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Why School Leaders of Color Are Also Civil Rights Leaders | Jay Artis-Wright

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In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Victoria Andrews talks with Jay Artis-Wright, CEO of Freedom to Choose Schools, a network of 175 affiliates across 11 states led for and by Black and Brown communities. Jay explains why the organization dropped “charter schools” from its name and what freedom means to the families it serves. She also shares how school leaders in Georgia spent two and a half years pushing for fair access to local sales tax funds, and why she sees school founders of color as civil rights leaders.

Transcript

Victoria Andrews: Hi, I’m Victoria Andrews, and you’re listening to the Getting Smart Podcast. In a time when the words freedom, choice and school have become such hot topics, I’m looking forward to our conversation with Jay Artis-Wright from Freedom to Choose Schools, a network of 175 affiliates across 11 states, led for and by Black and Brown communities, centered on self-determination and educational freedom across all different school models.

It takes a juggernaut to lead this amazing work. With a background in executive leadership, nonprofit management, government affairs, political strategy and education policy, Jay is well suited for this job. As CEO of Freedom to Choose Schools, she partners with educational leaders, philanthropic institutions, policymakers and community organizations to expand educational opportunity and strengthen the leadership pipeline of Black and Latino school founders and executives.

At Getting Smart, we are focused on building the future of learning for all students, and that requires an honest look at a couple of questions. Who’s being overlooked? What voices are being overshadowed, and what policies are limiting progress in different communities? And what can others learn, and what wins can they replicate for their communities?

So, Jay, I am so grateful for this opportunity to have a conversation with you. Thanks for joining us today.

Jay Artis-Wright: Thank you so much for having me. And wow, that was an amazing opening. This feels great, so I appreciate it.

Victoria Andrews: We didn’t have to fabricate any of it. It is the work that you have done that you should be extremely proud of. In a couple of the conversations we’ve had, I’ve seen that you have such a diverse background that landed you in this position at this time.

From Charter Schools to Freedom to Choose Schools

Victoria Andrews: Before we dive into your background, I want to talk about the organization, Freedom to Choose Schools, and its background. It recently underwent a name change. Can you share a little bit about that, especially when some of those words are being used in interesting ways right now?

Jay Artis-Wright: Yeah, like the word freedom. Interestingly enough, we were originally the Freedom Coalition for Charter Schools. There were 12 founding board members and school leaders, both Latino and Black, who helped us start the Freedom Coalition for Charter Schools at the time. It was mainly based on how Black and Brown leaders felt in the charter school space, which was dramatically different from what our white counterparts who were also running charter schools were feeling.

We decided to make the name change for two reasons. One, because we felt like choice was more encompassing than just charter schools, especially for Black and Brown communities, which are primarily in areas where charter schools can either be overcrowded or have a large waitlist. And then what other option do you have, right?

The second thing is that we made the change last year, and in the time we were doing our research, we saw an increase in homeschools and microschools run by Black and Brown people. Those people were saying, “We want to be a part of this too, but you have charter school in your name.”

So we dropped charter school, but we kept freedom, which was interesting, because freedom also commonly gets equated with conservatism and patriotism. We want that, but in our own way. You wouldn’t believe how often people hear “freedom” and then realize we’re a Black and Brown organization, and they’re like, “Oh, I didn’t think that.” But for us, freedom means the liberation of self-determination. That’s really what freedom means for us.

Victoria Andrews: Knowing the history, I’m so glad you opened up those borders and are more welcoming to the microschools, the small schools and the independent schools too. We’ve talked about it on different podcasts here at Getting Smart: when it comes to freedom in Black and Brown communities, education was not a right. Education was not something that was just given to everybody. Numeracy, literacy, sharing information, storytelling and passing down information were the path to freedom. So in a time when some groups have co-opted the word freedom, for you to fully embrace it and give it back the meaning it’s supposed to have means a lot. We honor and respect that.

Amplification, Advocacy and Policy

Victoria Andrews: So you underwent a name change, you’re more encompassing of other organizations and ecosystems, and you’ve even uplifted some of those in your work, especially through the three pillars that make your organization unique. Can you share a little more for listeners who may not be familiar with your pillars and how you’re the driving force for different communities with them?

Jay Artis-Wright: Yeah, so our three pillars are amplification, advocacy and policy.

Amplification, because when we first started this work, we were talking to a lot of lawmakers who often saw charter schools through the lens of a white founder and did not realize that a ton of people of color were running charter schools. And even more so amplification in the sense that we have incredibly successful schools across this country run by people of color that either no one believes in or no one has seen. A lot of that is because those school founders and school leaders are inside those four walls, focused on their students.

