Juneteenth and 2 Blocks Represent a Demand for Change

Illustration by iFp Teen Creative Maxwell

A Demand for Change

Written By: iFp Teen Creative Joseph

Our society still faces the effects of historical inequalities, where certain groups are disadvantaged. Institutions that make up our society have been designed to favor some people over others. These inequalities exploit our differences and make it much more challenging for people who don’t match the profile of the creators of these systems to succeed. This systemic favoritism exists in forms such as gender, socioeconomic and racial inequality. An example of this would be the gender wage gap. This exists in part, because the workforce was originally created by and for men.

There are ways to reduce these inequalities. It usually starts with making large scale changes that address expectations and culture. In our 2 Blocks movement we want to remove the prevalent achievement gaps in the education system. We want to shift the focus away from stressing over grades and towards developing skills that can be applied in the real world. Currently there is a massive focus on test results and grades, especially in the fields of English and Math. This means that talented students may might not fit into the academic profile are told they are not as competent as those who are acing their standardized tests. This shows that the educational system is set up to help students who fall into the “academic” profile rather than helping students with different learning styles or skill-set from reaching their full potential.

Juneteenth gives us another opportunity to look at ways to constructively deal with inequality in our society. The story of Juneteenth is the story about ending slavery in the US and specifically in Texas. Soldiers (most of them of color) showed up to enforce the country’s end of slavery that Texas chose to ignore. They wanted to continue with the cruel practices of slavery because they had built their society around it. Change was tough because removing slavery meant that the Texans would have to rethink the way their farms were operated and the way society was structured. Juneteenth was a significant day in American history because it represents a time that equality was enforced and the cruel system of slavery was taken down.

Juneteenth and 2 Blocks both represent a demand for change in our society. Both of these movements aim to challenge a system that has played a major role in society and looks to remove the inequalities. By applying principles of absolute equality, we can make sure that the differences we have are used to make our communities stronger rather than using them as a way to divide us. We need to recognize that every student learns differently and provide support for each student so that they may to reach their full potential. By taking firm action against systemic racism, just as the soldiers did in Texas, we can make significant strides towards the equitable world we all want.In solidarity!

Uncertainty is Difficult to Overcome

Written By: iFp Teen Creative Henry

Juneteenth is a holiday commemorating the day news of the emancipation proclamation reached Texas. 2 Blocks represents the foundation for equitable change in education. Both promote the advancement of equity and shine the light on issues like inequities and lack of student voice in education.

In both cases, the powers that be resisted change. Texas had built its economy on slavery. Cambridge Public Schools is built on an industrial age model. Uncertainty about the impact of change is difficult to overcome.

Our ongoing project, 2 Blocks, will hopefully make the educational system more open minded towards change, sparking passion in our future innovators to become scientists, mathematicians, and engineers. Maybe some will travel on interplanetary flights to ultra realistic VR!

Let’s Run the Same Race

Written By: iFp Teen Creative Sabrina

Absolute equality will be achieved when everyone not only gets treated fairly, but recognized for their individual differences. Instead of treating everyone the same, equity acknowledges the differences in each person’s needs. Some may need more resources than others, while others may not need as much.

We created 2 Blocks project to highlight the inequities in education in Cambridge. One of our hopes is to create equal opportunities for success. Giving students an equal amount of resources is not enough to reach absolute equality. Students should be given the appropriate resources to help reach their full potential - in school, in jobs, and with passions.

Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. Despite steps towards equality - racism and discrimination against black people persists in subtle and impactful ways. The discriminatory effects of the policies and laws that support inequalities need to be changed.

If you run a race with your side of the track being full of hills, mud, and cracks you will have less of a chance of winning against competitors with a smooth track. Life isn’t a race.The amount of opportunity you have for success should not be determined by your race, ethnicity, or background.

One Year Later

May 25, 2020, one year later. Where are we now? It has been one year since the murder of George Floyd, an innocent Black man who’s life was taken from him because of a counterfeit $20 bill and racially biased cop. This was a death that reignited the fire of the Black Lives Matter movement, the 9 minute and 29 second recorded encounter shared by people across the world.

Since the tragic murder, there have been 181 and counting murders of black civilians by police. Despite the protest-filled summer of people demonstrating every day for BLM, much hasn’t slowed down. We want to address the issue both systematically and historically, how one man's death fueled a movement spanning across 7 continents.

What’s Happened Since

Since the events on May 25th last year, the fight against systemic racism and police brutality has been monumental. During the summer after George Floyd’s death, we’ve seen countless protests and people fighting for change across the world.

