Jaylen Brown vs public education: how he plans to change our schools

Frustrated with the status quo of U.S. public education, Boston’s Jaylen Brown wants to use his M.I.T. fellowship to make a change for the better.

As brilliant as he can be at times, Jaylen Brown almost didn’t make it as a college student.

Overwhelmed by intensity of the course load at a summer bridge program designed to lessen the impact of transitioning from high school to college at Cal-Berkeley, Brown called his mother in a moment of distress.

“Mom, I might be in over my head. I think that perhaps this is maybe too much for me,” he said (via the Boston Globe’s Nicole Yang), second-guessing whether he belonged at one of the nation’s most elite academic institutions.

“I remember she told me, ‘Jaylen, just do your best.’ She said it with the patience that I needed to hear,” offered the former Golden Bear.

Despite the daily readings and extensive writing assignments, Brown persevered. And in so doing, he encountered the work of Jeannie Oakes — specifically Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality.

The academic work deals with ‘tracking’, a concept widely used in secondary schools in the U.S. that separates children based on their perceived intellectual capacities in ways that actually reinforce social inequalities.

“I experienced a lot of the stuff she was talking about, and I had no idea,” Brown explained. “I consider myself a smart guy, but once you learn somebody has been outsmarting you your whole life, it kind of sucks to realize.”

“That made me kind of emotional,” he added, admitting it literally brought him to tears.

Oakes’ work is far from an outlier; countless academic works support the findings that public education in North America and Europe tends to stratify — or place students of poorer and minority backgrounds in one group, and mostly white, mostly wealthy children in another — as much as they educate.

This hit home with Brown, who discovered he could use his platform to educate others about the pitfalls waiting for them within the educational system.

With multiple educators in his own family, Brown knew something was off after experiencing the difference between regular and ‘advanced’ classes in high school, and Oakes’ work helped crystalize those suspicions into a diamond of knowledge at the core of the Marietta native’s project.

Witnessing how teachers would encourage a rich embrace of topics with students in advanced classes compared to the rote memorization of facts in standard high school courses, Brown knew something wasn’t right.

“I’m just an advocate of my own experiences and things that I’ve seen … I’ve been blessed to be able to attend university to help me put terms with the pain and the distress I’ve seen and felt growing up,” he offered.

After several high-profile speaking events, Brown was awarded a 2019 MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellowship in which he decided to start a program designed to amplify his mission to change public education in the United States.

His plan is to start small, focusing on Boston-area schools, but would eventually like to use technology to link those groups to others in California and beyond.

“There are a group of people that are comfortable being the dominant group,” the fourth-year wing said.

“Some people might think there’s nothing wrong with the world and it should stay the way it is,” he added, pointing an invisible finger at those who would allow the status quo to stand.

“I’m one of the people that challenges that and thinks we still have a lot of growth left to do,” he added.

Given U.S. academic achievement lags behind many other countries despite spending among the most per student of any nation, the Cal-Tech product has a point.