October 2026: Clarice Brazas, High School Administrator in Philadelphia
Background
Charlie: Could you just talk a little bit about how you got involved in antiracist work in education?
Clarice: So I really think my first organizing experience was when I taught in Dekalb County in Georgia and our school was overcrowded and old - not old by School District of Philadelphia standards - but old for the South. It was built in the 70s, it was falling down, lots of vermin problems. And our school specifically was all minoritized students - so either Black and Brown students from around Atlanta or immigrant students. We had kids from Ethiopia, Somalia, Bhutan, Vietnam - all over the world. And it was very clear how money was being spent in the county - so that’s when I started working with students and organizing around that. And then when I moved to Philadelphia - a friend of mine who lived in Atlanta and had a friend up here, Elly Porter-Webb, gave me a list of book groups to join when I got to Philly, and one of my very first ones was with you, Charlie McGeehan, and the other was with Ismael Jimenez, and so I’ve been in it ever since.
Charlie: Elly Porter-Webb, an important person in the history of BARWE - one of the very foundational BARWE people - in the first inquiry group.
Freedom Side School
Clarice: And now working with Freedom Side School - shout out Freedom Side School, which has opened this year, a school for kids whose parents are incarcerated or dealing with incarceration. We’ve got our first K-1 class.
Charlie: And so I did a bit of research on Freedom Side School. And I see that abolitionist education is core to the school. Could you talk a little bit about what that means for the school and what it means for you more broadly?
Clarice: For the school, it’s going to mean allowing adults and families to be flexible with kids and what their needs are. In a school with a staff of only 7 people, one of them is a licensed clinical Social Worker, who is going to be able to support doing restorative work with kids, not focusing on discipline and punishment but focusing on building community. And so I think that is core to that work and core to my work. And that takes time - which is not always something we have a lot of. Being able to have a conversation with a kid or a group of kids or a group of families or a group of educators.
Charlie: So that school is a place where that can happen?
Clarice: Yes.
Charlie: And how many students does the school have?
Clarice: We are starting with 13 in a K-1 shared room.
How have things changed?
Charlie: And so I think you and I have been working together since 2017 - so basically a decade. And the very early days of what is BARWE now. How do you think things have shifted for you over the past 10 years?
Clarice: So I think that my advocacy, since I’ve moved from being a classroom teacher to being in Administration, my advocacy has shifted in some ways less from citywide work to very specific school-based work. So whether that looks like being a really big part of our hiring process and making sure we have good teachers or advocating to the District at large for the things I know my students and teachers need.
Charlie: And so it’s been six years now, more than six years, since we published our “What White Colleagues Need to Understand” piece…
Clarice: Wow it feels like so much longer ago than that.
Charlie: Doesn’t it really? It was published in the Spring 2020 edition of Learning for Justice - so basically a lifetime ago. And we wrote it in 2019, and maybe 2018. So it got published and then COVID hit - so it feels like a lot longer ago than that. What do you think has changed?
Clarice. So much of it still holds true. I do feel like, especially considering we wrote that before COVID, people’s vocabulary has shifted a lot. I don’t know that their mentality has changed, but their vocabulary has. And so the School District didn’t have all its equity policies then, it didn’t have an Office of Equity. And so however underfunded that office is, it exists now. I think there has also been a shift away from that because of a 2nd Trump presidency.
I also work in a school now that is primarily staffed by Black and Brown people - so that experience is different for me. I work in a bubble that I often forget isn’t true for the rest of the School District.
I feel like, if anything, people have less time to think now than they did before. We got to do that year-long Tune Up Tuesday series - and I don’t feel like work like that is happening at this level now.
Charlie: It’s almost like we have an Equity Office now, and we get a PD once a year.
Clarice: It’s like the Equity doesn’t flow into the work that happens. So I basically work with Special Ed every day in my neighborhood school and there is no equity for our kids compared to kids who are going to magnet schools or other schools around the city.
