Episode 12: Is it Worth it: The True Cost of Sending Our Kids of Color to Independent Schools

In this episode, we talk about the true cost of sending our kids of color to independent schools and if it is really worth it. We break down the fact that the composition for black youth in independent schools is racially dissent, demographically the population does not reflect the multiracial reality of our nation as a whole and how lack of racial diversity within faculty is an issue.

Reveta Bowers is the formerly retired Head of School at the Center for Early Education in West Hollywood. She recently came out of retirement to be Interim Head at CEE and is the current National Chair of The Common Sense Media Board of Directors. 

Luthern Williams is the Head of School at New Roads School in Santa Monica. He has over 25 years of experience as an administrator and English teacher in independent schools in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles.

We discuss:

- Advice To Parents With Children Of Color In Independent Schools

- How School Leadership Can Acknowledge Lack Of Diversity

- The Beginning of Affinity Groups

-  How Children Can Deal With The Feeling Of Duality

...and more! 

Here are some highlights: 

The Last Time Reveta Bowers Felt eRaced

“Last week. I was in a store waiting to be helped and standing next to someone else who had walked up after I walked up,” Reveta said. “The person turned and asked the person who had just gotten to the counter whether she could help her and luckily, that person was gracious enough to say, ‘Excuse me, she was here before I was.”

The Last Time Luthern Williams Felt eRaced

“It was actually several months ago in a professional meeting, and I was one of the only African ­Americans in this meeting, of people from various schools,” Luthern said. “I raised an issue about race that really I think, people weren't ready to hear. Often in those cases, I either have to sort of feel like I need to silence myself or to prepare for the big consequences of speaking my mind.”

Implications Of Lacking Diversity In Independent Schools

“The experience of racism is a reality that has severe social, economic, psychological and physiological implications. Generally speaking, independent schools perpetuate institutional systems of whiteness and power, and that the general demographic is majority white,” Collette said.

“The values and behavioral norms reinforce whiteness as the normative power structure. The prevalence of the ‘myth of sameness’ helps individuals who lack the vocabulary and knowledge of systematic racism to distance themselves and therefore their students from developing their own strategies for engaging within diversity and addressing racist experience. How do schools move away from institutionalizing whiteness, especially if they don't recognize that they're even doing it?”

Luthern Williams’ Take On Schools Fixing Racism

“A school really can't move forward in its process toward really dismantling issues of institutionalized racism until there is actually an awareness,” Williams’ said. “I think that usually involves really developing an analytic framework as well as the vocabulary to begin to see what to them has largely remained invisible. So I think that the first step always has to be acknowledging that there actually is a problem. Otherwise that problem just continues.” 

Reveta Bowers’ Advice On School Leadership Acknowledging The Problem

“The age of the children in the school has a lot to do with how we approach this work,” Reveta said. “Remember that I'm in a preschool through sixth grade, so when parents are coming to look at my school, some of their children aren't walking and talking yet. So it's much easier to have these conversations about coming into an environment as children are beginning to gain greater awareness of the world around them and the children around them.”

“Of course, parents of young children will often say, well, you know, my child is colorblind and I always come back with ‘no children are color blind, unless they can't see at all’ because one of the first things that children begin to discriminate around are colors. They're very clear about colors. Whether that's Crayola’s in a box, blocks on a shelf or people in a classroom. So the more diverse the school is, the more hungry people are for these conversations, but that's a long journey for many schools to undertake, and sometimes a really steep hill to climb.”

Reveta Bowers’ Looking At School Choice

“I think we have to look at the issue of school choice. This is not a discussion about public versus private or independent or parochial or boarding school or anything else,” Reveta Bowers said. “It's about every family coming to grips with what the choices and alternatives are that are both available to them and accessible to them. Any school is gonna require sacrifices. The school at the end of your block that you can walk to and that your children can walk to, because schools demand certain levels of participation, certain levels involvement of volunteerism, of sharing resources, but independent schools, particularly emphasize involvement of families as partners in the education of their children. So for me as a parent, it was always worth it, because I was in a work environment where I had left one system and saw the incredible opportunities and benefits in another one.”

“Leadership matters in this, and I was fortunate enough to work for a board in a school that had been founded by Jews, leaving Nazi Germany and Austria and England at the beginning of World War II,  to come to Los Angeles and eventually start a school. So there was a mindset in their minds about how incredibly important cultural identity, racial identity, religious identity, and diversity and discrimination were in the founding of the school. So when you have a board that has a mindset that they want an inclusive environment because of their own personal experience, you're way ahead of the game Usually it's the educational administrative sign or the parent side that's pushing for diversity, inclusion, and equity.”

Luthern’s Parents’ Southern History And Moving To California

“I think about my own parents and why I ended up in private school, which was not necessarily by intention,” Williams’ said. “My parents are both from the South and Louisiana. They went to segregated schools, and my mom  used to talk about having to read books that were hand me down books from the white schools with  pages torn out and books being out of date, and it was really important for them that we have access to a high quality education. When they moved to California and they first lived in a very working class African ­American neighborhood, but realized that on the other side of the valley where my parents moved, it was much more affluent and it seemed that the schools  were... The kids were achieving at a much higher level, so they moved all five of us there, and then  I ended up getting a scholarship for football to a private school, and I think that my parents always  are very clear, you're there for the education.”

Advice For Parents To Make Independent Schooling More Enjoyable For Their Children

“You have to think about finding the best fit environment for your child, because it's not worth it if you've chosen a school for your reasons,” Reveta said. “The child is sitting in that school and in that classroom hiding in plain sight, trying to be invisible because they don't feel as though they fit in anyway. So if academically it's out of reach or intellectually or emotionally, or the sacrifices a family is making to send their child to the school, all of a sudden, seem punitive within their family.”

