The Tax We Pay with Kelly Mitchell

About this episode

Kelly Mitchell discusses her experiences in education and the systemic issues affecting Black educators.

Kelly Mitchell's journey through education is a crash course in recognizing when systems are working exactly as designed...not for us. From stumbling into teaching via Craigslist after the 2009 recession, to middle school math teacher, to high school dean managing 350 students, to state workforce development, Kelly kept asking, "Who can fix this?" only to realize the system kept saying, "Not us." Kelly's revelation: education's recruitment problem isn't about signing bonuses, it's asking Black people to return to systems that actively harmed them their entire childhood. The retention problem? Leaders who laugh off racism when test scores are good, colleagues who outsource racial incidents to the "Black representative," and the invisible tax of carrying everyone else's learning curve. Now running Inclusive Design Group and pursuing her PhD, Kelly's done the full bingo card: classroom, admin, state, nonprofit. Her conclusion? The answer was never in climbing higher within broken systems; it's in collective power, teaching local Black histories, and helping our people understand the systems of oppression to reclaim what's ours.

People in this episode

Host: Dr. Asia Lyons

Guest: Kelly Mitchell

Topics covered

• education systems
• Black educators
• systemic racism
• retention issues
• collective power
• local Black histories

Keywords

• education
• systemic racism
• Black educators
• retention
• collective power
• local histories

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Inclusive Design Group

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