New Equity Podcast, Back to Freedom School, Launches Saturday Night
The global pandemic has laid bare major long-standing inequities in our public education system that affect everything from remote access, to responsive curriculum development, to student and mental health support, and beyond. As the national conversation around schools becomes increasingly rife with polarization and misinformation, Voices is embarking on an endeavor to tackle educational inequities head-on in the form of a new podcast premiering this Saturday.
Back to Freedom School is hosted by Voices Community Organizer and Policy Advocate Infinite Culcleasure and is distributed by the Vermont Education Equity Project (a joint endeavor launched in 2017 by Voices and Public Assets Institute). Infinite explains he felt compelled to create the podcast in response to concerns about the way that our current crisis is reinforcing and overshadowing long-standing issues in education.
"Now that [schools] are dominated by logistical and “safety” concerns, priorities have shifted away from addressing the inequities that existed in our public school system before COVID 19," explains Culcleasure. “But the news and the information that we are getting right now is incomplete. The situation on the ground remains way more complicated than the policy and political debates about getting back to ‘normal.’”
The emphasis on racial equity is a critical element of the podcast. Even the name, Back To Freedom School—a reference to the historical Freedom Schools that arose in the 1960s to counter the “sharecropper education” received by many African-American and low-income white children at the time—reflects the podcast’s focus on historical and ongoing institutional racism in education. Over the course of the season, Culcleasure explores these disparities through topics like curriculum, racial justice, literacy, and community schools. Featuring stakeholders from across the state and country, including parents, students, and teachers, Culcleasure says that the podcast aims to “increase awareness of equity issues while co-creating a social and political reality in which the success of Black, indigenous, and children of color, as well as children with learning, social, or economic challenges, becomes central to the cultivation of a robust democracy and to socio-political liberation.”
Back To Freedom School’s first episode, featuring French-Indian Vermont native, educator, and grandmother, Judy Dow, connects societal transgressions from the past to some of our current challenges and opportunities in education. Listeners can tune in to hear it at 99.3 WBTV on Saturday, October 3rd at 8 pm or catch the replay on Monday at 1 pm. Links to the podcast can be found on the resource page of the Vermont Education Equity Project website: edequityvt.org and WBTV-LP Radio. Culcleasure says he hopes the podcast enables Vermonters to think critically about their education system. “At the end of the day,” he explains, “what I think is most important is for everyday people to be coming into their leadership in ways that empower them to ask hard questions and to feel entitled to a quality education.”