Charlie: We did those Tune Up Tuesday sessions - and I guess we did a lot of them on white supremacy culture. Do you think you would still pick that piece?
Clarice: I do still think it is a very useful framing - to think about the work we do. And I personally think about it all the time. I was in a Leadership PD in the summer and the person who led it kept using the word urgency over and over and over and I was just like “Ugh!”
But I think there is a lot of focus on teachers and far less focus on school leaders and District leadership which has such a major impact on how schools are run.
Charlie: And that’s very interesting because we started in the beginning with a very bottom-up approach, which I still believe in a lot. But we were starting before there were any equity teams in most Districts. But the landscape now is really different.
Clarice: And I think our District is even more top-heavy now than it was a decade ago - and in a not good way.
Charlie: So as we look forward into this year, what do you think white teachers need to know or study or discuss or do to be involved in antiracist work?
Clarice: I think it’s some of the things we’ve always talked about - you have to know yourself and your place in society and your school. It’s so many of the things we’ve said in the past - you have to listen to the people around you, like the women of color, who probably have their ear to the ground in a way that you do not. And your organizing should never be putting them in danger. And I think last year specifically, that was something I saw with the teachers in my building. The intentions were good but the impact was not. The impact was putting specifically Black women teachers in danger in a way that wasn’t being reckoned with.
Charlie: And especially now, when I feel like we have a backlash against antiracist work I think that message is even more relevant. And especially with things like ICE, how can we make sure that we’re doing antiracist work but not doing work that is putting people in danger - whether it’s colleagues or whether it’s students.
Clarice: Absolutely.
Charlie: I guess the other thing that I’m thinking about is… What would you say today is the role of action in the work of white teachers in antiracist work?
Clarice: I mean I think we definitely still need action. In some ways, the movement feels a little disjointed - and I don’t know if that’s just my place and where I’m at in life - but it doesn’t feel like a lot of things are goal-oriented. I thought that was something we were doing a really good job with 7-8 years ago - we had very specific demands we were pushing for. I feel like a lot of people, especially white people, who were doing that organizing work shifted their focus almost entirely to Palestine. Which I think is absolutely a valid issue to organize around - but it did feel to me like many Black and Brown kids across the city of Philadelphia got neglected in that fight.
Charlie: I also think a lot of the education justice and racial justice organizing work… those organizations just aren’t there in the same way it was.
Clarice: And I feel like in many ways that is a symptom of where our government is at right now. It is hard for organizing like that to survive under a fascist dictatorship, in an out and loud way. And so maybe it is time to look towards arts organizing. Or, I am always going to come back to local organizing. We have, what, 24 schools that are being shuttered or moved in our city. It does not seem that these shifts are happening just based on size data.
Charlie: Yeah - school closures are clearly a racial justice issue - just like it was the last time they closed schools in Philly.
Charlie: What would you say are some of the questions you’d want us to ask when we talk to people? Or the topics you think we should explore?
Clarice: Something I’m personally very interested in right now is literacy - which feels so old fashioned. But we talk a lot about voting and how people can get involved in their communities. Working where I work and with the families that I work with, we have to approach spreading information and knowledge in a very different way. Are there options to have material read to people? Are we using vocabulary that families and students can understand? And if you are at a school that is very diverse, what does that look like across the racial and ethnic breakdown in your school? Whose voices are being heard still matters and is the information accessible to everyone?
Charlie: And would you also relate that to the teaching of literacy?
Clarice: 100%. I think we have a literacy crisis - I don’t know about across the country but I know about in the City of Philadelphia - lots of parents and families cannot read well enough to do the things they need to do or often to advocate for their kids in the way they want to.
Charlie: Yeah. And I feel like too often the answer to that is more testing, more data. We need data on the literacy results rising. But clearly we’ve been in a testing era for all this time - for all the time those families were in school we were in standardized testing central. They went through it, and it’s pretty clear it didn’t work. So is there a way to reshape literacy to being a justice issue? And are there ways to address it that aren’t just about “How can we give kids more tests?”
