Professional Learning for Busy Educators

Tupac Shakur has been dead for over 20 years, and yet his music and lyrics are still popular with young people today. Dr. Jeff Duncan-Andrade thinks Tupac remains influential all over the world because he writes about some of the essential truths young people still experience. Duncan-Andrade even named the elementary school he helped start Roses in Concrete after the Tupac poem “The Rose That Grew From Concrete.” The rapper’s metaphor for young people in tough neighborhoods trying to grow toward the light, despite a toxic environment, feels exactly like what Duncan-Andrade has seen in Oakland schools throughout his career.

“We see them [students] for their damaged petals instead of their tenacity and will to reach the sun,” said Duncan-Andrade at the final keynote of the 2018 Deeper Learning Conference. In addition to his academic research and writing, Duncan-Andrade still teaches at the Mandela Law and Public Service Academy at Fremont High School in East Oakland. For his students, violence is one of the most persistent toxic stressors. Most of them know someone who has died, often by gunfire. But in Tupac’s metaphor, the concrete isn’t just violence. It’s institutional racism, patriarchy, gentrification, poverty in the face of great wealth -- it’s inequality.

“The concrete is real and it’s multilayered and it’s toxic,” Duncan-Andrade said. “If schools are not aware of the concrete and that students are showing up with damaged petals, then we can’t see those roses.”