But they have made tremendous strides in a lot of things we’re seeing to be true today, like wraparound services, social-emotional learning and the whole-child approach. Those things are embedded in a lot of communities of color, in their natural narrative around being a teacher. So we really wanted to amplify that so people knew it, and connect it to our advocacy work and our policy work.

With the advocacy work, it’s a matter of talking to those same school leaders and saying, “Do you realize you’ve tapped into something here? Do you realize you need to share the wealth of this?” Do you understand what it looks like to take a student who came in reading at maybe a 5th or 6th grade level, who’s now in 9th grade, and maybe not get them to grade level within a year, but actually advance them? We have seen that happen time and time again. However, we often don’t see people get the credit for it, because that child still may not be on grade level. So we need advocates like these school leaders and these types of schools in this space, because they can tell you why we can’t advance someone in 165 days after they haven’t been able to read on grade level. It’s a technique.

And that leads to policy, which is where laws get made. Ultimately, when policy decisions are made about our schools and our classrooms, they’re generally made by people who don’t have that authentic experience. So we focus on those three pillars as a way to connect them all, so that people understand this is how you move the needle in education for our folks.

Fighting for Funding Equity in Georgia

Victoria Andrews: I know you recently worked with some of the school leaders in Georgia on policy work. While it wasn’t fully successful, it helped them become more knowledgeable. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Jay Artis-Wright: Yeah, and that is so funny, because we worked on that project for about two and a half years before we saw the success we saw. There were about 15 schools, most of them led by Black charter school leaders, and a couple of them by Latino leaders. We all got together, we met with some lawmakers, and we realized there are serious and substantial funding inequities, even for the charter schools that currently exist. So we wanted to challenge the charter law in Georgia on funding equity.

Specifically, every public school has a 1% sales tax it can use for capital improvements. When we did our research, we found that in a lot of the counties, like DeKalb County and another county whose name is escaping me right now, charter schools were not receiving what they call E-SPLOST funds, the fund where that 1% sales tax goes to schools. And we said, “How is that possible, when these are also public schools?”

In doing our research and having our schools talk about this, we realized there was an inequity here that we needed to not only expose, but also challenge. It was so important because, for a lot of these single-site charter school leaders of color, something like a 1% sales tax could keep their air conditioning running in the summertime for summer school. That matters, because a lot of our schools of color give 37 more school days to Black and Brown students so they can get on grade level.

All of this played into our decision to run legislation. Thankfully, after two and a half years of going through the process, we found a senator, Senator RaShaun Kemp, who was willing to carry a bill for us: SB 475. What was so amazing about the process is that before we got to the actual policy, another lawmaker said, “We’ve got to see the faces of the people you’re talking about.” So in the last legislative cycle, we brought a thousand parents and students to the state capitol to say, “Hey, we’re the ones who need air conditioning in the summertime.”

Victoria Andrews: Yeah.

Jay Artis-Wright: We needed the faces, right? That was the first step. The next step was getting someone to carry legislation for us. The legislation did not pass, but for the first time we saw a bipartisan charter bill in Georgia pass both houses, and it got held up on some technicalities and rules. We’re hoping to introduce it again, but we consider that a win, because we keep a scorecard on our lawmakers in each of our regions, and lawmakers who had never voted for a charter bill actually voted for this one.

Victoria Andrews: That is not a small win at all, especially thinking about how divisive some areas can be around charter schools and education. I’m excited to hear you’ll try again next legislative session.

School Leaders as Civil Rights Leaders

Victoria Andrews: And what you and your network learned, you’re not just going to keep with the lawmakers and educators in Georgia. Your network is really good about sharing: “This is what happened here, and this is how you can do the same thing.” You’re across 11 states with over 100 affiliates. How do you make sure your community members aren’t just a list of members, and really engage and activate them?

Jay Artis-Wright: That’s a really good question. For us, it starts with the school leader, either the principal or the founder. If you think back to how schools in this country started, it used to be a small schoolhouse in the center of town. In the early days, during the day it was focused on the students and their learning, and in the afternoon and evening it was a town hall for families and communities. Sometimes it was a school and a church.

We found that same historical context to be true in a lot of our schools, in the way our school leaders run them. Again, we’re talking primarily about schools where leaders of color are investing in their communities. Their kids go to these schools. They live around the corner. They grew up in the area. So it was really important for us to have them be the center of it.

