Episode 2: The Teacher As Change Agent with Grant Hightower
Show Notes:
Everyday Antiracism edited by Mica Pollock
Contact Grant Hightower:
Follow him on Instagram @GSHightower
Follow the Reading METCO Facebook page.
Follow him on Twitter @METCO_Reading.
Transcript:
(transcribed by kayla.r.fainer@gmail.com)
Melissa Milner 0:00
Hi, this is Melissa Milner. Welcome to the Teacher As... podcast. The goal of this weekly podcast is to help you explore your passions and learn from others in education and beyond to better your teaching. The Teacher As... will highlight uncommon parallels to teaching as well as share practical ideas for the classroom. If you haven't already, make sure to check out episode one where I break down all the elements of the Teacher As... podcast.
I am starting my podcast with a series of episodes centered around the teacher as change agent. Not all my episodes will be this serious. But due to recent events, I felt it was vital to engage in dialogue about social justice in the systems that aren't working. In this episode for the teacher as change agent, I'm interviewing Grant Hightower, the METCO Director for Redding public schools. Grant’s experience and perspective are invaluable in the discussion of how to change systems in education.
Being new to this podcast thing, I didn't make sure that my microphone was turned on. So I apologize for technical difficulties and some sound issues. Let's get started.
Welcome Grant Hightower.
Grant Hightower 1:23
Thank you for having me.
Melissa Milner 1:26
So what do you want the Teacher As... podcast listeners to know about you and your work?
Grant Hightower 1:31
So, I don’t know. I guess my work is my life, I suppose. And I don't mean that in the draconian way. Because I work through an equity program, my life has been formed by the experiences that I've had along the lines of race. And so I would just say that this has been a lifetime's worth of work.
My primary focus is on adolescents and children. But the more that things have changed and the older that I've grown, my work has clearly spread into the realm of supporting adults as well, primarily non people of color or white folks and how they can become better advocates and allies. Just because I think we're at a point in our history, long overdue, we're past the point.
But I think that now there are more people concentrated on what they can do to change the status quo. And I think that in my community, we're just tired of the lip service, just because the lip service leads to loss of life. And that’s just something that we can't tolerate. And so my work, I guess, is guided by making sure that young people first and then people in general don't have to suffer through similar experiences that people in our background have.
Melissa Milner 3:03
We’re very lucky to have you in Reading Public Schools. I can say that. Of all this work you've done, what is your proudest moment?
Grant Hightower 3:13
Oh, I don't know. There's a lot of proud moments, I guess. Because when you're working with people, especially when you're working with them over time, you get to see the story play out. And so it's hard to whittle it down to one. So in the work that I've done, I've been a drug abuse counselor. I've been a sexual abuse counselor. I have been a teaching assistant in an inclusive special needs program. And I've been a METCO coordinator, and now I'm a METCO director.
So that's a lot of different kinds of people from a lot of different walks of life. And so I would just say that maybe my proudest moment is seeing somebody that I start with, whether it's a student or any person that I start my work with, seeing them get to a place where they have found stability or value in their life or purpose in their life. And there's a lot of those. There have been a lot of those situations. So I don't know if I can whittle it down to one. But just seeing people find peace within themselves, I guess, after a period of time and struggle is probably the most pride that I feel.
Melissa Milner 4:16
Yeah, that's pretty powerful. Let's talk about that work. So what structures need to be changed in our systems now, our education system, to allow for equity?
Grant Hightower 4:26
So there's a couple of schools of thought, but there's a few trains of thought that I have. And I guess the cooperative or the idyllic part of my brain says that we need to do some work on hiring and retaining educators of color, leaders of color in order to expose not only white students on how black and brown folks operate, but also how white folks could be good colleagues.
I think that, in my idyllic mind this, there's a lot in terms of curriculum review. How do we look at the content that we're teaching and scale that back, or improve on it, or challenge the status quo. So that's where I am with the ideal motion to change the structure that we have.
