All right. Good evening. Good evening. I thought this is an auditorium full of people. Good evening. My name is Femi Ogundele, and I really appreciate you all being here this evening. I represent the leaders in Equity and Democracy in Education doctoral program in the inaugural cohort lead cohort one. The LEAD program recognizes that success of our democracy relies on equitable schools, which in turn rely on transformational system leaders.
This program is specifically designed for scholar practitioners. And as simple as an idea as that may sound, LEAD is a profound concept that seeks to bring the best of education to the production of education. You see, the doctoral program and the doctoral experience is the pinnacle of an educational milestone. It requires more than we ever thought that we had, and more than we ever thought that we had to give.
But in order to really make a difference in the huge system that is education, this program speaks to those who take on the responsibility of producing the educational environments that students are navigating. This program consists of practitioners who are currently in the roles that have the greatest opportunity and willingness to make and bring meaningful change. I think I speak for the entire cohort when I say, what brought us to this program was the idea that through this experience, we would be able to make a greater impact, not just on the schools that we work in, but on the entire system of education.
Being a scholar practitioner is not for the faint of heart. As practitioners, we know meaningful work without scholarship is fragile to current events, changes in leadership, and changes in funding. As scholars, we know that scholarship oftentimes, no matter how insightful, without work, without truly being tested in real environments and amplified by practitioners, gets written off too often as too abstract or hollow to be considered impactful by those who need to implement them.
But together, bringing seasoned practitioners to scholarship and making sure that research is focused on the right issues that are impacting the profession, their combined ability to change seemingly intractable systems and to inform dynamic change and scalable change is undeniable. Leaders in Equity and Democracy aims to fill the void of both by bringing together what is known with what is currently happening in education, and those who aim to produce knowledge with those who drive the results.
While we were focused on finishing and standing here before you all today, I would be remiss to say that through this experience, we lived the ideals and the goals of this program. Oftentimes when we talk about community, we talk about community in regards to people or in spaces. But community is also defined by time. The time in which we are connected.
And let's be very clear about the time that this was. Like many who graduated this year, we had our Covid 19 classroom experiences. Long zoom classes after long days. But Covid wasn't just in our scholarship, it was in our lives too. We had school leaders that worked to keep schools open, so essential workers had a place to send their children during the day.
Bunching three to four classes in a single gymnasium because of the teacher shortages that were happening right here in the Bay Area, we had practitioners working to keep this institution open for low SES students who had a better learning environment in an empty residence hall than they might have had back at home, where they lacked reliable Wi-Fi and other educational resources.
We fought against standardized testing and college admissions, which disproportionately snuffs out the brilliance of Black, Brown, and low-income students. We continue to fight for students and the right to express their opinions through protests on our college campuses and in high schools, because we know that too often people are more interested in order than they are in justice.
We fought, we toiled, and we won because we know that excellence, excellence and diversity are not mutually exclusive but in fact, you cannot have one without the other. And Martin Luther King said, that “when you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something.” It's each of our part to help build what is called the beloved community.
Additionally, while in quarantine, we endeavored through this program while the out loud racial reckoning of the Black Lives Matter movement was happening all in front of our faces. The violent and public recognition of a lauded system of policing in American democracy and its regard and hatred for Black youth, Black men and Black children was happening in front of our faces.
The idea of protect and serve was being questioned at best, and shouted down through chants of “I can't breathe,” “justice for Brianna” and “no justice, no peace.” I've never protested in my life, and I found myself on the streets of Oakland for days with a rage against the machine and a system that sought out the destruction of people who look like me.
While in this program, it was impossible not to see this system and all of its failures and not think about the system that we occupy. The system of education that we hold up, the excuses that we make for the disproportionate outcomes that we as career practitioners produce. In the LEAD program, we believe in order to lead a system, you must be able to see it – and that is all of it.
You see, there are no dress rehearsals for educators. We didn't get the benefit of observing someone else do it before we got there, or the time to think through all the possible scenarios. And in unprecedented times, we were forced to do. We were called to act, making incredibly stressful decisions when the stakes were at their highest.
It was in this time that our faculty challenged us not to get mad, but to get to work. To pour into the literature, find the solutions and remember the power that we hold and the ability to put them into practice. We were challenged by our faculty and by each other to do what Baynard Rustin called become angelic troublemakers and take what we know and what we are learning and put it into practice.
We leaned into the words of bell hooks, who said, “the academy is not paradise, but learning is a place where paradise can be created.” As scholars, we kept our community through Zoom screens and face masks, physically isolated, but together as an intellectual and professional journey that we will remember for a lifetime. Late nights after early mornings, after some of the most trying days of our careers. We set up in school wellness centers for students who were disproportionately disciplined in high schools.
We traveled to refugee camps to find educational excellence in the most challenging parts of the world to bring them to our public universities. We joined research groups and published in peer reviewed journals. Being in this program required us to push back on the status quo in all of our educational settings, and thinking for better ways in which we can design things for students, rather than asking them to navigate our deficiencies.
LEAD required this of us. We kept committed to our goals to be right here before you all, representing cohort one of a provocative concept that is known as Leaders for Equity and Democracy in the doctoral program. Throughout our learning, what we did we know will be studied for years to come. Our impacts will be researched and analyzed and turned into case studies because we lived it.
We know that we will be that piece of data that is the outlier in that research because we lived it. LEAD is an embodied experience, a continuous cycle of improvement and to understand that you can't solve cross-sector problems with single sector solutions. LEAD requires the best of us.
As we stand here at the completion of this program, we recognize the responsibilities and the positions that we hold, the knowledge and the influences that we have to make a change. As members of this community, we will take this path forever, another provocative but simple understanding that as leaders in education, we either design systems for equity or we perpetuate inequity.
And for us, that means holding each other, our colleagues, our schools, and our systems are accountable to serve every single student that we interact with. To our esteemed faculty and the Berkeley School of Education, sincere gratitude for the time and the space that you gave us to grow into the scholars that we are. They say the worst patients are doctors, and I'm certain that the worst students are educators, without a doubt in my mind.
And so I appreciate their patience as well as their ability for us to create our scholarly identities to solve complex problems and remind us that we hold the power to shape the future for many generations to come. To our family, almost every time that we engage as a cohort, we describe how our families have supported us, held us up, put up with us, and pushed us to be here.
I know if we had a chance to add your names to our diplomas, we would absolutely do that. But since we can't, we want to call you out here today. For those that we lost, I know that there are people here with us today that are unseen but I absolutely felt deeply: parents, siblings, grandparents, family members, mentors.
We continue to mourn you at events like this because we know that you would be here cheering us on. But we thank you for the love that you have given us and the memories that fuel us and remind us the importance of living with purpose and with passion. To cohort one: second to none. Scholars. Practitioners. If leading was easy, everybody would do it. We know that.
But leading is not, leading is not what we do. It is who we are. It is our calling. Let's never confuse movement with progress and always continue to push to make education better because we know how many hopes and dreams are relying on us to fix the systems, just to give them a chance.
And when the times get hard and the mountains feel steep, when the wind is in your wings beginning to blow and swirl us in all of the directions, just remember that turbulence is the price we pay for flying high.
Congratulations. We did it. And I'll see you at work.