Shaker Rising Video Project: Video #2

September 22, 2020—In the second video of the Shaker Rising Video Project, Matt Simon, the Coordinator of the Innovative Center for Personalized Learning answers the question: What if we maintain the status quo and continue to track students?

The Shaker Rising Video Project features District administrators, teachers and community members—all of whom will answer questions related to detracking at Shaker Heights Schools. Shaker Rising videos will be released in the coming weeks every Tuesday and Friday by email, in the District newsletter and on social media.

We hope these videos help our school community better understand why detracking is important, how it will be implemented at our schools and how it will positively impact our students’ success. 

Thank you for your continued support of our schools and our students in this year of Shaker Rising. For more Shaker Rising videos, please go to the District’s YouTube channel.

Please review a full transcript of this video below.

If we were to learn about a school system where white students went upstairs to advanced classes and black students went downstairs to lower level classes, we would be outraged. 

We would call that a racist system and we wouldn't stand for it. And yet that's pretty much what's happening right here in our community. And it is a problem.

So we must change. Our Shaker Heights School System must change and change is not easy. 

Change can be painful, but not as painful as maintaining our status quo. Not as painful as the way tracking manifests in our schools, where, by the time our own K-12 students make it to high school, our lower level courses are overwhelmingly filled with black students and our upper-level upper level courses are overwhelmingly filled with white students. 

We are better than this. We are a community worthy of a first-class education system for all of our Shaker students. Not just for some of our Shaker students. 

We are a community worthy of a school system that welcomes and celebrates and supports the success of all of our kids. 

So let's do that. 

Let's be inclusive, determined and wise. Let's tear down systems that are producing inequity between racial groups and build in their place systems that produce and sustain equity among racial groups. Let's build a school system where all Shaker students enjoy their education, find meaning and value in it and thrive socially, emotionally and academically. 

Let's do that together not just for my child, but for every child in our community.