CA News
Mid-Year Chapel, January 2018
Thrown into History
Sam Welsh ’18 sets a new record in discusThe first time Sam Welsh ’18 picked up a discus during a track and field practice in spring 2016, something about throwing it made an impression on him. “I felt I could do well with it,” says the All-American and Massachusetts...
Rick Hardy Chapel, September 2017
Video: Girls Varsity Squash, NEPSAC Champions
Girls Varsity Squash Wins NEPSAC Championship
The girls varsity squash team traveled to the Pomfret School last week with the goal of competing well in the Class C NEPSAC tournament against formidable competition from across the region. Match after match CA players earned hard fought victories resulting in all 7...
Head of School Rick Hardy’s Mid-Year Chapel
C&E Speaker and Scholar-Activist Rosa Clemente On the New Political Climate in the United States
President-Elect Donald Trump’s electoral victory came as a surprise to many, including CA students who had either just voted for the first time or were not yet old enough to vote. But Rosa Clemente, an Afro-Latina scholar, activist, and former vice-presidential...
Invisible History, Authentic Learning
Department X frees time to ignite teachers’ imaginations Centennial Campaign Priority: Faculty Leadership Fund The Faculty Endowed Leadership Fund will: Support a teaching culture of innovation Provide CA teachers with the resources to develop new and...
Boston Chief of Education Rahn Dorsey ’89 on Equity as Justice Work
Boston’s Chief of Education, Rahn Dorsey ‘89, opened his assembly on Thursday, January 28, by reflecting on his time at Concord Academy. As for many alumnae/i who return as speakers, the view from stage was a little different. He recalled CA fondly for allowing him to confront challenges, cultivate a lifelong passion for learning, and form relationships that still anchor him today. “CA prepared me to be independent, and to be a contributor in all of the communities I’ve lived in since,” he said. Although while he was a boarding student at CA he had no idea what a chief of education might do, after 15 years in public policy research and community organizing in Michigan and Massachusetts, he joined Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh’s Cabinet in 2014 and found himself in a role truly fit for him.
Working through public-private partnerships, with district, charter, and Catholic schools, Dorsey develops strategies for the city of Boston to support learning from the earliest stages — he is championing a push for universal pre-K — through higher education. There’s no set path for someone in his position to follow, but certain skills are necessary, such as a desire to explore diverse perspectives, comfort with ambiguity, a commitment to self-awareness, and the humility to responsibly represent others.
Dorsey discussed education as a critical policy space — a crucible where race, class, and culture all come into play in shaping students’ school trajectories, and their lives. “If you’re serious about being a mission-driven citizen, and making a difference, you’d be crazy not to get involved in education,” Dorsey said. It is inherently justice work, he stressed: “Policy uninformed by a sense of justice actually perpetuates inequity and [in education] underperformance.”
He didn’t claim that the work is straightforward. The national debate that pits district and charter schools against one another is especially contentious in Boston, where state funding follows students to either type of school. While fighting over resources, it’s all too easy for officials to forget that the resulting tribalism is not in young people’s best interests.
Dorsey clarified two terms often used interchangeably in debates about education: equality and equity. While proposals focusing on equality aim to ensure that everyone gets the same resources, equity-driven approaches apportion according to who needs the resources more. The difference boils down to sameness versus fairness. And make no mistake, said Dorsey, an equity agenda is the approach that keeps justice in mind.
For one example, he pointed to the longstanding systemic bias causing inequitable access to the highest level of rigor in the Boston Public Schools system. Eighty percent of boys in the elementary grades are Black or Hispanic, but only 48 percent of students in Advanced Work, the gifted-and-talented program, are boys of color. And for students who aren’t in Advanced Work, there’s only a slim chance of moving on to an exam school, or to college. While Dorsey would like to abolish the system of testing third-graders — essentially taking some off-track for college — and eliminate the Advanced Work program, the issue is thorny because it involves eliminating exclusivity and a valued option for the students in the program. “To get to equity, you have to renegotiate privilege,” said Dorsey. “We all have to give a little to make sure that everyone gets what they need to thrive.”
Dorsey drew a distinction between mobilizing (being vocal in framing and deliberating public challenges) and organizing (actively working with others to create alternatives). For Dorsey, the appeal of organizing at the local level is participatory democracy: sitting down with individuals and working across sectors to recruit teachers of color or take steps to counter disproportionate discipline. He stressed the importance of organizing “beyond education” to address the intergenerational poverty that has been entrenched in the U.S. for more than 50 years, and the need for gainful employment, stable housing, food security, and access to social services — the whole of a student’s situation, not just the parts of the day spent in a school building. The measure of success, said Dorsey, should be whether learning time was maximized for every student.
For students at CA, getting involved needn’t be heroic, Dorsey said. Communities need purpose– and mission-driven individuals more than ever, and people who will become “transparent and honest leaders.” He urged students “to build awareness, sensitivity, and empathy, to have active exchanges about values, and wrestle with competing visions for justice.”
