The Puzzle: Blog

This is a piece from CS&A's winter focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion in schools. Read more from this series here.

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The Boston school “busing” crisis garnered national attention in the early 1970s, but tensions over the racial segregation in Boston public schools date back to the late 1950s and early ’60s. Following the 1954 Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling that schools separated by race were unconstitutional, not only did the Boston School Committee resist holding a public conversation on equity and integration, the city and its schools grew more segregated.

In the early 1960s, Ruth Batson, a Boston civil rights activist and mother of three, organized to wake the city to its racist practices and challenge the School Committee’s inactions. “What black parents wanted,” Batson told The Atlantic for a 2016 article reexamining that era, “was to get their children to schools where there were the best resources for educational growth — smaller class sizes, up-to-date-books.”

City officials and politicians held tight to the false narrative that unconstitutional racial segregation in schools was a problem in the South, not in Boston. It would take another decade for this denial of systemic segregation to hit the light of day in the form of the now-infamous busing crisis, which resulted primarily in white backlash against forced integration of the Boston public schools with little impact on the quality of schools in predominantly black neighborhoods.

One group paying attention in the early 1960s was The Church of the Advent on the west end of the Beacon Hill neighborhood. The church did not have the power to change the public school system, but church leaders, alongside founder Mona Hull, decided they could use their limited authority to start a new school that by design would reflect Boston’s racial diversity. Opening in 1961 as a progressive elementary school with a focus on social justice, The Advent School initially enrolled a student body that was 50% black and 50% white. Reverend Robert C. Day, who became the first official Head of School was grounded in the understanding that equity, inclusion, and social justice were key. After spending a summer working with Freedom Schools in Alabama, he would often say, “If we don’t do this while children are young, it is too late when they get to college.”

I’d like to say that The Advent School’s diversity has remained high from the 1960s to the present, but in truth the school experienced some mission drift as it expanded over the years. When I accepted the position as Advent’s fourth Head of School in 2013, social justice was still central to the program, but the percentage of African-American students at the school was down to 12% and kids of color totaled only 25%. As a person who had an extensive background in education, community outreach, and diversity work, I was thrilled to be appointed to lead a progressive school with an impressive history and mission. I was also determined to realign the school’s social-justice mission explicitly to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work — and that this work would remain central to the school’s program for the long haul.

In the 2013-14 school year, as part of our most recent strategic plan, we began asking ourselves one essential question: How do we see ourselves and how do we live out our mission? In other words, what do we mean when we say we’re a progressive school committed to social justice? The conversations that followed have led to some significant and exciting changes that have strengthened the school all around.

Aligning Our Mission

Our mission statement reads:

Since 1961, The Advent School has stayed true to its founding vision: an urban school whose community reflects the diversity of Boston; a forward-thinking curriculum that inspires and engages a child’s passion for learning; a commitment to social justice; and a culture of collaboration where every child has the confidence to take action in a connected world.

As mission statements go, ours is fairly long, but it’s also deliberately specific. We want the school community to represent the diversity of the city. We want a progressive curriculum — in our case, inspired by the Reggio Emilia philosophy — that encourages and engages each child’s passion for learning. We want a thriving culture of collaboration in which every child has the confidence to take action in the world. We want to demonstrate our commitment to social justice in as many ways as possible to ensure that each child not only feels confident in his or her knowledge and ability to learn but also to become a caring, active citizen.

These elements are not platitudes. They represented the core mission of the school since the start. Over the past seven years, we have made a conscious, collective effort to reexamine the alignment between mission and actions in every area of school life. We focus on being as explicit as possible — constantly working to improve our teaching skills, to adjust and strengthen the curriculum, and to ask the questions that will help clarify our commitment to social justice, especially regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion. From students to the Board of Trustees, we are asking questions about equity, access, sustainability, and community.

Every day, we try to be as clear as possible regarding what our mission means in terms of the students we accept, how we relate and work with parents, the teachers we hire and the expectations we hold for them, the scope and sequence of the curriculum, the focus of our professional development, how we approach all business and fundraising decisions, and the ways in which we connect with the larger community. In other words, we take a 360-degree look at our school and programs to evaluate how well we’re meeting the mission and what we can do to improve.

This deliberate focus has been particularly important when it comes to our DEI work. As noted, when I arrived at Advent, students of color comprised 25% of the student body. Today, because of our efforts, 34% of the 200 students in our pre-K-6 school self-identify as students of color — and they come to us from 25 Boston neighborhoods and 23 communities outside the city.

Of course, enrolling a diverse group of students is only a surface measure of a school’s commitment to DEI work. But it matters. Over the years, Advent has been great about keeping varying aspects of social justice on its radar screen, but it has paid less attention to race than it should have. While looking carefully at all issues that fall under the umbrella of social justice, we’ve once again begun to ensure that we include a racial lens.

What Does it Mean to be Deliberate in This Work?

