The larger context

According to Raul Fernandez, Brookline select board member and advisor on the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s (DESE) Racial Imbalance Advisory Council (RIAC), racial inequities in education are a part of a much larger structure of racism.

“When we look at educational systems, they’re connected to housing systems, which are connected to systems of policing, and what we call criminal justice, and economic systems, and so on,” Fernandez said. “These interconnected systems, because of institutional as well as individual racism, have for far too long, throughout the entire history of this country, held people of color and especially Black people back.”

This kind of structural racism has plagued education in Massachusetts since the very beginning, Fernandez said.

“If you look at the system of education in particular, in the development of that system there are people that from the very beginning were excluded from it. In particular, anyone who was enslaved, people of color more broadly, Black people especially, even women,” Fernandez said. “There were people for whom education has been used to assimilate them, like indigeous people, Mexicans, {and others}.”

According to Cawthorne, the creation of honors and standard classes was a direct consequence of this history of racism.

“Leveling too was a part of desegregating schools. It was one of the things that was done essentially to sort kids, and in this case it was a way to assuage white families and white students’ fears of being in classes with Black kids,” Cawthorne said. “One of the ways to alleviate fears with desegregation was to create tracks. So then, essentially, you can say white kids are smarter and put them in these higher tracks.”

Cawthorne said that our normalization of these systems means we often don’t think about their origins.

“I think it’s been so baked into the bread over time that we just assume it’s normal when the reality is it’s not really normal in the grand scheme of schools. Particularly in the Boston area where we’ve had schools since the 1600s. This {deleveling} is like 50 years old,” Cawthorne said.