Dear Friends —

It would be an understatement to say that 2020 was life-changing and challenging. It was more than that; it was transformative. We faced multiple pandemics: the health crisis precipitated by COVID; the social crisis reignited by the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd; and the economic crisis legislated by a series of poor decisions from our political leadership. But through it all, we at NYU Metro Center have remained vigilant and steadfast.

Twenty twenty was one of the most productive years in the forty plus year history of the center. We were blessed to partner with the people—communities, schools, businesses, faith institutions, etc.—joining countless others in the fight to advance equity in education and beyond it. Though we fought to advance equity, which is a principle of fairness based on the recognition that all our students are different and come to their education with different needs, we also fought to end the systemic racism and white supremacy that make advancing equity in education impossible.

We published several resources that helped to lift the education community in a time where we all found ourselves searching. We forged unbreakable partnerships with at least six new community-based organizations, including EduColor and the Harriet Tubman Effect, expanding the reach of NYU Metro Center and deepening our commitments to community action and human centeredness. Our workshops, webinars, and presentations reached tens of thousands of people, across all fifty states in the U.S., and touched at least five continents. Our research program generated millions of dollars, which allows us to ask questions key to the communities we serve and hire and retain employees (many of whom live in the same communities our work represents).

As our boots beat the ground to pay homage to the blood spilt from the violence of systematic oppression, as we dreamed up ways to make our systems more woke, we clung to the belief that we will best serve our children by standing in resistance to systems, ideological and otherwise, hewn from the bedrock of bigotry. We’ve dared to ask: How might we in a post-COVID education world, help make our schools and classrooms anti-racist, anti-biased, culturally responsive and sustaining, and reimagined for all our students, especially those who run to us for refuge? Throughout 2020, we have remained bold in our call for new institutions and new positionings of our equity work. We have challenged the field to, instead of murdering our children’s bodies and killing their souls, love them—love them to life. We have called for institutions that truly uphold justice because, as Cornel West said, “Justice is what love looks like in public.”

The past year also gave us a chance to further engage our equity-driven sciences, our research-based practices, and supportive services to figure out how to move education forward. Throughout the year, we turned to technology to speak with our publics and enhance our human connections, to engineer a world that might exist on the other side of social, political, and health crises, a calculus that could expand our lives. In so doing, we stared at a set of disquieting questions that made each of us uncomfortable: that education in our nation is a tale of disparities—a narrative that is further animated by social injustices demarcated along lines of privilege and vulnerability.

Even though we already knew what this moment has shown us: that our schools are not currently designed to favor the dispossessed and the maligned; that even before we were forced to stare at the digital divide, finally understanding that the material possession of technology isn’t evenly distributed; before we acknowledged that some students would struggle—Black, Brown, and Indigenous students, multilingual learner students, students with IEPs and 504 plans—in this moment of Black lives matter, COVID-19, and against cries of “I can’t breathe”; we were taught that a new world is possible.

This is a crucial lesson for us because so often we get lost in the various narratives of disparity that shape how so many of us have come to understand education. This is why we marched—because social inequity is so pervasive in our lives. This is why we locked arms with countless others on our streets—because our babies are not okay in our schools, because Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth are disproportionality suspended, placed into special education more, graduate at lower rates, etc. We also know that these disparities increase at intersections of linguistic difference, ability difference, gender difference, and at the apex of other vulnerabilities.

But the lessons we’ve learned this year are ones of collective strength and community power. As we move into the next year, our goals at NYU Metro Center will be forged not out of what the disease has taken from us but from what it has given us. We have learned that sometimes, to move forward, we must slow down, that we are in this together—ubuntu—"I am because we are.”

Still, we recognize that the system is a historical and social artifact. It functions as its designers intended, shaped by the weaker impulses of those designers. It clings to the dark cosmetics of social hierarchy tainted by sexism, racism, language oppression, economic oppression, and other social, economic, cultural, and political forces of violence that very much inhabit all aspects of education. Each of these forces has yielded historical consequences that manifest in our schools and magnify over time and continue to this day. So, our work at NYU Metro Center will continue.

In 2021, we continue the work of supporting our partners in transforming education—asking new questions and brokering needed supports to help curate better experiences for students. We refuse to “go back” to normal because we want things to improve. Part of that improvement will mean helping districts and schools envision systems or a set of environments that are welcoming and affirming, where the least-desired or redundant components of education itself are omitted. It will mean dealing with the idea that education for so many of our children is a site of punishment—whereas this punitive narrative is regrettably based in some of our most dangerous and biased logics.

As we turn the page and lean into the possibilities of this next stage in our journey forward, we do so while committing our efforts toward understanding how to help students experience schooling as a site of joy. Joy is one of the basics of education, where we center students and let go of anything that continues to marginalize, exclude, and harm them.

Let’s continue to work together to dream up a world that deserves our children.

In solidarity, 

David E. Kirkland

Executive Director, NYU Metro Center

Vice Dean of Equity, Belonging, and Community Action 

NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development