And the interesting thing to me is that people are pushing back against standardized curriculum, and particularly AI curriculum, as it’s coming in.
Charlie: Other topics or questions we should explore?
Clarice: It would be interesting to know what people are reading right now and how (or if it’s being used in their work). Another issue is that we don’t have really great school leader PD.
Charlie: It’s interesting that you say that, because I think there are a lot of people who have been on our list for 10 years. We haven’t tracked everybody’s careers, but I am sure some of them are school leaders right now. That’s an interesting thing that we haven’t spent much time on.
Clarice: It’s something that can be very isolating. So it’s not the same as building power with classroom educators.
Charlie: And lastly, who should we Pass the Hat for this month?
Clarice: I would say Freedom Side School - they’re doing such good work. The goal is for kids to not stay there forever, but to go out in middle or high school and become organizing powerhouses. And I think that can happen, and I’m really excited about the forward trajectory of that.
Charlie: And if private school is needed, which there’s a broad argument that it’s not, but if it is needed it’s for people who need the most support.
Clarice: Yeah - they had to convince me. I was like “This seems good but I don’t know about the whole private school.” But if these kids were Deaf and Hard of Hearing, I know I would want a very specific school for their needs.
Charlie: Yeah - and it’s not a charter school, so it’s not sapping resources from the District.
Speed Round Questions
In addition to our conversations about the future of antiracist work in education, we want to get to know our collaborators a little better. Here are Clarice’s answers to our speed round questions:
What book would you recommend? All the White Friends I Couldn’t Keep: Hope - and Hard Pills to Swallow - About Fighting for Black Lives by Andre Henry
What is one recipe you would recommend? Pumpkin Espresso Bundt Cake
Who are you following for antiracist work in education? Ta-Nehisi Coates, Janelle Bowie, adrienne marie brown, Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, The Cult of Pedagogy
What is your favorite place in Philadelphia? West Fairmount Park and Produce Junction (because where else can you get flowers for that price?!)
Charlie: Could you just talk a little bit about how you got involved in antiracist work in education?
Clarice: So I really think my first organizing experience was when I taught in Dekalb County in Georgia and our school was overcrowded and old - not old by School District of Philadelphia standards - but old for the South. It was built in the 70s, it was falling down, lots of vermin problems. And our school specifically was all minoritized students - so either Black and Brown students from around Atlanta or immigrant students. We had kids from Ethiopia, Somalia, Bhutan, Vietnam - all over the world. And it was very clear how money was being spent in the county - so that’s when I started working with students and organizing around that. And then when I moved to Philadelphia - a friend of mine who lived in Atlanta and had a friend up here, Elly Porter-Webb, gave me a list of book groups to join when I got to Philly, and one of my very first ones was with you, Charlie McGeehan, and the other was with Ismael Jimenez, and so I’ve been in it ever since.
Charlie: Elly Porter-Webb, an important person in the history of BARWE - one of the very foundational BARWE people - in the first inquiry group.
Freedom Side School
Clarice: And now working with Freedom Side School - shout out Freedom Side School, which has opened this year, a school for kids whose parents are incarcerated or dealing with incarceration. We’ve got our first K-1 class.
Charlie: And so I did a bit of research on Freedom Side School. And I see that abolitionist education is core to the school. Could you talk a little bit about what that means for the school and what it means for you more broadly?
Clarice: For the school, it’s going to mean allowing adults and families to be flexible with kids and what their needs are. In a school with a staff of only 7 people, one of them is a licensed clinical Social Worker, who is going to be able to support doing restorative work with kids, not focusing on discipline and punishment but focusing on building community. And so I think that is core to that work and core to my work. And that takes time - which is not always something we have a lot of. Being able to have a conversation with a kid or a group of kids or a group of families or a group of educators.
Charlie: So that school is a place where that can happen?
Clarice: Yes.
Charlie: And how many students does the school have?