From America to the UK and beyond, people’s voices have been loud and clear, that BLACK LIVES MATTER. Everyone is tired of the same incidents being repeated over and over again. It's an act of violence that needs to stop and the fight won’t be over until justice is served.

Systemic Racism

The publicity gained from an iPhone capturing the grim 9 minutes and 29 seconds of the incident sparked momentum in the fight for police reform. This Should Not Be! Demonstrations and campaigns across the world have helped to highlight the significance of having an impartial justice system. iFp Teen Creatives ask: Where do we stand now, one year later? Is the arc bending towards justice? We remain committed to the fight for racial equality.

What’s Next

We need to continue demanding accountability. But more than ever, we need to strive for policy change and prevention of these situations from even happening. It’s through this that we can be on the path to justice once and for all.

In solidarity!

Where Do We Go From Here?

Illustrated by: iFp Teen Creative Ashi

We are iFp and Cambridge Public School students. Over the past several weeks, we have shared ways to improve the educational system through our blogs. We have discussed many topics such as the importance of curiosity, inspiration, motivation, expression and risk-taking. We talked about the need to view educational change from a systems perspective in order to combat educational disparities. Now we want to tie all of these ideas together and recommend solutions that will have a positive impact on our education.

2 Blocks is a student-led movement created to build bridges between the educational system and professional world. There are learning opportunities all around Cambridge and Kendall Square. These can help students become more familiar with college and career choices if integrated into our school system. Opportunities are not reaching everyone equally and this is where the opportunity gap begins. Everyone should have the chance to reach their full potential. These opportunities provide a space where students can grow.

There are people who learn effectively in the current educational system and many more who do not. Although a few changes have been made over the years, the system continues to use a ‘one size fits all’ concept. This approach benefits some more than others.

Goals We Seek + Action

The blogs that we have written are not just theory, but goals for the educational system. The ideas presented are essential for the school system to improve its relevance in the world that we live in. For instance, there are more jobs in Cambridge that focus on being creative and innovative, while many subjects taught in schools may not be beneficial for those types of jobs.

The goals discussed curiosity, expression, motivation, and inspiration bring the changes that we want to see. We want schools to nurture innovative mindsets.

Your Role

Everyone plays an important role in the educational system. The system requires that we work cooperatively. Each role requires different actions. The stakeholders identified in this system are teachers, policy makers, administrators, businesses, students and community members.

It is VERY hard to come up with a viable solution. It will require different solutions for each part of the system. Not everything will work well at first. This is innovation. We need to take risks and learn from our mistakes in order for our educational system to improve. We have to act now.

Teachers should create classroom atmospheres that encourage curiosity, motivation, and expression:

• Build more personal relationships with the students

• Use teaching strategies that create student involvement (passion projects, socratic seminars)

• Encourage students to take more risks in their work

Policy Makers and Administrators should support policies that advance equity, justice, and belonging in education:

• Acknowledge their ability to change the system

• Support new learning opportunities for the students

• Make the system less dependent on grades and more on learning opportunities

Businesses should support authentic learning:

• Expose students to professional careers

• Connect with schools to bring more opportunities into the classroom

Students can demonstrate excitement in learning:

• Embracing opportunities that come your way

• Doing your best in school and encouraging others to do so

Everyone can become a part of the conversation. Help spread the word about our campaign on social media, share feedback on the current educational system and most importantly, act to bring change!.

Conclusion

2 Blocks is not like a school project. After these blogs are finished, we will continue to discuss change and hope others will do so as well. The purpose of school is to prepare us for the future. Students should be excited about learning. The learning opportunities should reflect what inspires us. Kendall Square and the Port are only 2 Blocks away from one another. We should ensure that all students have the same opportunities to succeed. We need to work together to make the educational system more equitable.

Part 1 - Systems Change in Education Begins with Us

So what exactly is a system? The Merriam-Webster definition of system design is: “a regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole.” In other words, a system is made out of parts that work together to make something bigger. A system takes parts that might not normally do anything particularly interesting, but when working together with other parts, they are able to create amazing things. Systems are essentially what makes complex things possible. In the modern world, we experience systems and its effects every day. 

An example of a system would be a clock. A clock is made up of gears of different sizes that work together to tell time. Each individual gear does not do much at all. Even a pile of all of the gears doesn’t do much. It is upon constructing the clock and creating the system of gears we end up with a clock. Systems can be very complex as well. The internet is a system of servers and networks. Humans have done impressive things but it's only possible because we are an impressive system ourselves. 