The part of me that's more emotional just says that there needs to be a separation for students of color from the existing structure. Because the public school educational system just has not worked for black and brown folks. And in some ways, it's even been weaponized to be the first stop in the school to prison pipeline. And so I think that finding ways to get students of color into a space where they feel comfortable is emotionally where my heart has been going.
How do we create spaces that allow for the learning styles that are exhibited by black and brown students? How do we staff it with people who understand the matriculation from kindergarten through 12th grade? Do we even need to have a K through 12 model? Do we need to continue to champion for students that the way to go is kindergarten to 12th grade then higher education?
We haven't seen an honest and true payout in that way. You still see wage disparities for black and brown students who have gone the traditional route, graduated with a degree, in some cases Masters and Doctorates. And there's still huge disparities in not only the wages, but also in the ways that they can access the world.
And so when I'm looking at these things strategically, the professional in me says, well, there are some concrete things like curriculum review, and training teachers, and having outreach, and recruiting and retaining. But then the other part of me that's a father and a former student and somebody who works closely with black and brown families says, there's got to be a better way.
Because the way that we have that exists still doesn't work. And in fact, it's almost as if the system requires that there's a group of people who don't perform well in order for it to exist, right? There's a whole industry built on this achievement gap piece. And I don't know how honest that kind of work is. So I’m caught right now in this era, trying to figure out what makes the most sense to support life. And I guess those are my two conflicting mindsets right now.
Melissa Milner 7:51
Yeah. The way I'm seeing it now, and I totally agree with everything you've just said, is that the system is setting certain people up to fail. It just is set up that way. And how do you change something that's been around forever? It's got to be something major to wake people up.
Grant Hightower 8:16
We’re in that space now where people are willing to take bigger risks. And I also think students of this generation are hungrier. They have a louder voice. They have a little bit more courage than even kids in my generation, 20 something years ago when I was in high school. So I think that there will be sweeping changes, but I do think that it's going to take courage on behalf of adults to support the changes that young people are asking for.
Melissa Milner 8:48
So in that, you're going to be a big piece of helping my district try to make some of these changes. What is a METCO Director do? And how do you help with these systems, and changing them, and helping families?
Grant Hightower 9:10
Yeah, so again, this is twofold. On the one hand, you would say METCO is an independent program, right? And so the job of the director is to make sure that the buses run from Boston to the receiving district, and that the director is working primarily with the students in that program, the families in that program, and then also the faculty of the receiving district to try to support the individual students that are in METCO.
That's the philosophy that some METCO directors have. And I'm not putting a value judgment on that or what I'm about to say. The way that I look at it is, and what I've experienced as a black educator is you have the ability - and in some cases, the privilege - to have an impact that's greater than even any white educator in a specific district.
And the reason why I don't think it's an inherent advantage is just that the lack of access to black and brown bodies and ideology and just presence alone is disarming to a lot of people who are just not used to seeing black and brown folks around them. And so they're curious to what you have to say. And then when you start talking and they see that you have ideas and you're a fully formed human being and not just this caricature or avatar that they're that they're used to seeing at a distance on a screen, you can connect with people in a way that I've experienced that's just different than white educators can.
And so I think that it's important that if you're a person of color, working in a homogenously white district, that you take the opportunity to try to influence it as best as you can. Because your kids are counting on you. And that’s a way to support your kids. That’s a way to support your families, is to inject yourself directly into the pedagogy of the district.
And so one of the things that I've done outside of my daily duties and running the program is challenge, what are the core values of the Reading Public School System, asking those questions to superintendents and district leadership. Are we taking the opportunity now to step back and look at what do we want the children who come through the Redding Public School District to look like after their 12th year? You know what I mean? What kind of human beings are we sending out into the world?
In my previous district, one of the things that I was able to do was create a class that was able to really challenge students around those core values in trying to figure out who they were, what their lens was about, and not trying to indoctrinate them or trying to get them to see anybody's perspective. But really getting them to fully form theirs, learn how to defend their position, and then also challenge their classmates.
