Los Angeles Education Partnership (LAEP) Board Member Dr. Sylvia Rousseau says she was born into equity work. When she was growing up, family supper conversation often turned to the subject of the latest aggression or microaggression they had experienced and how they handled it when their rights and humanity were violated.
Her extended family was close-knit and child-centered. She witnessed family members who became the first to serve in certain professions, not because no one had tried before, but because no one had been allowed to. “I can’t talk about my contributions without talking about the aspirations, the hard work, the achievements, the sacrifices that were made for each generation,” Dr. Rousseau said.
Dr. Rousseau came from a long line of educators and didn’t think she wanted to be one herself. But she ended up there anyway. “The first day I stepped into a classroom as a student teacher, I thought, ‘This is where I belong,’” she said.
As a teacher, principal, and superintendent, equity was always her drive. “It came out of equal humanity for every child,” she said. Then, when she became a professor at USC, she taught classes about equity.
“This drive is deep in my spirit,” she said.
As a local superintendent in LAUSD in the early 2000s, Dr. Rousseau often worked with LAEP. Almost two decades later, an LAEP staff member who was also a student of Dr. Rousseau’s connected LAEP President and CEO Michele Broadnax with Dr. Rousseau at a conference, and Dr. Rousseau accepted Michele’s invitation to join the organization’s Board of Directors.
Dr. Rousseau was born in Ohio and lived and taught in four different states before coming to California in 1978. Now retired, the mother of five and grandmother to 17 is giving much of her time to LAEP.
As our nation came to a collective racial awakening and reckoning in 2020, LAEP renewed its commitment to racial awareness and justice through our advancement of educational equity – and turned to Dr. Rousseau to support this work. She led staff in multi-session professional development to deepen our own racial understanding and practice as a starting point to help us advance our work to serve Black students in our communities. The team explored the work of some of Dr. Rousseau’s favorite scholars on the subject, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Paulo Freire, Lev Vygotsky, and John Henrik Clarke. They examined the historical, socio-political, and socio-cultural issues around race – primarily of African Americans but also Latinx students. “We were dealing with many of the stereotypes and implicit biases we all hold and where they originate,” Dr. Rousseau said. “From there, we have the background to try to do this work.”
Dr. Rousseau is calling on LAEP and others to disrupt the traditional school system, which has been organized around a notion of white supremacy. “The problem is not children of color,” she says. “The problem is not Black children. The problem is our response to their humanity, our response to their culture, their language, their ways of being, that are stamped as rejected from the day a child enters school.
“Unless we are willing to disrupt this machine that just keeps rolling over them, we’re not going to change anything.”
Sylvia Rousseau, Ed.D., is Professor Emerita at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education and is on the Board of Directors at the Los Angeles Education Partnership.