Schools must cultivate student voice and power to shape the school itself and  in order for students to develop the skills to change society for the better. 

• Schools must directly encourage and provide structures for  students to take ownership of their education, community, and bodies. This means opportunities to explore their own learning and teaching styles, cultural, economic and political literacy, comprehensive health and sexual education, and social/emotional education.

• Students should be afforded specific opportunities to express their own voice and power over the structures and norms of the school environment.

• In developing a mosaic of student voice, particular care should be taken in supporting students representing underserved, historically silenced groups.

Schools are integral hubs embedded within communities. Families in communities should be able to use their voices and their votes to determine school district leadership and hold that leadership directly accountable. Recognizing that families with equitable access to job opportunities, affordable housing, and transportation are best positioned to support their children and engage with their children’s schools, we also embrace the importance of supporting a broader set of policies and organizing efforts that promote economic and social justice. Districts, local municipalities, state legislators, and our federal government have an obligation to work collaboratively to expand opportunities for families.

Schools must be highly democratic settings, their governance and operations reflective of and answerable to the communities they serve. All communities must have the right and responsibility to advocate for their own vision for public education.

• Parents and guardians are full partners with schools and must be included in planning and decisions affecting their children’s education in meaningful and documented ways.

• School district leaders are obligated to actively engage families in deciding which qualities should exist in local schools, collaboratively working toward developing those environments and establishing a system of meaningful accountability for them.

• All community members must consider and address existing and historical inequities in developing democratic systems that are deeply accountable to families and communities.

The effectiveness of the teacher in the classroom is the most important in-school factor impacting student achievement. All schools, especially our highest-need schools, must be empowered to attract, professionally develop, and retain impactful teachers.

• Schools should have a goal of recruiting a teaching force that is anti-racist, racially diverse and reflective of the communities they serve as well as the racial and ethnic diversity of the country at large. All students benefit from having a diverse set of educators. 

• School systems should be encouraged to implement grow-your-own programs, that help cultivate teachers of color from within the system and promote administrators of color from within the teaching force.

• Anti-racist and anti-bias training must be a part of every teacher’s professional training and development.

• Training for engaging with communities and partnering with families must be a part of every teacher’s professional training and development beginning with pre-service education and required for the maintenance of credentials.

• Schools, school systems and states must devote resources to support consistent reflection and internal audits of their ability to attract and retain educators of color. These procedures must be led and shaped by educators of color. 

All public schools should receive equitable distribution of public resources. A well-functioning education system is impossible without ample, equitably distributed public funding for all academic, co-curricular, and extracurricular programs. Students should be represented by elected, democratic bodies with policy-making power at every level of schooling to preserve accountability for all resources. 

• Funding plans at the state, district, and school levels must ensure ample, equitable funding for districts and the schools within them.

• Each school district should provide disaggregated data by race, national origin, gender, family income, and ability that shows which students attend and have access to alternative learning settings including gifted and talented, magnet school, International Baccalaureate (IB), Advanced Placement (AP), and career and technical education (CTE) programs.

• School districts should adopt policies and practices that sustain and provide continued stability to its schools. This includes, but is not limited to, ensuring each school employs highly-qualified educators [for more on this see our Teacher Quality section above],  has facilities that provide safe and supportive environments, and has materials and tools consistent with the instructional model of the school.

• Local districts and individual schools alone cannot  provide a high-quality learning environment for their students. To the greatest extent possible, school district leadership, as well as municipal, state, and federal policymakers should collaborate as a matter of practice to support strong families and communities who are best equipped to nurture student learning.

The foundation of a strong school climate is a deliberately nurturing culture of respect for all persons. For too many children of color, their school - even at the preschool level - is a site for unnecessary trauma.   The ultimate goals of school disciplinary policies and procedures are to protect everyone’s physical and emotional safety, and to help students become mature participants of a dynamic, diverse democracy.  In addition to thoughtful discipline practices and policies, schools and districts should advance policies that intentionally expand opportunity for all students and families.  Therefore, intentional development of strategies to integrate all students and families into the fabric of the school’s structure, culture, and curriculum is required.

• We reject and condemn the dangerous, inhumane criminalization of students of color that lead to their being disproportionately suspended, expelled, brutalized, or pushed out of school. We also reject the lies that insist that in order to have a safe learning environment, students of color must give up their constitutional rights or accept forced assimilation of dominant cultures of power.

• We support the work to reduce and replace the law enforcement presence in our schools with restorative disciplinary approaches that are more consistent with the mission of public education. In places where a school-based staff member responsible for safety remains, there must be clearly defined and enforced regulations on use of force.

• All disciplinary policies or procedures must be developed in cooperation with representatives of students, families and educators in the district. These policies should reflect an understanding of age-appropriate behaviors and offer equally age-appropriate consequences supporting the development of students and their restoration to the school community. 

• Discipline policies for all schools receiving public funds, including the methods and systems for reintegrating students who are or have been justice-involved or asked to leave the school community as a result of a school-based infraction, must be published prominently, distributed widely or be otherwise easily accessible in all languages spoken in the school and in its community.

• Discipline data for any school funded publicly should be regularly collected and made public in a disaggregated form by race, national origin, gender, and ability on at least a bi-annual basis. 

• Students, parents, and educators who speak out to expose or challenge social injustice and inequity within existing schools and systems must be protected from retaliation.

Families should be offered choices not between bad and better, but between multiple good options. The former is not a choice. Students and their parents have the right to choose the most appropriate educational setting regardless of residency or economic status. Parents should have the right to send their child to any public school and that right assumes that every public school is worth attending and equitably resourced. A poor quality, poorly resourced, or unsafe school is not a viable choice; therefore, presenting a school in one or more of those conditions as an option to parents is unethical, and should be illegal. 

• For states/school systems to offer parents vouchers to move their children to a private school after those same systems have done all they can to undermine and under-resource neighborhood schools is unethical. 

• Fueling any system serving public school students that decentralizes oversight and accountability to the general public is unethical.

• Communities of students, families, and educators should be the ones to design and decide upon new school options. Decisions about allocating resources to create or change schools should not be made behind closed doors, without the input or authorization of the people those schools should serve.

• Schools should exist to benefit students and communities, not for profit. 

• Creation of new schools, regardless of structure should be determined in consideration of local needs, not a matter of right or in lieu of improving existing public schools.