Kinda sorta defending Quinta Brunson (and the people she attacks)

The dust-up between the queen of television and an education reformer is more complicated than it looks

If you don’t live and breathe charter school politics, let me bring you up to speed on an episode from this week.

This is where we start:

That’s Jeanne Allen, leader of the Center for Education Reform, calling out Quinta Brunson, comedic actress and writer of the award-winning television show Abbott Elementary, for having benefited from a charter school education but actively promoting an anti-charter storyline on her show.

As they say, “it didn’t go well.”

Black Twitter drug Allen like carry-on luggage. And, for white progressives who stan hard for conventional public schools like it’s a social religion, it was a leftist holiday.

Carol Burris, the former suburban principal who now leads Diane Ravitch’s Network for Public Education - a group that exists almost solely to attack charter schools, their leaders, educators, and families - found their news peg.

They sent a dispatch to their nation of pensionistas asking them to jump into the dog pile.

And that was the recipe for a social media flare-up that, like much of the crossfire in the public education debate, won’t do a damn thing to get a single marginalized child the education they need to be free.

Twitteratti has said so much about this kerfuffle. I’ll add a few points.

First, Brunson is the type of success story I want to see coming out of our cities. Creative, brilliant, funny, talented, hard-working, Black, and proud. Abbott succeeds not as a Black life show but as an accessible comedy cutting in all directions. It’s quick, witty, self-effacing, endearing, and escapist.

My first trip as an education writer to Philly, where Brunson grew up, left me shaken about the prospects for the children there. To see her come up through that school system and make it to the global stage is a win on so many levels.

Bravo. I applaud her rise.

Now, for Allen. That’s another story. Her tweet about Brunson’s populist anti-charter storyline being motivated by money was a bad take that understandably led summoned the mob for her tail.

Ed reform is like that sometimes. Righteous, morally indignant, and culturally mismatched for communicating with people of color. Reform will pave over the bones of revered cultural totems in communities and erect the Google Academy of Academics and Test Scores on the spot where ten generations of Black people graduated with pride, defunct schools named after Booker T. Washington or George Washington Carver and other notable ancestors.

Here’s the thing: I know Jeanne Allen personally. While people are dragging the cartoon of who they presume her to be, my experience with her is that she is the kindest and most generous conservative I know. She’s fought for more people of color, publicly and privately, than the public record will ever show.

And, if you’re ever in a policy knife fight, she’ll be the first to have your back while all the other education reform careerists remain silent or, at most, drop apologies for their weak support into your DMs.

I can’t defend her in all things, just as she can’t defend my roasting of right-wingers, but I can honestly say that those who suggest she wears a coat made of Dalmatians are grossly misinformed.

She’s wrong on issues I care about, but she can disagree with you on political or social problems and still open doors for you.

I appreciate that because, at this very moment, conservative education reformers are whispering to my supporters that I should be canceled for not being appropriately accommodationist to their affronts against social justice.

As for Brunson, I can appreciate her art while admitting that she’s not perfect. Education in her home city is a complicated mix of pride and problems. Not all the kids get into special magnet programs as she did. Not all have educators in their families who can block and tackle and get their kids on the hidden tracks to success that sent her to Hollywood. As she pointed out, her elementary was converted to a charter school ten years after she left it.

Does she examine why that happened?

Is it because that school was terrific, needing no changes, and some evil charter overlords seized it?

Or, more realistically, was it a school driven to disrepair by social abandonment, low expectations, and poor district management?

And, as Brunson admits, her next school was a community charter that she still is proud to have attended.

So, why the anti-charter plotline on her show?

We have so few Black men in education, less than 2% of American educators, so why have one of the three Black men on Abbott Elementary be a slick pimp-like character with villainous motives?

Who’s imagination does this play into? Who sees Black male educators who dedicate their lives to running schools of hope in communities that desperately need Black male role models and educators?

My hot take?

It’s the reverse of misogynoir aimed at the white, progressive, female public school system constituency and the POC of color who spend so much time with them that they mirror each other.

I’ve had the privilege to know too many good Black men who have educated themselves on the needs of our kids, dedicated themselves to the racial uplift of our people, and fought a daily battle of keeping our kids safe and on track to trade in the careless reductionism that Abbott paints them with.

I don’t expect everyone to be sensitive to Black men on this point. Unfortunately, America does a terrible job of seeing us as human; in education, all sides reduce us to one problematic characterization or another, starting in Kindergarten onward.

And, none of the characters on Abbott are indeed models of good behavior.

Ava, the principal, is a self-absorbed parody of the breezy and marginally useful school leader. Brunson’s character is an empathic teacher who is socially clueless. Finally, there’s an overwoke white male teacher who is Screech transported from Saved By The Bell to Abbott.

Still, it says something that 30% of the Black male representation in Brunson’s fictional universal is dedicated to pimpery.

Yes, I’ll defend Quinta as we should do with all our sisters, even as they throw us under the stereotype bus when they get to tell our stories in pop culture. We are not her audience, even as we support her glow-up.

And, to be brutally honest and culturally transgressive, Allen isn’t wholly wrong.