Whole Child, Whole Family, Whole Community
Whole Child, Whole Family, Whole Community
Four California foundation presidents walk into a bar…. I know. It doesn’t sound like a promising joke. And it’s not. Instead, it’s a story about how real life experience can inform policy and practice, and how working together, we can build a better future for our children.
Meet the four presidents: Fred Ali of the Weingart Foundation; Antonia Hernandez of the California Community Foundation; Robert K. Ross of the California Endowment, and me, Jonathan Raymond of the Stuart Foundation. All of us are charged with improving the lives of California’s low-income children and families and empowering them to overcome the built-in burdens of poverty and discrimination.
Last month, my three colleagues published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times titled “What LA should look for in its next police chief and school superintendent.” In it, they emphasize that these two highly visible appointments will “set the tone” for Los Angeles for years to come. The school system, they say, must move beyond arguments over charter schools, and instead “prioritize the real needs of children and their families” by applying a Whole Child approach. The police, meanwhile, must build out community policing, and improve public safety by placing prevention over punishment. Both leaders must see children and adults not as statistics but as people — not as test scores, or data points on a law enforcement chart.
As a former school superintendent, I couldn’t agree more. In public education as in public safety, reducing people down to just a number, just a race, just a category of human being you have assumptions about, is not just unfair and harmful to that individual — it hurts society as a whole. The so-called “school-to-prison pipeline,” in which top-down, inflexible school policies push mostly of-color children into juvenile detention and prison, deprives our nation of the talents and gifts of countless young people, destroys families, and burdens the public purse.
And the endless arguing over charter schools — which were originally meant to function as laboratories of excellence, whose outcomes would be scaled for public schools — pits educators, policy experts, philanthropists, and lawmakers against one another and families, instead of uniting for the sake of our children. What kind of example does this set for the next generation!?
The only thing I would add to what my colleagues have said is this: the next police chief and school superintendent should meet regularly, and promote cross-pollination between educators and law enforcement. Because the Whole Child philosophy is more than an approach to education. Whole Child, Whole Family, Whole Community is how all city leaders need to view the people whose lives they touch.
Nine years ago, during my first hundred days as school superintendent of the Sacramento City Unified School District, I was privileged to observe a meeting between the Sacramento police department and a Hmong community nonprofit group, to address racial profiling of Hmong teens. It was really an accident of fate — I’d had a meeting with the group’s director, Koua Jacklyn Franz, who agreed to let me overstay my welcome and sit in when the police arrived. But fate is exactly what it was. Right before my eyes, I saw first-hand how education and policing fit together.
Hmong youth in Sacramento are part of a refugee community and face issues including racial stereotyping and an academic achievement gap. Their parents may speak little or no English, often work nights and are as likely to fear officials as to demand their attention. Like all children whose families can’t strongly advocate on their behalf, Hmong youth are especially vulnerable when schools prioritize standardization instead of customized lesson plans, cling to outdated assumptions about who can and cannot learn, and operate like locked fortresses, not neighborhood centers for community growth.
Such schools, which represent the antithesis of the Whole Child approach, are ground zero for the problems that result in youth dropping out or getting expelled, at which point they become more likely to encounter the criminal justice system. The Whole Child approach recognizes all children as unique, talented individuals with a rich capacity to learn, grow and thrive. It meets them where they are, brings families into the learning process, engages the head, heart, and hands, and recognizes neighborhoods and communities as part of their lives, and therefore part of the learning eco-system.
Imagine a school where police come help plant vegetables in the school garden. Where they meet with parents not because there’s a problem, but because knowing the community is part of their job. That’s what educators do in Whole Child school environments — they kneel in the dirt with the children in their charge, and visit parents at home to forge positive relationships and offer tools for family learning. They recruit local grassroots leaders to mentor and advise their students. The learning eco-system of school, family, and community is also the living eco-system that can promote or protect a kid from confrontations with law enforcement.
Whole Child, Whole Family, Whole Community. In education, the results speak for themselves. I was able to bring Whole Child practices to some of Sacramento’s lowest-performing schools and saw graduation rates, test scores, and other key metrics improve for our most vulnerable students.
I also forged a strong bond with then-Sacramento Police Chief Rick Braziel, who partnered with us in funding our Men’s Leadership Academy. Our collaboration meant major changes to how school resource officers were trained and deployed, addressing another aspect of school culture that can unfairly target youth of color. Today, I’m encouraged when I see the Whole Child vision starting to seed the criminal justice system. Drug courts, alternative sentencing, and other approaches that see offenders as people not as numbers are part of that vision.
So my colleagues are right: the next leaders of LA’s public education and police systems must share a commitment to viewing “grassroots leaders and children of color as assets and partners.” But speaking from experience, I would add that they should view each other as assets and partners too. In that meeting with Koua Franz, she made me understand that as school superintendent I could not be passive — my duty was to truly lead and make an affirmative choice to stop perpetuating inequality.
The same holds true for LA’s next school superintendent — and its next police chief, too. In my new book, Wild Flowers: A School Superintendent’s Challenge to America, I argue that all Americans must set aside their ideologies and assumptions, and unite around our children — head, heart, and hands — as the center of and inspiration for education policy and practice.
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