BY RACHAEL LEHMAN

The most important relationship in education is between student and educator (we’ll use the terms professor, faculty, and teacher interchangeably). From the pre–K to doctoral levels, education today is a vestige of colonialism imbued with white supremacy and patriarchy. BIPOC students experience the negative impacts disproportionately of this colonized education system, but our entire society loses when access to quality public education is not accessible for some. To support students in and out of the education system we have to critique and support our teachers. Faculty are in a complicated position, being both harmed by and complicit in colonial practices. Recognizing some of these harmful practices is the first step to healing our education spaces.

Not quite sure what a colonized education system looks like?

Here are some things to look for:

1. Opportunities afforded by the structure to strengthen the student-teacher relationship are disappearing. Functionally speaking, educators are diminished as mentors by outsourcing advising and counseling, thereby destroying the student-teacher relationship. This serves another purpose: solidarity amongst student-faculty is more difficult to achieve, ensuring executive driven education.
2. Faculty members’ time is not valued; they are over-extended and mistreated. I am not speaking solely of monetary compensation. Educators are given excessive out-of-classroom duties, which drains their emotional, intellectual, and creative banks. A particularly egregious use of faculty time is when self-interested career-track executives launch months-long projects or initiatives only to kill them without explanation. Precious energy gets usurped by executives’ agendas that would otherwise be invested in students.
3. Manufactured chaos resulting from the reorganization of staff, faculty, departments, and offices. The severing of bonds between colleagues is a tactic to maintain power and control. Educators have very little emotional energy to question executive staff if they are actively seeking stasis. Watch out for re-orgs about every three to five years.
4. There are lots of temporary, part-time, and alternatively licensed teachers and staff to ensure that large numbers of students will have no long-term mentoring. The revolving door of faculty members is an obstacle to forming unions and furthers the exploitation and devaluing of the teaching profession.
5. Students are excluded from all aspects of decision-making, from the desks in their classrooms to the ways in which their tuition is being spent by executives. For example, students should be able to challenge their institutions’ investments in the extraction industry. It goes without saying that students deserve to learn accurate history. Decolonized practices mean including students in decisions that affect them.
6. Administrators give a lot of lip-service to diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE) work by creating positions, task forces, and committees, ignoring their on-campus content experts only to hire expensive out-of-state consultants. By not utilizing on-campus expertise, the executives silence dissent and avoid accountability. Additionally, DIE initiatives typically do not have accountability measures written into policy and have little positive effect on decades-long achievement gaps. (This is true even at institutions that have people of color in leadership positions.)
7. High turnover of BIPOC faculty and staff and other change makers. Ask colleagues of color if they feel listened to and included in decision-making. There’s a good chance that if professionals are not being listened to then students of color are not being listened to either.
8. Meetings and decision-making that provides very little opportunity for substantive input. Campus town halls and listening sessions give the illusion of agency and choice. Educators’ time is wasted with artificial inclusivity and “co-governance.”
9. Overemphasis on rule following and punishment. In higher ed, this means that if your tuition payment is not on time; you’re dropped from classes, but if you don’t withdraw formally, you end up with Fs and a FAFSA hold that takes months to fix. At the K–12 levels, our students of color experience disproportionately higher suspension and expulsion rates. In the preschool-to-prison pipeline, the presence of a student resource officer escalates matters to real-world consequences, including criminal records that can stick with people for a lifetime. Our DACA students face additional challenges in that a school discipline issue can get escalated to deportation.
10. The budget is inaccessible, vague, confusing, or secret. The budget reflects values. What does your school value?

Creating student- and teacher-centered education is essential. It is radical because it disrupts the sole function of education, which is to replicate our hierarchical exploitative workforce. Imagine an education system that decenters executives and administrators. The solution to closing achievement gaps present within this system should be co-created by educators and students. Students are directly affected by the education system and, therefore, should be viewed as content experts about their needs.

Guest blogger Rachael Lehman is an assistant professor of sociology and women’s studies at the Community College of Denver.