Parker’s mission statement says that the institution “educates students to think and act with empathy, courage and clarity,” and furthermore that the school is so deliberately diverse that students are able to respect and honor the experience of every other human being, which bolsters a safe space in the environment. When I hear people speak about Parker, there seems to be an automatic assumption that the mission has been accomplished.  But I wouldn’t say that we are there just yet-–especially as it pertains to racial identity development.

I say this for three main reasons. First of all, my experience at Parker, though great, has not conclusively been one of an equitable and safe environment in which I’ve been able to be free to be myself-–this is so just by virtue of the fact that I am a black woman in a white educational institution, and there is little hope for complete equity in this type of environment.

Second, I am doing an independent study with Alex Boone on Parker’s 14 year curriculum and its impact on students’ racial identity development. This study is not to prove whether the curriculum’s impact is either positive or negative but rather to simply help us understand its overall impact. What we’ve found thus far is that, at the very least for the two of us, Parker’s explicit curriculum has not fully been able to support our healthy racial identity development.

And third, after watching the fall-out of the October 26th MX on whiteness, I have decided that the fall-out was far too violent. If Parker really is successfully educating students to “think and act with empathy, courage and clarity,” then the fall-out should have been less violent.

One of the first questions that Alex and I asked during our independent study was whether, given the ethos of the school, Parker has an obligation to support healthy racial identity development among its students.  I believe that the answer is yes. The Francis W. Parker school has made an affirmative assertion to prospective parents and its students –that “we are responsive in our approaches to teaching… so that each person can grow in intellectual, aesthetic, emotional and moral life.” This implies that healthy emotional and identity development will follow suit.

It is not as if the school has never attempted to guide the student body through this process. Recently a new job, Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, was created at Parker aimed at promoting equity and diversity in the school.  In the past, Racial Dialogues was used as as a way of exploring racial prejudices and racially driven narratives.

S.L.I.C.E., which stands for Student Leaders in Identity, Community and Equity, is the latest school effort made to increase equity. SLICE is similar to Racial Dialogues in that it is a student-led program with a curriculum  designed to ensure that ninth graders are given a basis of education and vocabulary on subjects of identity, privilege, race, and sexual orientation.

The latest effort made was the October 26th Morning Ex in which faculty members and one student spoke about white racial identity.

There are two things that trouble me about Racial Dialogues and S.L.I.C.E. First of all, they are student-led. I believe that students are brilliant, that we hold much more knowledge and worth than we are often given credit for. But I do not believe that it is the primary responsibility of, or within the capacity of, an 11th or 12th grader to teach her peers a full curriculum on any type of identity development.

Second, the only times that we-–as a student body–receive any formal education on identity development (with the exception of Ms. Collins’s one semester Identity Development elective) is during student-led productions.

Why isn’t it dropped into the curriculum and taught to the student body by trained professionals whose appropriate primary responsibility is to teach? As long as those topics are not dropped into the curriculum, then it seems that there is a gap in it as a whole that has not been addressed.

Upper schoolers can and should help complement and support healthy identity development for their peers, but it certainty cannot be their sole responsibility to guide each other through it.

To be clear, I only say that because it is in our ethos. I’m not sure whether generally it is within the job description of a school to guide children this way, I simply know what Parker’s mission tells me.

I have felt this way for a very long time, and my independent study has only strengthened my opinion. I can no longer stay silent about the major gap within our school’s curriculum, however, because the fallout of the October 26 MX on whiteness was too great and too violent. In the long term we need an anti-oppression curriculum, which would educate the student body thoroughly on identity development, colonialism, and systematic oppression. Short term, a way to alleviate the tension is through greater transparency between the administration and teachers, and the student body.

This article is a call to action–to the school, to the administration, to do what may be impossible: to fulfill our mission statement, to commit fully, to make a change in the school for the better.