Systems have a flaw. They are hard to change.  Improving a system can mean improving its parts. However, if only some parts are upgraded, then the flaws of the other  parts still impact the system. To illustrate this, let's say you have a very old car that is falling apart. You buy a new engine for the car and now the car will reliably start but the brakes are weak. So then you upgrade the brakes but the air conditioning doesn’t work. As shown in this example, upgrading the parts of a system can and will improve the system but upgrading parts at a time does not mean that the system is all of a sudden much better.

The other way to approach improving a system is redesigning it. This can either be from scratch or by using existing parts and changing  the way they interact. Let's go back to the car example. The most straightforward way to get the car operational is to buy a new one. This represents a brand new system that fills the same niche in society but doesn’t necessarily inherit the issues of the old system. That being said, we don’t have to start from scratch. If the old car had some excellent condition vintage wheels, the new car can incorporate this part of the old system to the new and improved system.

Education System

These same principles can be applied to improving more abstract systems as well. This includes one that is the key focus of our 2 Blocks movement: the education system. The education system consists of many parts. This includes things like the teachers, the administration, the community, the building, the students and so on. But a major role in the system that is harder to define is the culture and expectations. This part of the educational system is something that can’t be addressed head on. 

The student culture at school is determined by how students interact. Some schools have high pressure environments where students try their hardest to maximize their grades which can lead to high levels of anxiety for testing. At the same time there are schools where a student’s peers don't care about what grades they have or test scores so nothing is motivating the kids to do their work. The ideal situation would be if the students put effort into school but see it less in terms of grades and more in terms of learning opportunities. This kind of culture needs to be addressed indirectly and to improve this aspect of the education system requires a more indirect approach.

Making sure that learning is more important than grades requires getting the students interested in learning versus  making them feel like they are being forced to learn. The reason that students might feel forced to learn is that historically the expectations were different. In the US in the early 1940s less than 5% of the population went to college and got a bachelor's degree. In the modern day this number has gone up to 35%. This is because college is no longer the expectation for people going into academia but instead it has shifted so that successful careers will often require a college degree. 

Focus of Mastery to Modernize Education

When we compare the classroom now to back them it looks the same. This means that students are getting prepared in similar ways to a time where the expectations were nothing like they are today, and this makes students think if they aren’t doing well in school they should stop trying because they won’t be successful in life. If we can shift the focus away from grades and getting into the most prestigious universities and instead emphasize learning new skills that will help in life, we can create a healthier school system that is more accessible to everyone and not just the “academic” students.

Our society is running on the principle that hard work gets rewarded. However, some people aren’t cut out to do the same hard work as others. Making everyone solve complex math problems and write lots of essays makes people work hard on something that they don’t enjoy. Although these skills can without a doubt help the student in many ways, the system should be designed so that the students can be rewarded in putting effort into areas they want to over areas they are forced to. If they are able to develop their skills enough, this can translate into their careers. However, given how the structure emphasizes doing english and math SATs and getting into good colleges, this idea is lost.

The solution for these problems is to make jobs and business seem more than just the end of a tunnel of education. Instead education and the working world should go hand in hand. Exposure to the working world at a younger age can make jobs seem less distant and more real. Whenever a guest speaker talks about their job, it gets students interested in that job. Whenever there is an activity or field trip, students get excited about that topic. Having more interaction between students and the professional world can inspire a generation to grow up and do amazing things. Getting people from the professional world to share the excitement that they have for their careers can spread that excitement and shift the culture away from pass/fail and towards acquiring skills as a student.

Why Teens are Interested in Systems Change

Cambridge has a massive innovative professional community located in Kendall Square. We also have Harvard and MIT right at our doorstep. If we can implement ways to get kids of all ages seeing the work and research going on in these places it can help them worry less about getting the highest test scores and think more about learning. 

In 8th grade, people from Biogen came to my class and helped us through some easy experiments. At the end of their classroom visit, we took a field trip to their community lab and spent a day doing an interesting experiment. It was a lot of fun and was an excellent way to get students interested in the biotech world. These kinds of programs can be run in many different fields and will for sure get students interested. For example, someone from a tech company could come and run a coding session. Someone from a graphics design company can come and run a logo designing session. Students want to learn about these things, but when they are mentioned in textbooks they feel very distant.

Conclusion

In the educational system, stakeholders include students, teachers, administrators, staff, policy makers, business leaders, community partners, families and caregivers.  As iFp Teen Creatives, we are committed to doing our part and encouraging our peers to do likewise.  If each stakeholder agrees and commits to reimagining their part in the system, then and only then change truly happen. 

A system is made out of parts that work together to make something bigger.

Let’s work together to create a system that works for everyone. That’s why systems change in education begins with us!