Clarice: We are starting with 13 in a K-1 shared room.
How have things changed?
Charlie: And so I think you and I have been working together since 2017 - so basically a decade. And the very early days of what is BARWE now. How do you think things have shifted for you over the past 10 years?
Clarice: So I think that my advocacy, since I’ve moved from being a classroom teacher to being in Administration, my advocacy has shifted in some ways less from citywide work to very specific school-based work. So whether that looks like being a really big part of our hiring process and making sure we have good teachers or advocating to the District at large for the things I know my students and teachers need.
Charlie: And so it’s been six years now, more than six years, since we published our “What White Colleagues Need to Understand” piece…
Clarice: Wow it feels like so much longer ago than that.
Charlie: Doesn’t it really? It was published in the Spring 2020 edition of Learning for Justice - so basically a lifetime ago. And we wrote it in 2019, and maybe 2018. So it got published and then COVID hit - so it feels like a lot longer ago than that. What do you think has changed?
Clarice. So much of it still holds true. I do feel like, especially considering we wrote that before COVID, people’s vocabulary has shifted a lot. I don’t know that their mentality has changed, but their vocabulary has. And so the School District didn’t have all its equity policies then, it didn’t have an Office of Equity. And so however underfunded that office is, it exists now. I think there has also been a shift away from that because of a 2nd Trump presidency.
I also work in a school now that is primarily staffed by Black and Brown people - so that experience is different for me. I work in a bubble that I often forget isn’t true for the rest of the School District.
I feel like, if anything, people have less time to think now than they did before. We got to do that year-long Tune Up Tuesday series - and I don’t feel like work like that is happening at this level now.
Charlie: It’s almost like we have an Equity Office now, and we get a PD once a year.
Clarice: It’s like the Equity doesn’t flow into the work that happens. So I basically work with Special Ed every day in my neighborhood school and there is no equity for our kids compared to kids who are going to magnet schools or other schools around the city.
Charlie: We did those Tune Up Tuesday sessions - and I guess we did a lot of them on white supremacy culture. Do you think you would still pick that piece?
Clarice: I do still think it is a very useful framing - to think about the work we do. And I personally think about it all the time. I was in a Leadership PD in the summer and the person who led it kept using the word urgency over and over and over and I was just like “Ugh!”
But I think there is a lot of focus on teachers and far less focus on school leaders and District leadership which has such a major impact on how schools are run.
Charlie: And that’s very interesting because we started in the beginning with a very bottom-up approach, which I still believe in a lot. But we were starting before there were any equity teams in most Districts. But the landscape now is really different.
Clarice: And I think our District is even more top-heavy now than it was a decade ago - and in a not good way.
Charlie: So as we look forward into this year, what do you think white teachers need to know or study or discuss or do to be involved in antiracist work?
Clarice: I think it’s some of the things we’ve always talked about - you have to know yourself and your place in society and your school. It’s so many of the things we’ve said in the past - you have to listen to the people around you, like the women of color, who probably have their ear to the ground in a way that you do not. And your organizing should never be putting them in danger. And I think last year specifically, that was something I saw with the teachers in my building. The intentions were good but the impact was not. The impact was putting specifically Black women teachers in danger in a way that wasn’t being reckoned with.
Charlie: And especially now, when I feel like we have a backlash against antiracist work I think that message is even more relevant. And especially with things like ICE, how can we make sure that we’re doing antiracist work but not doing work that is putting people in danger - whether it’s colleagues or whether it’s students.
Clarice: Absolutely.
Charlie: I guess the other thing that I’m thinking about is… What would you say today is the role of action in the work of white teachers in antiracist work?
Clarice: I mean I think we definitely still need action. In some ways, the movement feels a little disjointed - and I don’t know if that’s just my place and where I’m at in life - but it doesn’t feel like a lot of things are goal-oriented. I thought that was something we were doing a really good job with 7-8 years ago - we had very specific demands we were pushing for. I feel like a lot of people, especially white people, who were doing that organizing work shifted their focus almost entirely to Palestine. Which I think is absolutely a valid issue to organize around - but it did feel to me like many Black and Brown kids across the city of Philadelphia got neglected in that fight.