Because one of the philosophies that I have is that we're past the point where adults can have a sweeping meaningful impact on kids. Kids have a greater impact on themselves in their peer groups than adults do. Kids, at this point, have learned how to just hear us and look like they're listening, and filter out what we're saying, and then moving on.
But there can be actual work done when students have the ability to have intense discourse with one another, challenging discourse. And so, anyway, I say all that to say part of the opportunity that I have or part of my job is to directly inject myself into the thought process of an entire district, and take my perspective and hoist that up as another possibility.
Melissa Milner 13:00
And I promise we are listening. We really are.
Now it's time for our “Zooming In” segment.
[ZOOMING IN SOUNDBITE]
So in your work, what are you zooming in on right now? Are you reading something? Or is there a program you're working on that you're really zooming in on?
Grant Hightower 13:08
So yeah, that just never ends. So right now I'm working on two-- I guess we'll call them professional development capsules or trainings. One for for students, and one is for adults. And it's all about how to be not an active antiracist, but it's all about antiracism and how do you impact your immediate community.
So the student program is geared towards how do students influence and champion what they would like to speak about and model what they want in a classroom environment to their teachers. And then the adult capsule is more about how you go about having courageous conversations and start the work of talking about how to reconstruct or reconfigure your existing school environment, whatever that may be.
And so one of the books that I've always read but I'm continuing to read is Everyday Antiracism, which is basically a compilation book. There's no specific author. It’s edited by a group of educators, and it's basically a compilation of a number of essays around how to build a classroom environment, how to have courageous conversations, how to look at curriculum review, any number of different organizational first order changes. And so I use that to kind of frame the work and use some of the educational jargon that's familiar with adults.
Because I know that there's two different learning styles, right? And so I want to be able to access both. So Everyday Antiracism is one of the books that I'm looking at. Stamped is another book that’s one of the hot books. I've had it for a few months now, but I'm getting into that just recently.
Melissa Milner 15:15
Yeah, I'm reading that. It's shocking, because we didn't learn any of that in school.
Grant Hightower 15:20
Yeah, so one of the things that I did in my previous district was we screened 13th when it first came out for the class that I taught called Diverse American Voices. And I think that those sorts of in depth research based looks at Americana, it shocks people. Because people don't pay attention to the way that a system is built. I think people just believe that things are or they aren't. And so to your point, yeah, I think that there are definitely some revelations in that book that are taking people aback and disarming them a little bit.
Melissa Milner 15:58
As part of the PD, have you-- I think it was a TEDx talk by Sydney Chaffee maybe about the actual activism. And she talked about teachers need to be comfortable with kids rebelling against the system. If you're teaching them to look at the facts, then you need to be prepared that they might then rebel against you, so that whole rebellion, protesting idea. Or are you just starting with antiracism and then we can talk about--?
Grant Hightower 16:30
So part of being able to be a teacher that can support those kinds of conversations is understanding that you're not always going to get it right and that you might incite kids or that you're going to deal with kids who are at different places, even in their understanding and learning. There are some kids who I speak with.
There's a weekly meeting that an organization from another town has, and it's primarily students of color. But there are a fair amount of white students that are on there as well. And there are kids on there who are light years ahead of some educators in terms of social justice or issues of equity and race. Because it's something that they're passionate about. For them it’s essential to their survival from their perspective.
And so you might have that child in your classroom. And I think that one of the things that I talk about quite frequently with adults who teach is you have to decentralize yourself from conversations, right? So you have to understand that you don't have to be the person who knows everything. Sometimes a conversation that you're hosting or that you're moderating in your classroom is an opportunity for you to learn as well.
And I always give them the example that I had-- Well, before I get to the anecdote, I guess the reason why I tell people that is because you have to understand that these kids are thirsty and hungry for knowledge as well. But they don't always know how to respond to the emotions that they feel when these things are brought up. And so part of your job is to listen first. And you don't have to be the authoritarian. It's okay to be vulnerable in your classroom.