“I don't think it's worth it to drive the child two and a half or three hours to get to a school, but for some children, if the experience on the other end of that drive is pleasurable, then it's worth it. But I think so many of our children of color are in schools where they're hiding in plain sight. Everybody else can see who they are, but they can't see who they are themselves within the reflection of the school. They don't see anybody who looks like them, that's an adult, or anybody in their class who looks like them.”

Williams’ Perspective On His School, New Roads

“When I think about my own school, I think about New Roads, it was founded because the founders largely felt that Brown versus the Board of Education had been a failure,” Luthern said. “That there wasn't a socioeconomically, racially, and culturally integrated school in Los Angeles. So diversity was at the core of its DNA, there is no New Roads without diversity. One of the things I keep going back to is, does the school have an institutional commitment to diversity and equity? To me, that means looking at your students. It means looking at your faculty. It means looking at your board. It means looking at your administration.”

The Beginning Of Affinity Groups

“And you know what, schools are not just accepting children, we're accepting families. I know when I first came to the center, there were very few families of color, very few, a handful. But it was important for them to have a place in the school where they could get together outside of school to really share and embellish the experience they were having in the walls of the school. So that was the first affinity group that was started, the heritage families.”

“It was a rich tradition over the years as the school became more diverse. We moved from 3% students of color to 51% students of color now. From three teachers of color in the beginning, and all three of us were a different racial identity to 45% of the faculty and staff being people of color now, but as Luthern said, it is a journey. It doesn't happen overnight.” Reveta said. “We can apologize for the experience they had, and we should apologize. But how can we work on not just diversity and not just equity, but on the most important standard of all, which is the inclusion in the schools in which these children are enrolled.”

Luthern Williams’ On Dealing With Duality

“I think about why it is that I actually became an administrator,” Luthern said. “I was actually brought to a school in New York City, a very prestigious school. The Black Student Union actually protested to bring me there because they said they couldn't find a qualified African­ American teacher in New York. So they found a 21 ­year ­old African American man right out of college who was connected to people from the school. But it was a very interesting thing because I remember at that school, there was this beautiful dark skin girl, and very regal. Just innate. Her name was Amatullah, and she didn't say a word in my classroom. She was in my English class and I remember she used to always walk with her head to the ground. I noticed that a lot of the African­ American kids there, they were surviving, they weren't thriving.”

“In some cases, they were getting a second class education in a world class institution. I saw this at several schools in a row, and I said something has to change. I realized that these schools have the capacity to be able to develop the full human potential of students. But what happens, I think with a lot of African ­American kids is they're still wearing their masks. They still have to have that double consciousness as they are in the schools. I left the school but this young woman ended up winning the Creative Writing award and she ended up writing her essay about me, her college essay. I think this goes back to what Reveta was saying. I think the need is to diversify the faculty and diversify the administration and diversify the board. So you shift the conversations that people are having, and you have different kinds of people helping to set the agenda for the school. For everyone.” 

Reveta Bowers’ On School Obligation To Help Parents

“It's an obligation to not only provide professional development for faculty, but professional development for parents. Parental education that names it. That speaks of it,” Reveta said. “To be clear about what a family is joining when they join an independent school. To speak out loud, when these families come into our school about our mission, our purpose, our values or philosophy of education, our commitment to diversity because if you don't want to be there, then don't accept the invitation to be there.”

Reveta Bowers’ On Changes Since Coming Out Of Retirement (32:36)

“I came out of retirement back to a school that was diverse when I left, and it's even more diverse now, and that's a credit to the board and the administration for continuing on the path of that strategic vision,” Reveta said. “That has been an important part of the mission and the values of the school, but there are other school heads of other schools in Los Angeles in different places on their journey, but like minded educators. That's why schools that are in different places on the journey need to find ways to collaborate, to convene, to invite, to assemble, to share resources, and to have conversations across leadership circles and board members.”

“Talking to board members in other schools, and heads talking to heads in other schools. That's why I take the responsibility of my school to be a convener, so seriously. If they can come into a community that's willing to have these hard conversations and listen as others have those conversations, and if we can model, we know that others will follow and will have the courage to take those steps because they see it working somewhere else. That's critically important.”

Luthern Williams’ Explains Change Has To Be A Desirable Amount Of Challenge For Someone

“I think we have taken it upon ourselves to build our capacity as antiracist heads of school and try to figure out of how we do this work,” Luthern said. “It's a multiracial group and we started a few years ago. One of the things that I think we need to realize is that just like with learning, you have to find a desirable level of challenge for people, and there's only a certain level of anxiety and stress that you can put into a process for optimal growth. So I think that schools have to approach their work very strategically and figure out what is the next step on the journey for my institution.”

Reveta Bowers’ Thoughts On If Independent School: Is Worth It ?

“I would say it's absolutely worth it because I think the sacrifices that families make to send their children to independent schools today is both an opportunity, but it's also an investment,” Reveta said. “But it's got to be the right school. It's gotta be the right match. It's gotta be a place where they feel as the values of their home are aligned as much as possible with the values of  the school. They see themselves having a role in the school as parents, and a role in the school for their children as well. But they believe the school is worth investing in with their time, with their personal resources, with their energy, and with their voice.”

“I think every parent should talk to alumni from a school and ask about their experience. If what you hear sounds good, then pursue or explore the school. In schools, we have a real obligation to make it easier for parents to feel included and families to feel included as well with systems, protocols and procedures. Sometimes even resources to make all of the school available to them in the same way it is available to other children in the school.”

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