Options aren’t the same thing as expectations. Options are given. Expectations are internalized.
That’s the mindset of new MMSD Deputy Chief Tremayne Clardy. For him, we make the ceiling be where it is for our kids. Kids don’t know what their future options are and many wouldn’t fully understand those options even if we sat down and gave detailed explanations for them.
But kids do internalize expectations. As Principal of Sennett Middle School, Clardy changed the expectations for kids from the moment he stepped through the door. Clardy wanted all the age-old rhetoric and set-in-stone ways of thinking to be gone from Sennett forever. Parents and teachers found that with him in charge many of the old ways were immediately and simply gone.
Passing kids along who were underperforming? Gone. Using code words to dance around issues of race? Not anymore. Just trying to get kids moving so they could get a high school diploma? No. Those things weren’t flying anymore.
“I have no intention of developing middle school students just for high school graduation,” Clardy says. “We’re developing these school students for high-level career opportunities and college readiness. A high school diploma is a step in the right direction but it’s not the end-all.”
The lowered expectations when it comes to African-American students will be a no-go as well. Clardy says one symptom of the problem when it comes to students of color, in particular, is that staff allow those kids to just survive school instead of use school as a springboard to a future.
“It’s our responsibility to promote that dream of going to college,” Clardy says. “When I was principal at Sennett we talked about college and career readiness from the day you walked in the door as a sixth grader until the day you walked out as an eighth grader. So you knew what that expectation was. And we also have a career component to it. It doesn’t have to be a four-year university, you know, the career and technical side of it is obviously just as important. But there is an expectation that you develop a skill set that is beyond the high school diploma so that you can be in control of your lifestyle. You can control the life you want, where you want to live, what you want to drive, who you want to marry. It’s about education that really unlocks freedom.”
As the supervisor of all Madison middle schools, Clardy will bring the same attitude that he did while principal at Sennett when it comes to race. Clardy demanded that race be unveiled as an issue pertaining to performance when he was a principal. He wants the same thing done across all middle schools now.
“I was unapologetic talking about race from the time I walked in the door,” Clardy says. “I’m not going to use code words like ‘equity’. I’m really setting a culture where not only is it okay to talk about race, but it’s expected. When you look at academic performance, behavior performance, when we look at attendance, if you present data that doesn’t have your data pulled out by demographics then you have the wrong data. I want to see comparative data of our students sorted out by color to see how they’re performing as compared to their peers.”
At every turn African-American kids have been performing more poorly than their white counterparts. Clardy saw that no matter how you categorize and chart the demographics, the concept remained the same.
Specifically, he saw that no matter what category was presented, the black students lagged behind. If a white student was in the Special Education Program and a black student was also in the same program, the black student underperformed. If a white student was from an impoverished background they still outperformed a black student from that same background.
“You take two students around socioeconomic status, special needs status or mental health status, but you have a white student and you have a black student, the student of color still underperforms even with those other factors in play,” Clardy says. “So if race continues to be the one indicator when it comes to disproportionality, then call it out. You don’t try to sugar coat it with all these other factors like special needs or socio-economics. While they do play a role, they’re not the most significant indicator of success right now.”
In the lead-up to school starting in middle schools today, Tremayne Clardy has gone to Welcome Back sessions at nearly all of the middle schools in the Madison area. He has been extremely impressed with the level of attention staff are paying to racial issues.
“I’ve only been on here for three weeks so I’m learning a lot,” Clardy says of the School District. “It’s hard to get a true feeling for the culture of each middle school without the students being there yet. So I’ll learn a lot more when the students come back. But I will tell you I’m very impressed especially at the middle school level with the leadership. They are a group of professionals who have embraced race. There has not been one presentation that I’ve been to where they did not bring up race and called out or need to improve growth of our African American students.”
But even in saying that, one can almost feel the push back bubbling up. There’s always someone in the back of the room at these presentations with just a slight frown. There’s someone reading this article asking themselves why the race card is coming out again. And again. And again.
It’s not a card. It’s not something Tremayne Clardy woke up one morning and decided to focus on randomly.
In recent years a study showed that Madison is the worst place to be a black child. The worst place. Disparities exist at every turn for black kids in this community unlike nearly anywhere else in North America. This isn’t a tale about some far away stereotypical place like South Central or Detroit or the South Side of Chicago. This is Madison, Wisconsin. This is the city we live that is being discussed.
Changing the mindset of all the factors in Madison that have led to such glaring disproportionalities is tough. Clardy wants to change the way the kids see themselves and their future in order to impact those disparities from the inside out.
Madison Area Middle Schools will pull the data throughout this upcoming school year broken down by race. They will use it as a benchmark to measure how effective they have been at changing the culture of performance for African-American students.
It’s not racist to talk about racial issues. Showing the areas in which students of color lag behind their peers is neither a condemnation of those students nor is it a condemnation of the teachers working in the system. It is simply an acknowledgment that this disparity exists. Stopping it requires that people embrace the truth of the matter and set a different tone of expectation.
“I’m very happy and excited about the opportunity to work with so many great principals in Madison, especially at the middle school level,” Clardy says. “I’m also excited that the central office team here led by Dr. Cheatham is top notch and they have this clear set of goals around how to improve our performance at middle schools. I like the fact we are digging deep into the performance of African-American students. I’m very passionate about it and I am actually most excited that we are specifically calling out the need to promote the growth of our African-American students.”