Charlie: I also think a lot of the education justice and racial justice organizing work… those organizations just aren’t there in the same way it was.
Clarice: And I feel like in many ways that is a symptom of where our government is at right now. It is hard for organizing like that to survive under a fascist dictatorship, in an out and loud way. And so maybe it is time to look towards arts organizing. Or, I am always going to come back to local organizing. We have, what, 24 schools that are being shuttered or moved in our city. It does not seem that these shifts are happening just based on size data.
Charlie: Yeah - school closures are clearly a racial justice issue - just like it was the last time they closed schools in Philly.
Charlie: What would you say are some of the questions you’d want us to ask when we talk to people? Or the topics you think we should explore?
Clarice: Something I’m personally very interested in right now is literacy - which feels so old fashioned. But we talk a lot about voting and how people can get involved in their communities. Working where I work and with the families that I work with, we have to approach spreading information and knowledge in a very different way. Are there options to have material read to people? Are we using vocabulary that families and students can understand? And if you are at a school that is very diverse, what does that look like across the racial and ethnic breakdown in your school? Whose voices are being heard still matters and is the information accessible to everyone?
Charlie: And would you also relate that to the teaching of literacy?
Clarice: 100%. I think we have a literacy crisis - I don’t know about across the country but I know about in the City of Philadelphia - lots of parents and families cannot read well enough to do the things they need to do or often to advocate for their kids in the way they want to.
Charlie: Yeah. And I feel like too often the answer to that is more testing, more data. We need data on the literacy results rising. But clearly we’ve been in a testing era for all this time - for all the time those families were in school we were in standardized testing central. They went through it, and it’s pretty clear it didn’t work. So is there a way to reshape literacy to being a justice issue? And are there ways to address it that aren’t just about “How can we give kids more tests?”
And the interesting thing to me is that people are pushing back against standardized curriculum, and particularly AI curriculum, as it’s coming in.
Charlie: Other topics or questions we should explore?
Clarice: It would be interesting to know what people are reading right now and how (or if it’s being used in their work). Another issue is that we don’t have really great school leader PD.
Charlie: It’s interesting that you say that, because I think there are a lot of people who have been on our list for 10 years. We haven’t tracked everybody’s careers, but I am sure some of them are school leaders right now. That’s an interesting thing that we haven’t spent much time on.
Clarice: It’s something that can be very isolating. So it’s not the same as building power with classroom educators.
Charlie: And lastly, who should we Pass the Hat for this month?
Clarice: I would say Freedom Side School - they’re doing such good work. The goal is for kids to not stay there forever, but to go out in middle or high school and become organizing powerhouses. And I think that can happen, and I’m really excited about the forward trajectory of that.
Charlie: And if private school is needed, which there’s a broad argument that it’s not, but if it is needed it’s for people who need the most support.
Clarice: Yeah - they had to convince me. I was like “This seems good but I don’t know about the whole private school.” But if these kids were Deaf and Hard of Hearing, I know I would want a very specific school for their needs.
Charlie: Yeah - and it’s not a charter school, so it’s not sapping resources from the District.
Speed Round Questions
In addition to our conversations about the future of antiracist work in education, we want to get to know our collaborators a little better. Here are Clarice’s answers to our speed round questions:
What book would you recommend? All the White Friends I Couldn’t Keep: Hope - and Hard Pills to Swallow - About Fighting for Black Lives by Andre Henry
What is one recipe you would recommend? Pumpkin Espresso Bundt Cake
Who are you following for antiracist work in education? Ta-Nehisi Coates, Janelle Bowie, adrienne marie brown, Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, The Cult of Pedagogy
What is your favorite place in Philadelphia? West Fairmount Park and Produce Junction (because where else can you get flowers for that price?!)