When we talk about our work with other educators, we often start by highlighting the link between the Reggio Emilia philosophy and our social justice work. The Reggio Emilia approach to education, among other things, requires that we see each and every student not only as unique, independent, and capable but also as essential to our community. From its inception post World War II, the philosophy of Reggio Emilia has been rooted in democracy and social justice. When Nancy Harris Frolich, Advent’s previous Head of School, introduced Reggio to the program, it turned out to be an excellent fit with our mission, amplifying the tenets of social justice, progressive education, and our image of the whole child. The Reggio philosophy echoes and strengthens our belief that deep learning takes place in partnership and community within the context of the broader world. This is paramount to who we are today.

With a diverse group of students, this means, for one, that the collective perspectives of the students is much richer than in a more monocultural school. The students literally facilitate for each other and the adults the value of honoring diverse perspectives. They also provide a wider lens that makes it clear that voice, agency, and power are not always equitable in school and society.

For the teachers, this also means they need to have the skills to teach well across race. Such work involves developing greater cultural competencies and the ability to create a vibrant multicultural, multiracial, multi-gendered, multifaceted curriculum. It means that teachers need to understand implicit bias and how it can play out in a school community. For me, this work is personal. If we don’t understand our own biases we cannot know how our views impact the way we teach. Understanding that we all have biases represents a change in the way we were all educated as teachers. It means we don’t have all the answers and we may get things wrong at times. No longer can we be the sage on the stage; we have to be proximal, intimate, and vulnerable in our teaching practice.

What has energized me most about The Advent School has been the work we’ve done both to support a diverse group of students in developing their individual identities as students and people and to offer a curriculum that engages them at the intersection of academics and social justice. At every grade level, we talk with students often about community. In an age-appropriate way, we facilitate dialogue and study difference and identity — especially regarding race, religion, socio-economics, and sexual orientation.

Our students are immersed in a robust and integrated curriculum built around yearlong themes. We teach students to expect connections within their learning and to cross boundaries between disciplines freely. Within the context of a theme, students learn from direct experience as they actively integrate scientific, cultural, mathematical, and literary studies. To the degree possible, we use the city as a classroom and talk with students about the social inequities in the greater Boston community and the world — always finding ways to connect course work to community issues. The students discuss, research, write about, and represent these topic areas using a variety of different mediums. By design, the students can’t help but be active participants in this learning process. They make choices and accept responsibility for their learning. For example, kindergarteners’ curiosity about the natural and human world provides a context for the kindergarten theme. Starting with a study of butterflies, they learn about life cycles, migration, the development of families and community, and recognize how they can build deep and meaningful connections locally and in the larger world. In this study, we have the opportunity to weave in learning about environmental sustainability and its cultural contexts, along with the need for activism on behalf of the natural world and communities impacted by climate change. Our third graders study concepts of independence and freedom using historic sites in Boston as extensions of the classroom. Students study ship manifests to learn about area and volume.  They visit Revolutionary War battle sites, and map the geography of Boston as it was in the 18th and 19th centuries. We expand the perspective on America’s journey of independence — helping students understand the limitations of the popular narrative focused primarily on European settlers and widening the lens to include the devastating impact of American colonialism on the indigenous and enslaved people. We want them to know that our perspective of the world changes depending on who tells the story, who has access to the story, and who controls the narrative. This is essential to what we understand to be true and just.

In fourth grade, we teach the study of fractions using census data so students see the role of math in understanding community from a cultural and historical perspective. In examining the building of world civilizations, we start with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to conceptualize the reality of the human necessities required to thrive. We also have taught the concept of array in math through the making of quilts. In doing so, we connect students to local fabric shops and teach the history of quilting and its significance to the African-American community.

In second grade, we have linked a study of gender identity with the study of math. Students designed and sold T-shirts for the Boston Pride Parade, donating the proceeds to the Human Rights Campaign. Meanwhile, sixth graders have explored slavery in the U.S., the Civil War, and Jim Crow Laws as a launch pad for an in-depth study of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and an exploration of the present-day civil rights movements. One year, students worked on first-person narratives about local and national civil rights leaders who worked with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X and related them to the modern-day Black Lives Matter leaders locally in Boston.

All of these examples are designed to integrate all levels of academic development. Overall, we focus on the scope and sequence of the curriculum in light of our social justice mission. We not only want the academic content connected to social justice issues each year, we want to ensure that the themes link and connect and build on each other year to year. By the time students are in the upper grades, we want them engaged in collaborative problem solving and student-directed projects. The opportunity we have through this integration allows us to go deeper and broader than basic grade-level skills.

It Starts with Teachers

To support all of this work at Advent, we are very clear about our expectations for teachers. We’ve also created a Department of Teaching and Learning, which includes the dean of students, the dean of faculty, two instructional coordinators, the school psychologist, and myself (as Head of School). In part, we operate as a typical school leadership team, but we also make sure we connect with all of our teachers to support them in serving every student well and meeting the school’s mission.

