BELE

Building Equitable Learning Environments

education-equity

BELE Beyond 2023

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As the BELE Network has grown and evolved over the past six years, our charge has remained the same: creating more equitable learning environments that support all students to succeed and thrive.

While we will not be continuing as a formal network in 2024, we will remain steadfast in that charge in both our individual work and partnerships. Through this time together as the BELE Network, we have built relationships that will sustain and carry on BELE’s vision and learning. Our hope is that more and more schools, school districts, and education support organizations will find innovative ways to apply the latest science of learning and development on behalf of young people everywhere.

We know through research that a student’s daily experience in school — including how they feel and think — is fundamental to not only how much they learn, but also their lifelong well-being and development. By focusing our attention on improving the day-to-day experience of students, we can catalyze meaningful change and set students up to reach their fullest potential.

Here are three key insights from our work to guide us in our journey forward:

  1. Student experience matters, is measurable, and directly contributes to the academic success and well-being of young people.
  2. When educators and leaders participate in repeated improvement cycles, they transform how students experience school and improve student outcomes.
  3. When educators, students, parents, and community members recognize each other as partners and collaborate to change policies and practices, student experience improves.

To help you put these insights into action, we’ve created Centering Student Experience: A Playbook for Improving Student Outcomes By Centering Student Experience. Regardless of role, we each have a part to play in shaping the conditions that impact student learning and improving the experiences of students. This playbook — which is a curated culmination of actionable best practices, tools, and resources created by the BELE Network — can serve as your first step or a guide to going deeper.

We are grateful for your commitment to this work and thankful for your support of the BELE Network. As we reflect back on these last few years, we are incredibly proud of the knowledge we’ve generated in partnership together, the tools we’ve tested and refined with educators and students in schools across the nation, the conversations we’ve had to advance the field forward, and so much more. While this is our final newsletter, we look forward to continuing to support all students to thrive.

With gratitude,

The BELE Learning Partners

Changing Student Narratives to End Racial Inequity

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Kingmakers of Oakland

Educational disparities between Black students and white students are glaring in our education system. “Black boys tend to be at the bottom of every positive academic indicator and at the top of every negative academic indicator,” says Chris Chatmon, Founder and CEO of Kingmakers of Oakland. And these disparities are a direct result of what Black students experience everyday and the false narratives that circulate about who they are.

“For Black boys in general, there are through-lines that are common wherever you go to school. We know how Black boys are perceived and how they aren’t, in general. We know that Black boys get referred to special education and get expelled more than anyone else. The experience of Black boys is debilitating; it cries for support, for help, for changing the reality for Black boys,” says Matin Abdel-Qawi, Kingmakers’ Chief Program Officer.

As a BELE Network partner, Kingmakers of Oakland is working to improve outcomes for Black students by improving their experiences in schools and shifting the mindsets of educators and administrators. We need them to see Black boys “as brilliant, excellent, and full of potential,” continues Abdel-Qawi. “Once you [change the narrative of Black boys]. All things are possible.”

As they work with schools and students, Kingmakers implements strategies to recognize the need for broader narrative changes and redesign schools so everyone sees the potential in Black students. Some of Kingmakers’ models include increasing collaboration, updating curriculum, and implementing student feedback.

  1. Learning Collaboratives: Kingmakers creates teams composed of senior leadership, school personnel, parents and caregivers, and students who work together to transform school systems, generate shared efforts, and foster community-level change in service of a better education experience
  2. Updating Curriculum: Kingmakers and curriculum developers work together to equip schools with new curriculum across subject areas that teaches students about cultural identity, building students up to grow into their own power.
  3. Student Feedback: Kingmakers organizes interviews with students to learn more about their experiences. Grounded in the daily lives of the students interviewed, Kingmakers engages administrators to understand and analyze barriers to student success. These conversations lead to new programming, created by Kingmakers, to provide more opportunities for students, especially Black male students.

We know that Kingmakers’ strategies like these work. A study published in 2021 showed that high school dropouts decreased by 43% because of Kingmakers programs. The study found that programs also led to school-wide improvements benefiting students who were not direct participants, reporting a decline in dropouts by 29% for Black females.

Kingmakers shows us how we can create learning environments that support and affirm students, especially Black boys. To provide educational experiences that help them thrive as learners and people, we need to keep working to build new narratives that empower Black students in classrooms, schools, districts, and communities.

Columbia Law School’s Center for Public Research and Leadership (CPRL) released a report highlighting four education equity bright spots in partnership with the BELE Network, including Kingmakers of Oakland. Read the report to learn more about these real-world examples where individuals, organizations, and systems are engaged with the science of learning and development, student experience, and resource equity, to build towards an equitable K-12 public education system.