Remarks to Philadelphia Board of Education - October 24, 2024
Good afternoon. My name is Fasaha Traylor, and I am here to raise thorny questions for the Philadelphia School District that educated both my daughters and now, my grandson.
Our country is embroiled in a great many controversies over many things, but it must NOT be controversial for our School District and our Board of Education to protect our students’ freedom to learn. The questions of policy and values implicated in the suspension of Northeast history teacher Keziah Ridgeway--a recipient of the Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award--have grave implications for exactly what kind of education we are offering to our children, families, and City. Keziah Ridgeway’s suspension should be lifted, and lifted today.
In 2016, when my colleague and I began our research and writing for our book, They Carried Us: The Social Impact of Philadelphia’s Black Women Leaders,” one thing we decided early on was that we didn’t want to imply that only old people lived lives of accomplishment and were therefore due social recognition.
We thought then, and think now more than ever, that it is important to spotlight younger people who are on a path to doing great things, or are doing great things now, in mid-career.
If we had known then what we know now about Keziah Ridgeway, I can assure you that she would have taken her place in our book alongside such venerable educators as Constance Clayton, Fanny Jackson Coppin, Nellie Rathbone Bright, Ruth Wright Hayre--who used to preside over this body—and the activist-educator Caroline LeCount.
Why Keziah Ridgeway? Because she is an emblem of what can happen when the right to learn becomes entangled in political conflict, which is itself rooted in conflicting values. Although I have not spoken to Ridgeway about this, I would say that she believes it is her duty to offer her students the freedom to learn in an environment which values equality.
And I believe it is this Board’s duty to support teachers who defend the right of their students to learn.
Much has already been said and written about Keziah Ridgeway’s support for the work of two of her students (one of whom is Sudanese) in producing a podcast for a Black History Month assignment in February about the role of art among oppressed people I imagine that if the oppressed group her students chose to highlight was not the Palestinian people, their podcast may have drawn little notice. But since our country is roiled with demonstrations and debates about the role of the US in wars spreading across the Middle East, her students’ work was seen through the lens of the strong feelings generated by the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and the death and destruction visible to all of us on the evening news, social media, and in horrified conversations in our communities.
I watched the students’ podcast. I couldn’t have been prouder of the comparisons the students made, the critical thinking skills the podcast demonstrated, and the conceptual clarity required to compare art produced by two different peoples under dissimilar conditions of oppression.
Which is why I was shocked when the podcast was ordered to be "taken down" by the District. I was truly shocked when I learned that Keziah Ridgeway was confronted by one of her fellow teachers and asked if she was a "terrorist.” This accusation was undoubtedly provoked not just by the podcast, but by Keziah Ridgeway’s dress, which marks her as a Muslim woman. By the time she was suspended in September, pending the outcome of an "investigation," I felt the whispering of the Black women educators we wrote about in They Carried Us calling me to speak up and speak out about the values they spent their lives upholding.
The job of the Board of Education is to insure the “freedom to learn.” That is it. Your job includes the protection of those teachers who, every day in the classroom, insist on the equality of all students, and not the supremacy of some. Sometimes this will be difficult, as the forces outside the classroom seep in and try to use students and curriculum as fodder for political battles outside. What parents, teachers, board members, and administrators must realize is that the freedom to learn under conditions of equality is the North Star for what we must all want for every student. Keeping our eyes on that prize is what protects us all. Not just some. All.
I would like to close with W.E.B. DuBois. His words about the “freedom to learn” are certainly more eloquent than mine and should remind the Board of its duty:
“Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental…The freedom to learn…has been bought by bitter sacrifice. And whatever we may think of the curtailment of other civil rights, we should fight to the last ditch to keep open the right to learn, the right to have examined in our schools not only what we believe but what we do not believe; not only what our leaders say, but what the leaders of other groups and nations, and the leaders of other centuries have said. We must insist upon this to give our children the fairness of a start which will equip them with such an array of facts and such an attitude toward truth that they can have a real chance to judge what the world is, and what its greater minds have thought it might be.” —W.E.B. Du Bois, The Freedom to Learn (1949)
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