Noting that Boston has the highest income inequality of any city in the U.S., he challenged students to recognize that equity is at the core of policy debates, and to cultivate a lifelong habit of contributing to their communities. “It’s not enough to be vocal,” said Dorsey. “You have to be active. Don’t just talk about the thing that bothers you the most — be about it.”
For MLK Day 2016, A Stirring Speech by Princeton Prof. Imani Perry ’90, and Workshops Reflecting on Self and Community
On January 19, the Concord Academy community devoted a day to honoring the memory and legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A moving keynote speech by Imani Perry ’90, Hughes-Roger Professor of African American Studies at Princeton, set the tone for an open-hearted and open-minded day of workshops led by CA students, faculty, and staff.
Against the backdrop of recent incidents of violence and injustice in the U.S., Head of School Rick Hardy suggested in his opening remarks, individuals can perhaps best observe MLK Day by attempting to see through others’ eyes. “The way forward begins with a desire to know others, to listen and to be aware, to seek understanding and even to risk misunderstanding, to confront difficult subjects and to engage in challenging conversations, all in an effort to see a point of view different from our own,” he said.
Reclaiming Dr. King
In her speech, Prof. Perry responded to #ReclaimMLK, the hashtag used this Martin Luther King Jr. Day by activists across the U.S. to protest racial injustice. Offering a nuanced and historically informed perspective on what it might mean to reclaim Dr. King’s story, she invited the CA community to complicate the common vision, “too modest and simplistic,” of King.
We often hear only one speech of many — “I Have a Dream” — and forget the disapproval King faced in his lifetime, she said. We forget the vicious backlash he received when speaking out against police brutality and wealth inequality, international– and economic policy, and northern racism as well as Jim Crow. “We forget that he was courageous, and not just saintly,” she said.
Likewise, Perry said, we forget that “he wasn’t always right, nor was he always righteous.” Shaped by prejudices of his time, King marginalized younger organizers and female leaders of the freedom movement, such as Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer, and, responsive to the homophobia of the larger society, distanced himself from Bayard Rustin, the architect of the March on Washington. In short, he was fallible. And in telling a “too-perfect, and too-pristine story, we forget that greatness is in fact not achievable without fallibility,” Perry said.
By telling King’s story in all its complexity, she suggested, we offer one another a pathway for confronting our own limitations and setting aside our defensiveness. We come to see sincerity — not perfection — as the goal of a righteous life. “Every time you step out and raise your voice to say anything of importance, you run the risk of error, of misjudging, of failure,” Perry said. But we can’t run from the risk of making mistakes, because the transformation we seek in ourselves and others can be achieved only in community.
This information age with its peculiar public anonymity makes it difficult to nurture social justice work online. So Perry focused on what individuals can do in flesh-and-blood community. She had a special charge for CA students. As young people, she said, “you’re called to much more than good grades and good behavior.” Students’ best selves will be revealed in relationships, she said, in their “capacity to care, imagine, create, and respect.”
“Here at Concord Academy, you’re capable of pursuing that best self by committing to the full membership, recognition, and expression of everyone in the community,” Perry said. She admitted that it’s a lot harder than it sounds. Because of individuals’ varied circumstances, the community isn’t equal, and our unequal American society produces tacit acceptance of inequality. Her challenge: to listen deeply, to share knowledge, to include. To invite deep human connection.
“Young people are so important to the pursuit of a better society,” she said. “You’re possessed of a larger imagination than those of us who are your elders. You’re filled with a possibility that can move us out of the ways of the world that have distorted us, your elders, and you can push us into something kinder and more just.”
What Perry described as the “dynamic and vulnerable process of community-building” was nurtured, for her personally, here at CA. Prior to studying literature and American studies at Yale, getting her Ph.D. in history at Harvard, and her J.D. from Harvard Law School, teaching law, and writing about racial inequality and its legal foundations, Perry was involved in social justice work at CA, where she served as the president of an affinity group for students of color, joined Concord Students Against Apartheid, and lobbied to diversity the English curriculum. She also spoke, from the heart, of times she had fallen short in seeing the world through others’ eyes.
Judging by the swell of responses and questions, which Perry graciously stayed to answer after her talk and over lunch, her own story had provided students a pathway too.
Envisioning an Ideal School
Following Prof. Perry’s speech, students moved between their choice of more than 30 workshops designed and run by their classmates and teachers. From discussions of everything from body image to climate injustice, animal rights to the AIDS crisis, diversity in the media to Islamophobia, students leaned into their discomfort, listened intently, and spoke candidly and respectfully about difficult issues. Bystander training was also offered by Duane de Four, who has worked with universities, professional sports leagues, and the armed services.
CA seniors and Coheads of Diversity Nadia Itani ’16 and Quess Green, reported the results of a school-wide survey of students’ top commitments for engaging with one another and priorities for an ideal school culture. They urged their fellow students to continue to listen actively and respond honestly and kindly, to keep the spirit of social activism alive at CA every day.