings, fighting unfair discipline, patching curriculum gaps at home, soothing our children’s damaged spirits each night, using our homes as detox centers from their schooling experiences, and fighting like hell to get them to what feels like a safe harbor.
There is no city in America where the entire district is safe harbor for Black children. At best, we find pockets of safety inside systems that were not originally designed with our children’s full humanity in mind.
When my parents fought for Black children’s safety, it was never only about physical safety. Their non-negotiable understanding of safety included intellectual, cultural, emotional, and spiritual safety. That is why my Mama and her friends—Mamas Janet Ryder and Judith Hokhmah among them—joined the teaching profession in the 1970s. They were not entering classrooms simply to deliver content. They were stepping into schools to protect Black children, teach them fiercely, and create spaces where Black children could know themselves as brilliant, worthy, and fully human. Honoring their legacies means continuing to fight for that fuller vision of safety now.
That fight starts early. Research on bias in early childhood education, including preschool discipline and surveillance, reminds us that Black children are often watched more closely, read more suspiciously, and disciplined more harshly as early as ages three and four—even when they are simply being children. That pattern continues across the pipeline. On Instagram, Black students at elite high schools, prep schools, and colleges used social media to document the racism they were enduring in places that were supposed to represent access and opportunity. Many of our children come to understand race not as an abstraction, but as a wound. Detentions, suspensions, in schools and out of school, even referrals for discipline often racialized and inequitable.
I know this truth personally. By the time my son had Ms. Joyce Abbott as his sixth-grade teacher at Hamilton, I was already a seasoned educator. And still, it was a huge sigh of relief to know my back was covered simply because my child was being taught brilliantly.
Ms. Abbott—the same legendary educator who inspired Quinta Brunson to name her hit show Abbott Elementary after her—did not just teach him. She loved him, advocated for him, and held expectations that honored his brilliance.
Ms. Brenda Morton, who taught my son at Penrose Elementary, was another teacher who allowed me to breathe as a parent. My children had others too. And if they had that caliber of teacher every year—if every Black child did—the whole sham would be up. The lie that our children are deficient, that our families do not care, that our communities are the problem could not survive what happens when Black children are consistently taught, affirmed, and pushed by people who know exactly who they are and who they can become.
That is part of what servant leadership looks like in education. It is not performative care. It is not charity. It is the disciplined choice to use your knowledge, authority, and labor in service of children and communities, not your ego. It means understanding that your job is not simply to cover content, but to develop human beings. It means that a child leaves your classroom safer, sharper, more grounded, and more capable than when they entered it.
That is also what culturally responsive pedagogy actually demands. When some teachers push back and say they “love” all their students, that claim is not automatically dismissed. But it is fair to question what they mean by “love,” because too many teachers love their content far more than the children they were hired to teach. So the real question is this: what does that love actually do in the lives of Black children growing up in a world saturated with anti-Black messages in curricula, social media, and society writ large?
As Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings has reminded us for decades, love for Black children is inseparable from rigor, relationships, and high expectations. Culturally relevant pedagogy is not vibes, décor, a diverse classroom library, posters of freedom fighters, or a single lesson in February. It is teaching well, as if Black children are full human beings whose intellect, culture, and futures matter to them and to all of us. It means helping students develop positive racial identity while becoming highly literate, numerate, and adept in complex problem-solving, pattern recognition, self-advocacy, and the battles that are sure to come later for themselves and their communities.
That is why family engagement has to be more than a slogan. Parent organizing is how families build enough collective power to insist that schools become places where Black children are safe intellectually, culturally, emotionally, and spiritually—not just physically. It is also why I adore Mama Sarah Carpenter so deeply. The work of Memphis Lift is quintessential in how it educates and empowers parents to advocate for their children and insists that the people closest to the problem should lead the solution.
Oakland REACH offers another powerful example of parent work that treats families as strategists, organizers, advocates, and builders of solutions—not as spectators to decisions already made. Groups like PAVE help families study the system, navigate special education and IEP processes, sit with decision-makers, and turn lived experience into demands about funding, safety, and school quality. Going in to change policies alone, one child at a time, is daunting and we can have our voices heard more clearly in unison.
Spaces like the Parent & Kinship Action Lab remind us that when parents gather, analyze, and advocate together, they are building the conditions their children need to survive and thrive. The same parent-power logic runs through the National Parents Union: families must know what to ask, document what they see, and act in concert instead of suffering in isolation. Parent advocacy is not extra credit; it is survival. A culturally responsive approach to family engagement starts from the assumption that parents care, know their children, and hold expertise schools cannot replace. It treats families as co-architects of safe, rigorous, culturally affirming schools—not as audiences to manage or public-relations problems to contain.
Black teaching frameworks offer a powerful model: teach and develop your replacements in society. Teach the children who will be stronger, smarter, and faster than you, and who will build on the long arc of the moral universe being pressed toward justice.
At the Center for Black Educator Development, when we work with our high school and college teacher apprentices, we stress and model this same long view. The young first- through third-grade scholars they teach in our Freedom Schools Literacy Academy and through CTE pathways matter right now, but so do the trajectories of those children’s grandchildren and future progeny. The choices teachers make about rigor, identity, love, and justice ripple across generations. Mindsets Matter Most.
James Baldwin understood the stakes when he said that teaching Black children is a revolutionary act. Maya Angelou framed literacy with similar urgency when she said, “Elimination of illiteracy is as serious an issue to our history as the abolition of slavery.” That is why a great teacher and a great school matter so profoundly for Black families. They do not erase food insecurity, environmental racism, wage theft, over-policing, or state abandonment. But they create breathing room. They mean a parent is not fighting the school and the world at the same time. They mean a child is not carrying the daily trauma of being unseen in the very place where they are supposed to grow. And they mean families gain the capacity to fight the larger battles pressing on our communities.
And so when June arrives, that familiar end-of-year sigh should mean something different.
It should not be the sound of families who simply made it through another year of unnecessary struggle—of fighting schools that should have been allies, of watching their children endure what they should have been protected from. It should not be relief rooted in survival alone.
It should be a collective exhale born of trust.
The kind that comes when, across an entire school year, our children were taught by educators who saw them clearly, pushed them rigorously, and cared for them deeply. When schools functioned as true partners in raising our children—in loco parentis not just in name, but in practice. When families did not have to spend the summer merely repairing the damage of the school year, stitching their children’s spirits back together, or rebuilding alone what the school should have helped protect.
That is the standard.
And when we build schools that meet it consistently—not as exceptions or pockets, but as the norm—Black families will have more than a moment to breathe. We will have greater capacity: to keep building our children up, yes, but also to confront the larger social and political harms pressing on our communities. We will have more strength to fight for housing, healthcare, safety, literacy, justice, and the futures our children deserve, because we will not be spending every summer recovering from what school did to them. And we might even get to enjoy summer the way our children deserve—with Black boy joy, Black girl magic, rest, laughter, play, freedom, and the fullness of being together.