Faculty members work closely with the Department of Teaching and Learning (DTL) to differentiate instruction based on their deep understanding of the students in their classroom, through weekly meetings, periodic discussions of each student’s progress, and in­class observations. In particular, we help the faculty deliver an exemplary, interdisciplinary, social-justice-oriented academic educational program that inspires and responds to the needs and interests of students. We also support them by offering professional development related to progressive education and DEI.

This task is not easy by any means. What it requires is for us to be intentional, specific, and vigilant in making sure this work doesn’t get lost in the “administrative” life of our school. Even when we are knee deep in writing progress reports, the reality is that in order to really talk about a student, we need to understand who they are, how they learn, and what impacts their social emotional growth. Identity is at the root of the process and if our faculty don’t understand the identity of our students, we can’t fully assess their growth.

Co-teachers in every classroom is another intentional element of our DEI work. It provides the opportunity for teachers to have an in­-depth understanding of each child as a learner, including strengths and interests, academic readiness, and learning style. This is a different teaching model from the one used in most schools. Without a lead, it means that co-teaching is a team partnership that gives way for collaboration at the highest level. Ownership is shared and distributed equally, which adds a whole level of intention that can be modeled to our students.

As part of our commitment to social justice and progressive education, we try to keep our doors open for connection with educators from other schools and, as often as possible, to share what we do. We’ve arranged a program that brings educators from across the globe to The Advent School on a regular basis for observations and conversations. With some educators, we’ve created a more in-depth educator partnership to explore related issues. We also bring in outside speakers — such as Robin DiAngelo, author of “White Fragility;” Dr. Sandra Chapman, DEI consultant; Liza Talusan, educational facilitator and coach on DEI; and Katy Swalwel, professor and researcher on socioeconomic impact on education — to help us improve our knowledge and skills. For progressive educators, The Advent School Collaborative and Speaker Series has hosted conversations on the intersection of the Reggio Emilia philosophy, anti-bias teaching, and social-justice education. Recently, we also hosted AISNE’s Administrators of Color Collaborative; Education Trust, an organization of alums of color in independent schools; and Planned Parenthood — as a way to engage in a broader community dialogue.

The Ongoing Work

Being intentional takes a lot of work. That’s the great challenge for us — and for other schools that care deeply about the intersection of education, DEI work, and social justice. It requires all of us in education to constantly look inside ourselves for ways to improve. It requires a constant examination of the curriculum. It requires developing a relationship with neighbors, preschools, next schools, parent groups, and local and national organizations. It also requires constant training, lots of reading, and lots of reflection. My general feeling is that “when you get comfortable with DEI work, you are not doing it right. DEI work is inherently uncomfortable.” The complexity of running a school focused on social justice requires constant vigilance and an openness to learning, including where you need to grow. Our challenges, similar to other schools, include changing demographics, the cost of living in one of the most expensive cities in the nation, and small numbers of faculty of color and men in elementary schools. All of which are at the center of our daily planning, intention, and vision of what is next.

I often run DEI workshops or take part on panels at diversity-related conferences, such as the NAIS People of Color Conference, and I serve on the faculty for the Diversity Leadership Institute. Over the years, I’ve noticed that school leaders looking for ways to improve the diversity and inclusiveness of their campuses often hope for a list of best practices and clear steps they can follow. It is possible, of course, to point to lists such as NAIS’s Best Practices for Equity and Justice, but I also make it clear that each school community needs to have its own conversation about why DEI work matters, how the school wants to approach the work, and what resources it needs to keep the conversation and momentum going. There is no single answer that applies to all schools. There is no ideal community to imitate. There is only intentionality and hard work. I’m often asked,  “How do we get more families of color to come to our school?” My responses is always, “The first question we need to be asking ourselves is, What practices are we currently doing to limit access to others?”

Perhaps what I appreciate most about The Advent School is how nimble, intentional, and authentic the community feels. Keeping our mission in mind, we are able to adjust to the varied needs of our students each year, figure out what we need to do to improve our teaching, and then engage in professional development.

I’m proud of the evolution at The Advent School over the past seven years. What I love about the community — what is so thrilling about working here — is that we are a place where we get to say what we intend and then pursue it with all our skills and knowledge and heart. We’re not afraid of tough conversations. We’re not afraid to admit what we don’t know. We talk often about what is not working and about what we need to do. It’s messy and hard, but we do it because we are playing the long game. Together we want to stay nimble and constantly improve the quality of our curriculum and program so that we can educate each generation of students to find their passions and live fulfilling lives — as individuals and as members of a just and multicultural democratic society. We are reminding our students that they don’t have to wait to be advocates. They are advocates for themselves and others and they will build a better world than the generation before.

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Nicole A. DuFauchard has been the Head of School at The Advent School in since 2013. Prior to Advent, she served as the Director of Multicultural Affairs at Providence Day School in Charlotte, NC. Nicole holds a BA in Political Science and International Affairs, and an MA in Organizational Communications and Development with a concentration on Cross-Cultural Communications. She has spent the last 20 years exploring equity and access in education. She also works with school boards across the country to engage in equity and justice work and serves as a mentor for Administrators and Faculty of Color and Women aspiring for school leadership roles with NAIS and AISNE.

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