All the White Kids Went That Way

Race and classroom hierarchies

In my last post, which you can read here, I explored how Montessori education, while rooted in radical principles of child liberation, can also be used to uphold systems of privilege and power. That post, and the stories in this post, were adapted from a recent presentation I gave to the Bristol Early Years Forum for Anti-Racist Practice, an amazing group of educators in Bristol, UK.

In this follow-up, I want to bring that lens closer to home. This is a story about what systemic racism looked like in my own classroom—and how I tried, often imperfectly, to challenge it.

Daily Departures

In “Montessori as a Colonizing Force”, I explored how the transition of my school from a traditional state elementary to a Montessori magnet reshaped both the racial makeup of the student body (see image below) and the broader dynamics of the surrounding community.

One of the most striking ways this racial legacy then played out in my classroom was through the daily separations that occurred along racial lines. Every single day, all of my white students would leave the classroom to attend academically advanced classes, while most, if not all, of my Black and Brown children would be pulled out for special education classes or extra English language support, such as EFL or SEND services. It was glaringly obvious how these departures reflected a racial hierarchy of intelligence within the space.

The academically advanced classes, which had been heavily advocated for by middle-class and white parents in the community, were framed as opportunities to provide “gifted” children with “above and beyond” experiences—creative reading groups, self-directed projects, and other interactive, expansive forms of learning. Even though these parents wanted to send their children to “diverse state-funded schools,” they still fought to ensure their children had access to every possible advantage the school could offer. Meanwhile, many of my Black, Hispanic, and low-income students were left behind, receiving the clear message that they were not seen as worthy of the same opportunities. What was happening district-wide with “school choice” initiatives was also written into the very geography of my classroom.

I had one Hispanic student whose natural mathematical ability far exceeded many students in the gifted program. But despite her advanced capabilities, she couldn't gain access to the group because she failed the entrance test multiple times. As a dual language learner, the test, which wasn’t designed with her cultural and linguistic background in mind, acted as a barrier to her participation. Despite my advocacy, she couldn’t get into the programme, because the system held that passing this test was the definition of fairness.

I tried to address this in three ways:

1. Working with like-minded colleagues and parents to advocate for the abolition of these programs

2. Pushing to diversify the Advanced Academics programme by advocating for students I believed deserved a place

3. Trying to bring self-directed, expansive, project-based learning into the standard classes for all children to experience

There were clear systems of inequity at play here: the way we overdiagnose children of color, the intellectual hierarchies we create within schools, the role of teachers and tests as gatekeepers, the privileged access to student-centered teaching models like project-based learning, and the competitive academic systems that allow and encourage parents with power and influence to advocate for their children's advantage.

This experience reinforced for me that being an anti-racist teacher requires more than just diversifying our bookshelves; it’s about addressing systemic inequities. No matter how well-intentioned we are as teachers, we operate within a society where advantage and disadvantage are embedded into the fabric of our institutions. These patterns—rooted in histories of racism, patriarchy, classism, ableism, and more—continue to influence who has access to education and the resources children need to thrive.

As a result, our response as educators has to also be systemic. A school is a complex organism—if we only pay attention to our individual classrooms, or to a tiny facet of this work, like cultural holidays, we are missing the forest for the trees. For more on a systemic approach to equity, read this article I wrote for Public Montessori in Action International: “Equity: A Whole School Approach.”

Hidden Systems

The racial and class-based hierarchies in my classroom may have seemed particularly stark—children literally leaving the room each day based on perceived intelligence. But the truth is, this kind of sorting happens all the time in our educational environments, including our Montessori classrooms. Sometimes it’s explicit, through systems like academic tracking or “gifted” programs. But more often, it’s implicit—reflected in who we see as capable, as leaders, as the “normalized” children in our spaces.

We have to begin by recognizing that Montessori education is not exempt from racism and bias. As Maati Wafford writes:

“Montessori is not automatically an anti-bias, antiracist method, but rather is influenced by teacher and social contexts of racism and other forms of systemic bias.”

Maati Wafford from Equity Examined (2023).

In Montessori classrooms especially, where the ideal is one of freedom, leadership, and independence, it’s worth asking: who do we see as embodying those values? If we were to gather data across classrooms and tally up who teachers describe as the “leaders” in their environment—and who they say they’re struggling with—I think we’d see a clear pattern emerge. More often than not, the children we see as natural leaders are white girls. And the children we struggle with most? Boys. Particularly boys of color and neurodiverse boys.

These perceptions don’t come out of nowhere. They are shaped by the same systems that produce the more visible separations—systems that assign value based on whiteness, class status, language, and gender performance. If we want to build truly inclusive, liberatory environments, we have to examine not just how children are tracked on paper, but how they are tracked in our minds and in our expectations.

In the next post, I’ll share stories from two different school contexts that shaped my understanding of what systemic anti-racism can look like in action: one where assumptions about equity went unchallenged until the data told a different story, and another where I learned what real partnership with families could look like. These experiences taught me that transforming our schools begins not just with what we teach, but with how we listen, who we include, and what we’re willing to change.