In the last 18 hours I have read and reread Nikole Hannah-Jones’s article on the New York public schools and Black children, in the same way I read Malcolm X’s autobiography when I first discovered it. Each pass forces me to confront my own academic journey and to sit with a hard reality that I now must outsource my own child’s cultural footprint, a task that grows harder by the day as the pathology of navigating his Blackness in white spaces becomes more emotionally dangerous under a political ethos that the internet replicates and celebrates.

My mother, like so many Black mothers before her and since, was trying to do two things at once: give her child access to the American Dream and protect him from the evil that so often comes wrapped inside it. She believed in public education as the right moral choice, even as she understood its limits. When she secured me a slot at the “good school” — the way families do when they have the ambition but not the social capital to flatter the egos of the power brokers who gatekeep it, she found her way into Cambridge, literally 3.3 miles from our home in Roxbury. In several ways, being in Cambridge seemed better. But it was an illusion of better. Black children here still lacked true champions and advocates. Boston Public Schools was assumed to be the less sophisticated system, but at least it was honest about its warts. Cambridge, dressed in the language of progressive virtue, has never had to be.

I started my teaching career at twenty-two in New York City, and I walked into a system that — scale and geography aside — was not so different from the one I’d left. I taught first in the South Bronx, then in Manhattan, serving students from East Harlem at a high school that most of those students had ranked 11th or 12th out of 12 choices. I was effective enough at the work that I was invited to meet with the Vice Chancellor on teaching and learning and later asked to work with school leaders across the city. That work is where I learned exactly how fractured the system was: I worked in East New York, Brownsville, the South Bronx, East Harlem — and was eventually asked to bring what I’d learned to Newark, during Cory Booker’s mayoral administration.

Even then, even with all the optimism of youth, I knew this — having to leave your community to find a decent school — wasn’t new. My own childhood had already taught me that such a move is not a quirk of the system — it is the system. Hannah-Jones’s article is a reminder, not a revelation: schools are public in name, but the public, by and large, is only invested in its own children, not in the struggles of children who are someone else’s problem.

Cambridge, for all its grandeur of progressive thought, still masks an apartheid school system. And it is precisely in urban districts sitting next to wealthy suburban resources that this contradiction is hardest to hide because proximity exposes the hypocrisy. You cannot claim the values of integration and equity while building a system engineered, block by block, to avoid them.

This is not a new fight, and it did not need Hannah-Jones to discover it — Boston has always had people who named it plainly. Ruth Batson spent decades documenting and organizing against the exact segregation Boston pretended not to see, work that laid the foundation for METCO and for the desegregation battles that followed. Mel King built power from the ground up in the South End and Roxbury, insisting that political power and educational access were the same fight. Charles Ogletree carried that same insistence into the law, using his standing at Harvard to hold the region’s institutions accountable to the equity they claimed to believe in. And Bob Moses, in “Radical Equations,” made the case that math literacy is a civil right on the same order as the vote — that access to rigorous education is not a mercy handed down by “good schools,” but a demand owed to every child. Their work is the tradition my mother was operating in, whether she had the language for it or not, and it is the tradition Hannah-Jones’s reporting belongs to now. The names change. The fight is the same fight.

I came back to Cambridge as an adult to engage in this, serving as advisor on education to one Cambridge mayor and working with another to implement the interventions that might actually close the gaps in opportunity running through our schools. I have also sat in more than 30 IEP meetings, at no charge, beside parents I had often never met before that morning, because no parent should have to walk into that room alone to fight for their child.

What I have observed since coming back, especially during the pandemic, is that Cambridge practices what Robin DiAngelo calls “nice racism,” the kind that speaks fluent equity while the outcomes never move. It is time to close the gap.

Here’s how we do that, as a city: 

  • We stop talking about strategic tutoring at School Committee and finally activate it. This will mean opening youth centers and other city buildings, and working with Cambridge school volunteers, Tutoring Plus, and anyone else willing to show up. We might have to ask kids to give up part of a Friday or a Saturday. 
  • We stop telling families how good they have it here, and start telling them the truth: this is a fight, and we need them in it, at their highest advocacy selves. 
  • We stop square-dancing around matters as consequential to children’s lives as algebra and start pushing every child toward greatness.

Many of our schools are peanut-free because we refuse to accept the risk to even one child with an allergy. We owe our children the same standard when it comes to opportunity. Cambridge has to become an excuse-free city — one genuinely committed to preparing every child to compete in the city that is supposed to be theirs too.

Tony Clark, a 1994 CRLS Graduate, is Co-Founder and Co-President, My Brother’s Keeper Cambridge Task Force

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