And I think that one of the things that educators get afraid of is losing control in a classroom environment. One of the things that you can do to help you maintain that is from the very beginning, let the kids know that this is their space and that everybody needs to play their role in protecting that. That means making sure that the conversations stay within the walls of that classroom, and then set your norms, whatever those norms are.
But anyway, the anecdote that I use is I had a very intense student. She was a biracial student, and she had come out as lesbian. So that was a major part of her identity. And so she had a mother who was very intensely involved in race relations and academia. And she and I got along just fine.
Part of the way that I set up my classroom was you have to be able to allow other people to get their opinions out when you challenge them. And part of that is respecting their time to hold the floor. And so we were having a conversation right as Trump had taken office. And I had a number of students whose parents had dual citizenship in the Middle East. And so we had a student in the class who was pro Trump.
And he made a comment to the effect, and I don't want to misrepresent what he said, but what he basically had said was, I can sympathize with the fear that you guys are telling me about. Because some of the kids were saying, I'm worried about my parents being able to come home or being able to go back to their native country to see family back there. I’m worried about them being detained or deported. And the kid said, well, I can sympathize with you, but I can't empathize with you. It came off as very cruel and crass.
And this young lady, she just blew up, right? She blew up, and she starts cussing him out and threatening him. Now, personally, I understood what her anger was. Internally, I was having a fire raging as well. But part of the job is to be able to teach and model to folks how you have hard conversations. How do you rebut something that somebody says that you feel was ignorant, right? How do you set somebody up to walk into them speaking their own truth?
Because the methodology right now, or one of the strategies that people use, is to just throw grenades out there and let the people who get hit by them flounder in their own emotions. And there are very specific tactics that you can use as somebody who is an emotional thinker to separate yourself from the emotion and then challenge the person who's hurling grenades to be honest about what they actually mean, not just say incendiary and provocative statements. But to really put truth behind that, right?
And so I'm trying to get this female student to see that she's crossing a line, and she needs to step back. And again, I understood her frustration. We're both people of color. She turns to me, and she's like, shut the F up, Hightower. You don't know what this is like. And so to me, that doesn't bother me. I understood because I understood the passion and the anger.
What was humorous to me, and that’s the other thing I tell adults, is just try to find the humor in the teacher student relationship. The humor piece for me was she was so wrapped up in her kind of selfish emotion, which I understood. But she was so wrapped up in it that she equated me as a teacher as not understanding her as a person of color. And she didn't look at me in that moment as, oh, this is Hightower, one of the only black dudes in school that I always go eat lunch with, that I always had these conversations with. That personal connection was lost because the emotion overcame that. That took precedence.
And I think that some teachers would have taken that opportunity to make that fire burn hotter by taking it personally and then focusing their energy on her. But what I saw with her was she stood up and she was backing out. She was trying to escape that situation. So I let her cuss me out. And I said, all right, you can take a walk. You can come back and go take a walk. And she walks out the room.
And a couple hours later, I saw her in the hallway, she apologized, and it was fine. And we go back-- and I said what I had to say to her about, I heard where you came from, but I need you to understand that that can't take place again. And we had that conversation. And so the next day, it’s water under the bridge.
The whole classroom didn't need to know what that interaction between she and I was. She understood where I was coming from. I understood where she was coming from. And I let her know that I had empathy towards her stance, and she was going to be faced with those scenarios in the future. And if she chose to take that route, she was never going to win. And so we had that heart to heart and we moved on.
Melissa Milner 23:20
That's a huge lesson for her. It really is.
Grant Hightower 23:22
It’s major, it’s major. And she is still, to this day, one of my favorite students ever. And not because of that one interaction. Even prior to that, I’m like, yeah, this girl’s gonna be a superstar. But I say all that to say, that interaction doesn't happen if you don't have an educator who's willing to say, I'm willing to take the risk to let people get open with their emotions. That lesson doesn't happen if I'm a teacher who frowns upon conservatism and tries to silence his other student who wants to voice his opinion. That learning experience doesn't happen if I am centering myself as the know all be all, the ruler of the classroom, and I take what kids say to me personally.