Once we identified them as the center, we trained them, we talked to them, and we helped them realize that whether you want to be or not, just by the design of who you are and the fact that you decided to start a different system or a different institution, you are also a civil rights leader. You are also giving homage to our forefathers, who we know had to fight for us to have an education.

So it starts there. Once that light bulb clicks, we help them see that they’re also a trusted network for parents, because parents are trusting them to keep their students safe and to educate them. Parents are going to listen to them more than they’ll listen to me or anybody else. So it starts with the school leader, and we’ve had our success using that model.

We add to that with a fellowship called the McLeod Society Fellowship, named after Mary McLeod Bethune. We take a handful, about 10 school leaders every cohort, and we ask, “How do we build you up so that you look at your school not only as it is today, but also as the legacy it will leave for other people?”

Victoria Andrews: I’m so glad you mentioned that. Oftentimes, as a Black and Brown school leader, you’re signing up for way more than making sure people are fed, people are educated and the buses roll at a certain time. You are, like you said, a civil rights activist. And having that lens means really processing what that means, because when I was a school leader, there was nothing in my master’s program about that.

Jay Artis-Wright: There’s no class on civil rights.

Victoria Andrews: There was no class on being a civil rights activist, in any capacity. But you could feel it in the way parents responded to you, especially if you were the only Black or Brown leader in a space, and in the way students responded to you. They may share things with you they wouldn’t share with other school leaders. Sitting with that is a heavy lift.

Jay Artis-Wright: Absolutely, a great lift.

Victoria Andrews: And I don’t know, if people knew that going into it, how many would still want that honor. Because it is an honor, but it’s also super weighty, and it’s difficult to navigate.

Jay Artis-Wright: It is very difficult to navigate, and it is my mission in life to help people navigate it more easily, because you do have a responsibility. I like that you used the word honor, because when you look at the history of education and institutional systems in this country, we have found over and over again that Black and Brown people are marginalized socioeconomically, but also ethnically and in other ways, because the system really was not designed for us. That’s just the truth. Brown v. Board was a fight to get us integrated, and even when it did that, it caused a ripple effect.

There’s a book that talks about how Brown v. Board, and other books have talked about this too, actually decreased the Black teacher pipeline and the Black profession in education overall, because schools were integrating, but they weren’t hiring Black and Brown teachers, just as much as they weren’t allowing Black and Brown kids into schools with white kids. It’s part of the history, and it’s unfortunate. We need more graduate programs and more schools of education teaching that part of it, not only for Black and Brown people, but for white people as a whole, because when you walk into a public school system as a Black or Brown child, you’re walking in based on a law that people are still actively trying to push back on.

Victoria Andrews: Right. I’m thinking of the book Jim Crow’s Pink Slip.

Jay Artis-Wright: Yep.

Victoria Andrews: I remember talking with my mom. Her school was integrated back in the fifties, and she mentioned how many of her teachers and principals were, like you said, then unemployed. That’s still the case in many areas. If you think about rural communities, the school district is often the chief employer: the bus driver, the custodian, the cafeteria worker, the teacher, the aide, everybody. If you fracture that community, you’ve displaced several people from professional jobs that allowed them to support their families.

Building on Community Assets

Victoria Andrews: Speaking of community, I really appreciate how your organization looks at communities as asset-rich, not asset-deficient, which is a label a lot of people prescribe to Black and Brown communities. Can you talk about how your network educates and amplifies the work the communities themselves are doing, not just the leaders?

Jay Artis-Wright: Yes, and thank you so much for bringing that up, because sometimes we do this work so often that we forget we’re doing something different from other people. One of the things I’m proud of about my team and our organization, and even the founder of our organization, Dr. Howard Fuller, who is a long-time civil rights leader, is that it is built on humility and love. It’s literally built on the fact that we are not doing this for clicks, we’re not doing this for clout. We’re doing this because it is embedded in our history and our culture, and if anybody needs to be talking about it, it’s us.

From that perspective, I think that’s where the asset-rich view comes from, because we want to pour into people. We don’t need to take anything more away from people, especially when our kids constantly have the bigotry of low expectations put on them anyway.

Foundationally, the difference is that a lot of our school leaders are parents. They’ve had kids in the system. They’ve gone through the system themselves. For me personally, I’m a first-generation college graduate, and I often say, “If I can get through it, I know y’all can get through it.” So it doesn’t even feel like something we have to do intentionally. It feels natural, because we know what we’re capable of.

Victoria Andrews: That really resonates with me: being able to uplift not just the leader, but also the community, helping them see themselves in a different light. You’re not coming in to do anything to them; you’re doing it alongside them. That can sometimes even feel like an identity crisis. If you’ve been told nothing grows here and businesses leave here, but you have a school leader who’s pouring in and groups of families saying, “Hey, we’re really trying.”

