Perhaps because it was Sunday, the church service atmosphere during Dr. Christopher Emdin’s keynote address before NSBA’s National Black Council of School Board Members (NBC) luncheon in San Diego felt particularly appropriate.

Truth be told, Emdin, a popular and eagerly welcomed presenter during past NSBA and NBC gatherings, never fails to stir audiences’ hearts, minds, and souls.

Sunday’s keynote was no exception as Emdin noted that the date—April 3—was the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. Delivered in 1968 during a trip to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers, it would be King’s final public speech. One day later, the civil rights giant would be assassinated.

“The gift of the mountaintop is you have a different view” of the challenges before you, said Emdin, the Robert A. Naslund Endowed Chair in Curriculum Theory and professor of education at the University of Southern California and director of Youth Engagement and Community Partnerships at the USC Race and Equity Center.

 He suggested to audience members that the pandemic has offered a new opportunity, a gateway “to get to the promised land” where we successfully and lovingly educate Black children.

“I am unconcerned with a return to how things were” pre-pandemic, said Emdin. “I am invested in the promised land.”

He rejected the blanket assertion that all children were “broken” by the pandemic and said we need to better engage students about their attitudes and experiences during remote learning.

In conversations with students, he said he often hears that they enjoyed the freedom to organize their own schedules, to have more time with family and friends, and to explore personal interests. 

“The babies don’t tell me they are as broken as we say they are,” Emdin said. If you ask them how they spent their time and what worked for them, you can learn a lot about how students “can be a component in the construction of their education.”

He offered a historical reminder of the academic success that Black children frequently enjoyed in segregated schools. With integration, however, the education system “didn’t integrate the pedagogy. The achievement gap was the approach to education.”

A key missing component, he says, was the love of Black children.

Schools need to follow “the right script” when educating children, one that recognizes that when you “touch the soul, you expand the mind.”

He described the battle that Black children often face in school as a David vs. Goliath battle. School systems want them to look like and act like Goliath. When students rebel and say, “This doesn’t feel right,” they’re labeled as having “oppositional defiant disorder.”

“We need to create the space for David to get his slingshot” and be free to express his ingenuity and style.

In his 2021 book Ratchetdemic: Reimagining Academic Success, Emdin encourages educators to provide spaces for students to display their academic brilliance without sacrificing their unique identities—especially when that means being “a little extra” or ratchet.

Emdin said he came to Sunday’s NBC luncheon, “to be ratchetdemic and ratchetdemic abundantly” with his message to use the pandemic “as the portal to get to the promised land.”