Now that’s not to say that what she said to me didn't bother me. Of course it bothered me. You never want to be spoken to like that. At the same time, you have to then go to the next level of assessment and say, well, what am I really doing? I'm talking to a kid about a thing that's really tough. She's feeling challenged, she's feeling threatened. This kid is feeling a way. And my job is to find a way to build a bridge.
And if the bridge can't be built, then we need to find a way to put out the fire before there's group contagion. And so there are ways to do that. And I just think that the more you practice it, the better you get at it. And I say all that to say, and I understand teachers looking at their professional livelihood and not wanting to take that risk.
I just always try to say, well, what's the alternative? Because what are we really teaching kids other than how to take tests and how to move through the system? So I don’t remember what your original question was but that's the work that I do.
Melissa Milner 25:13
No, it is all gold, believe me. On a lighter note, as they say, what is your favorite movie and why?
Grant Hightower 25:22
I gotta go Pulp Fiction. I'm a big Tarantino guy. I love Django, too. I love a lot of his movies. Not every one, but I love a fair amount of them. But I would say Pulp Fiction, just because I am big on stories. I'm big on illusory elements. I do love the disorientation that he uses when he tells you a full story but in a disorienting sequence.
The characters were some of the best character models and progressions, character arcs that I've ever seen. And I think that one of the things that Tarantino does well is he doesn't get caught up in the juxtaposition of tricking you into rooting for somebody who was, at their core, a bad human being. And in the majority of his movies, he has people who do bad things. But I would say that the heroes of those movies, at their core, are in it because of some virtuous reason.
So like, for instance, like Breaking Bad. Breaking Bad was a show that I love. But at some point in that show, if you're paying attention, you realize that you're rooting for a real scumbag. You know what I mean? They start you off with this idea that like, oh yeah, I'm rooting for this guy because he's in a bad situation.
And it’s brilliant writing. Because what happens is, at some point, Walter White makes a choice that he's going to be-- what did he say? I am the danger. He makes that choice to be the danger, and you don't even see it. You're so caught up in taking this ride with this guy that you don't realize that you really are rooting for a 100% true to life bad person.
And I think that with Tarantino, what I do like, the people who end up, who wash out at the end being the heroes in his films have maybe done some horrendous things, but at their core started off on their journey with good cause.
Melissa Milner 27:39
Good intention.
Grant Hightower 27:40
Yeah, good intentions. So Pulp Fiction, to me, has all those elements. And that's why I enjoy it. And then, obviously, the action.
Melissa Milner 27:46
It's a great movie. I'm a huge Tarantino fan. All right. So how can people reach you if they want to hear more about your work?
Grant Hightower 27:54
So you can come on down to the Reading Public School’s Central Office and ask for me if you want to speak in person. Or you can follow me @GSHightower on Instagram. You can follow the Reading METCO Facebook page. It’s just Reading METCO. And then you can follow us on Twitter @METCO_Reading.
Melissa Milner 28:15
Thank you so much, Grant Hightower.
Grant Hightower 28:18
I appreciate your time. Thank you for giving me the opportunity and the platform. I wish you continued success moving forward. And if you ever want to speak again, you know where to find me.
Melissa Milner 28:26
Awesome.
If you enjoyed this episode, and have not done so already, please hit the subscribe button for the Teacher As... podcast so you can get future episodes. For my blog, transcripts of this episode, and links to any resources mentioned, visit my website at www.TheTeacherAs.com. My contact information for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are also on my website.
I am sending a special thanks to Linda and Lester Fleischman, my mom and dad, for being so supportive. They are the voices you hear in the Zooming In soundbite. And my dad composed the background music you're hearing right now. My intro music was “Upbeat Party” by Scott Holmes.
So what are you zooming in on right now? I would love to hear from you. My hope is that we all share what we're doing in the classroom in order to teach, remind, affirm and inspire each other. Thanks for listening. And that's a wrap!