Not Synonymous

Victoria Andrews: I’m thinking of the most recent New York Times article by Nikole Hannah-Jones, and the cost and benefit of trying to pour into a community, and the tension that can be there for both the school leader and the parents.

Jay Artis-Wright: If you don’t mind, I’d love to speak to that specifically. I highly commend her for being vulnerable enough to say, “Oops, I made a mistake with my kid.” That is so profound in her leadership, to be able to say that as a parent and as someone who has spoken out. But one of the things I found as I was reading it was: why are Black and poor synonymous with each other? I actually wrote about it, too.

This is where amplification comes into play, because there are several good, quality schools, especially in New York, that are run by Black people. If you wanted your child to go to a school where she was culturally affirmed, it didn’t have to be a poor school. That’s a narrative I’m constantly fighting against: Black schools and poor schools do not have to be, and should not be, synonymous. We have school leaders and schools that are run by us and for us that are doing phenomenal work. It’s not a unicorn effect. It is just a matter of having the right leadership.

Victoria Andrews: And there are different types: boarding schools, small schools, and I can think of at least five microschool leaders who are doing exactly what you’re saying. Not just work that’s good enough to get by, but exceptional work within the community, in service to Black and Brown families. But it also takes seeking that out.

We could have a whole other podcast on the article in general, because, like you mentioned, it takes a high level of vulnerability to say, “Hey, I didn’t get this right,” and then to share the things she’s still grappling with, and even bring in her daughter for a conversation together. And I would love for us to include your response to her article in the show notes.

The Power of Choice

Victoria Andrews: As we bring this conversation to a close, and especially since you mentioned Black and poor not being synonymous, can you talk about how Freedom to Choose Schools supports the luxury and the power of choice in education?

Jay Artis-Wright: Oh, wow. How do we support the luxury and the power of choice? We support it by reminding people where it came from. We are big history buffs, and we remind people that choice and power for Black and Brown communities were not given to us. They were fought for. And even after they were fought for, even after we claimed victory, we continuously have to make sure there’s accountability attached to them.

So it’s really a matter of dusting off the cobwebs and reminding people: do not be fooled. Do not let the co-opting of who we are and what we’re supposed to be remove you from who you authentically are. And be bold about it. Right now, everybody’s trying to mute identity so much.

Victoria Andrews: Yeah, and everything’s starting to look and feel and sound the same.

Jay Artis-Wright: It’s so homogenized. Like I said, we struggle with it even with the word freedom in our name. People say, “Oh, you should have an American flag behind you.” And it’s like, no, we respect the American flag, but even that has taken on the imagery of a certain type of person, which should never be the case when we’re talking about democracy. So it’s a matter of reminding people of the power and identity they have within them. I think about that Black Panther movie, when the mom says, “Show them who you are.” That’s us. We’re that mother.

Victoria Andrews: Oh my gosh, that is so good.

How to Get Involved

Victoria Andrews: Jay, we have all sorts of listeners from everywhere. If somebody wants to join the network, or they think, “I know a school leader,” or “the leader of my kids’ school definitely needs to join,” what can they do? What are some next steps they can take?

Jay Artis-Wright: Awesome. Thank you for giving me this platform to share that. The first thing you can do is go to chooseschools.org and look us up. There’s an opportunity for you to become an affiliate. You can sign up for our newsletter to get a look behind the scenes and see what we do. We have policy forums every second Thursday of the month.

We also have our own podcast, Choice Words by Freedom to Choose Schools, where we spend a lot of time elevating and amplifying microschools, homeschools and charter schools around the country that are run by people of color. Depending on where you are, you may find a school leader in your neighborhood. And lastly, as you mentioned, we are in 11 regions across the country, and you can find those regions on our website as well. We are on all the social media platforms as Choose Schools: LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok. We’re pretty easy to find.

Victoria Andrews: And some of the microschool leaders we’ve worked with have been featured on your podcast, like Lizette Ballas.

Jay Artis-Wright: Yes, El Mercito, yes.

Victoria Andrews: As well as Shireen with Colossal. So please listen to some of those leaders. They are doing amazing work.

Thank you so much for joining me today, Jay. I’ve learned a lot, and I need to follow up on some things. I deeply appreciate what you all are doing, how you’re going about it, who you all are and who you’re in service to. Thank you again. Looking forward to more collaborations down the line.

Jay Artis-Wright: Thank you so much, Victoria. This is my pleasure.

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