Talking Racial Equity with a Teacher at a D.C. School Needing a Name Change

In light of the Black Lives Matter movement, many of us have been thinking about what we can do to promote racial justice. My focus as an intern here at New America has been to write about matters of equity in schools and early childhood education programs. Having grown up in Washington, DC and attended public school here, I’ve been especially interested in learning more about the work that educators in this area are doing. It was in this context that I spoke to Michele Bollinger, a history teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School, which is one of 115 schools in the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) system.

Wilson High School has been in the local news lately as a result of the renewed push to change the school’s name so that it no longer commemorates a president who authorized segregation within the federal government. The effort to change the school’s name has also gained momentum in light of the major decision at Princeton University to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from its public policy school. In addition, Wilson High School has long been the topic of discussion in DC due to the trend of the percentage of white students increasing and that of Black students decreasing at the school over the past several years.

How best to maintain diversity and serve its student body are pressing questions at Wilson, and ones that Bollinger is personally grappling with. Although she herself is white, several students I spoke to said Bollinger is unquestionably committed to racial equity. One student, Anna Parra Jordan, told me that Bollinger “goes above and beyond what she has to teach” and “thinks a lot about what she is going to show and the impact it will have on her Black students and her white students.” Having frequently been the only Black person in many of her AP classes at Wilson, Parra Jordan especially emphasized the significance of Bollinger’s approach towards ensuring that Black students’ voices are not dismissed.

In this Q&A with Bollinger, we’ll delve a bit deeper into her work and experience within the Wilson community.

How long have you been teaching at Wilson, and what subjects do you teach?

I have been a teacher at Wilson for over 15 years. For many years I have taught DC History, AP US History and Women’s History.

In the time you’ve been there, how has the environment shifted with respect to racial equity?

When I began at Wilson, the student body and teaching faculty were predominantly Black. The city was more heavily Black too, before the policies that engineered the development known as gentrification were implemented by then-mayor Anthony Williams and an institution known as the federally-appointed Control Board. There was a democratically elected school board through which residents engaged in school policy more directly. Although Black students and students of color did have to deal with racist teachers, they were also more likely to be taught by Black teachers more often, and the presence of those teachers helped foster a stronger sense of community among students.

You’ve been an important figure in the effort to change Wilson’s name. In what ways do you think this name change can be significant for students, particularly students of color? What has been your role in the movement?

The Woodrow Wilson High School name change is a long overdue and much needed development in our school and community history. I think the lessons of the name change are beneficial to many–the idea that protest matters, the correcting of the historical narrative, the opportunity to reassert our values, the raising of our horizons relative to what we can do and achieve. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard students discuss racial inequity and discrimination at Wilson, only to end the conversation with, ‘what do you expect at a school named after a segregationist?’ While many people, including students, agree that there are other more pervasive inequities that need to be addressed, renaming the school will have a positive impact on student morale as well as social and emotional health. But it’s possible that this change could have a more significant impact on white students, who are largely taught that racism is a problem, but not one that any white person is responsible for eradicating, nor one that could undermine the reputation or legacy of any particular white person.

As for my role, all I did was make visible a conversation that many teachers, students and anti-racist activists have been having over the years. I give credit to the Wilson students who are pushing on this issue now and to the Tenleytown-based DC History and Justice Collective for their ongoing organizing.

More generally, I’ve heard about your emphasis on addressing racial equity in the classroom. How have you integrated an equity-centered approach into your teaching and curriculum?

Well, let me say that for starters, I am a white teacher who is very much a work-in-progress when it comes to anti-racist teaching. There are a lot of pieces to this method, some of which I do well, some of which I am still developing. But I made this commitment early in my career and I remain dedicated to it. The first step is understanding that racism affects every part of teaching and learning. There’s a lot I could unpack relative to that, but suffice it to say that I try to analyze the DCPS curriculum, my own curriculum, trends in instruction, practices in my classroom (including grading and assessment) and how I navigate interactions and relationships with my students, relative to issues of race and principles of anti-racism. My students and my colleagues help hold me accountable and I try to do the same for them. In recent years, I have found a number of resources that have been helpful in this process, books such as How to be an Antiracist (Kendi), So You Want to Talk About Race (Oluo), Teaching for Black Lives (Watson/Hagopian/Au). I really appreciated the way a number of teachers at Wilson have demonstrated leadership around this work and I’ve benefited from their example.

Have you used online teaching resources as part of an anti-racist curriculum, and have you found them helpful at all?

There are a number of online teaching resources that are essential to an anti-racist social studies curriculum. The Zinn Education Project is my go-to and is a constant source of both lesson ideas but also dialogue and reflections on critical pedagogy. But there are others—Clio Visualizing History is a great source for material, as are resources on museum websites and so on. I rely on online sources for local history and neighborhood-based historical sources. We have far to go in terms of making more multicultural primary sources digitized and accessible. But social media has been a great tool for teachers and to spread and share sources that don’t make it to a mainstream history textbook.

Outside of the classroom, how have students utilized the concepts they learned? How do they put them into action?

This is a great question, because applying history and putting our knowledge to work to build a better society is how we demonstrate mastery, right? The growth of standardized testing has impaired our ability to teach and learn in this way. However, students still do it. A few weeks ago I was at the rally in Fort Reno [where Wilson is located] organized by students. One by one, the students harnessed the content and skills they learned over the years to compel us to fully engage in this historical moment. They drew upon their knowledge of history, politics, literature, culture and more to challenge us and our city to implement the kinds of policies that will improve our community. It was a beautiful sight to see and it made us all proud. Over the years, on social media and in DC, I’ve seen dozens of Wilson alumni submit testimony to elected officials, organize campaigns, lead protests, and write well-researched essays. They have also created art for Black lives, to shut down ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement], to divest from fossil fuels, to challenge rape culture, and more. One challenge I have for myself is to make these types of opportunities more possible and doable for my own students during the school year.

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