Black Education Strategy Roundtable

The strengths, capabilities and potential of Black students are being highlighted in an asset-based narrative. BESR is developing this narrative through our Black Student Report Card. It is a narrative developed by Black people about our own students. Flipping the deficit-based narrative held about Black students, educators, policy makers, and community influencers can shift their mindset to a strength-based assessment and have high performance expectations of our students. Group and individual listening sessions were conducted with BESR members and students.

The state legislature authorized the State Board of Education (SBE) to grant school districts emergency graduation requirement waiver authorization for the 2021 and 2022 classes. Due to the suspension of the school operations and transition to online learning modalities, it was uncertain how students could complete all graduation requirements during their senior year. The SBE expediated their rule-making procedures and established emergency graduation waiver policy. Through advocacy with partner organizations, we added language to the policy requiring districts to dissagregate student demographics in their emergency waiver use reports back to SBE. For the class of 2021, Black students received the highest numbers of waivers. Black students who systemically have been underprepared for postsecondary achievement now graduated even less prepared for their future.

In addition to planning for the return of students to the classroom in 2021, opportunities for systemic change to education were realized. BESR joined with other education advocacy organizations and formed the Black Joy Consortium for Reimagining Schools. The consortium member organizations comprised mostly of non-BIPOC leadership, yet quickly agreed to focus our work on Black students and that BIPOC focused organizations should lead the work of the consortium. Black Joy is working with the OSPI executive team in addressing opportunities and challenges in establishing new practices in education.

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