No sooner had we sent out our “DEI faces continued scrutiny” email than the following headline appeared in the Boston Globe:
Our students in Boston and Montana speak to one another and learn how to disagree: Regular Zoom calls help high schoolers make sense of America’s cultural and political divides.
By Julian K. Braxton and Brad Faulhaber
We have been vocal in our criticism of schools that suppress viewpoint diversity, so when one of those schools does something positive, it requires a shout-out.
For the past seven years, two teachers from opposite ends of the country (and political spectrum) have worked to help students explore polarizing topics such as guns, affirmative action, “environmental justice,” and abortion, just to name a few. At Boston’s Winsor School, this happens in a senior elective called Politics of Identity, taught by Julian K. Braxton, one of the article’s authors.
The Globe article explains, "Winsor is an all-girls, racially diverse private school for students in grades 5-12, located near the hub of Boston’s education, research, health care, and biotechnology industries. Boston, as readers of this paper know, is in a metropolitan area of 5 million people, and the median home price in the area is nearly $1 million. Sidney High has a more homogeneous student body. It’s located in rural northeast Montana, in a town with a population of about 6,100 residents, where the median home price is $251,700. Sidney is the wellspring of Montana’s oil and gas industries. In the last presidential election, residents in Sidney High’s ZIP code voted 80 percent for Donald Trump and 18 percent for Joe Biden, while residents in Winsor’s ZIP code voted 91 percent for Biden and 7 percent for Trump."
What have the students learned? According to one student, “Our exchange showed me what good civil discourse looks like. We never dehumanized [each other] or looked down on each other’s views. We learned to listen, truly listen, not to convince but to understand.”
“Uncomfortable” classes that push students to think and hear different perspectives like this should be foundational to K-12 education. Given how important this work is, why wait until senior year and not make the class a graduation requirement for all students? If the DEI offices are not going away, why don’t they teach students to reclaim their sense of agency and tackle complex issues outside their “echo chamber bubbles?” They could pursue truth and present the other side of the illiberal race, gender, and climate worldview that is pushed as fact. This would strengthen the students’ mental muscles and better prepare them for college.
Braxton states, “This year, we’re trying something new in our collaboration: our first election night Zoom session, when we will be processing results that may be out of our comfort zones.”
One can only hope that the response to the 2024 election results differs from what happened after the 2016 election. When Trump beat Clinton, teachers had meltdowns in front of the students, canceled classes, called for emergency assemblies, and allowed school-sanctioned crying in the hallways. No one was modeling appropriate behavior. Ironically, the adults were not the adults in the room and seemed to be teaching kids how to be fragile, anxious, and depressed.
This brings us to next week. We will be rooting for the students in Julian K. Braxton and Brad Faulhaber’s classes to lead the way and show us how to “unite around our common humanity rather than see each other as enemies to be vanquished.”
Resources
Generation Z and the Transformation of American Adolescence: How Gen Z’s Formative Experiences Shape Its Politics, Priorities, and Future by Daniel A. Cox, Kelsey Eyre Hammond, Kyle Gray (AEI)
Are Young Voters Ready to Elect the Next President? Not Yet, Says Generation Dissatisfied by Rachel Janfaza (Glamour)
Thanks for reading Parents Unite! Subscribe to our Substack for free to receive new posts and support our work.