Change Schools, We Can Change the World

As a 5-year-old got ready for her first day of kindergarten in rural Michigan, Dr. Rema Reynolds Vassar’s stepfather gave her one order. Sturgis, a town of about 10,000, had fewer than 100 Black residents, and he needed her to understand.
“Don’t let anyone call you nigger,” he said. “If they do, you fight back.”

She thought kindergarten that morning was “the best,” as she stroked the teacher’s hair and listened to her read aloud, as happened every night at home. Then little Rema, one of just two Black children in the school, went to recess.
It happened on the merry-go-round. She had trouble with spinning, but this time she thought she could, so she did. She was sick immediately and began shouting to the boy spinning the equipment to be let off.Dr. Rema Reynolds Vassar

“Let the nigger off,” a boy across from her called out, laughing. And, somehow, she launched her little body across the merry-go-round, sending him flying through the air into the dirt.

In the principal’s office, her mother listened to all the words the principal had to say about the little girl: barbaric, brutal, and other “b” words. Then, the principal repeated the boy’s word out loud and said it was only a word. She suspended Rema on her first day.
Rema’s mother waited, and when the principal was done, asked, “What will happen to the boy?” Told he’d be back to school the next day, Rema’s mother was cool, calm and to the point: “And so will she.”

“My mother recognized the violence I experienced that day,” recalls Vassar. “Seeing her protect me and advocate for me, matter-of-factly and resolutely, changed my whole life. She stood up to the principal and affirmed my humanity. She let me know, ‘You are a full human being, and they’re going to have to recognize you.’”

That memory shows up in Vassar’s demeanor today as an advocate for racial justice.

It has shown up in her leadership while she was chair of the Michigan State University Board of Trustees, and it shows up throughout her scholarship and teaching at Wayne State University, where she is one of only two Black women in her department to be elevated to full professor.

Vassar, affectionately known now as “Dr. Rema,” says she has learned from her own experiences to defend our collective humanity.

She says she often asks herself: “How do we create equity and justice in these spaces that I occupy, where I know first-hand that equity and justice are absent?”

Scholarship with a moral imperative
Vassar, whose work is in the department of educational leadership at Wayne State, has made equity and justice the center of everything she does.

At Wayne State, she founded efforts such as: Leading Well, a grant-funded professional learning community for Black women school leaders in Detroit; the Center for Black Children in Education (CBCE), which hosts an annual conference; and the Sankofa Scholarship Foundation, which provides scholarships for young people in higher education.

Through Leading Well, Black women school leaders in Detroit have opportunities to come together to focus on their own wellness. Vassar says Leading Well puts educators on the hook for creating schools where students feel safe and seen and can learn without experiencing racial violence.

“To do that work humanizes those Black women in ways that get translated or matriculated into their school communities,” says Vassar. “Educators are accountable to the full humanity of all the students in their buildings across the United States. They’re accountable to justice, wellness, and healing that comes when you are harmed.”

And Vassar’s work supporting Black leaders in education, especially those in Detroit, aligns closely with Wayne State’s commitment to community engagement through culturally engaging partnerships, says Dr. Ben Pogodzinski, professor and interim assistant dean at Wayne State.

A sense of urgency
Vassar’s second initiative was even more aspirational.

In 2020, the world was riveted by the murder of George Floyd, and Vassar was horrified. She was also a little relieved. Seeing how others responded to the event shifted her thinking.

“I felt that I am not alone in this work,” she says. “I knew this moment could spark lasting change. It gave me an undergirding of hope and revitalization, and a sense of urgency.”

From that sense of urgency, Vassar created CBCE to allow educators to learn from and support each other to advance equity and justice for Black children.

For Vassar, centering Black children is a moral imperative.

“If we can get it right for Black students, we get it right for everybody,” she adds. “Everyone has to go through a schooling experience. So, if we change schools, we can change the world.”

To bring about that change, CBCE sponsors an annual free and virtual conference that allows those committed to Black students’ success and wellness to gather. More than 3,000 participants from the United States, Canada, Jamaica, and the Bahamas attended the conference in 2024.

Pogodzinski says that the conference brings an important difference to the work of centering Black students.

“By making this conference so accessible, it models the type of engagement needed to truly be an avenue for voices to be heard and knowledge to be shared from multiple contexts, motivating greater opportunities for positive impact in Michigan — and beyond,” he says.

Vassar says she sees the conference expanding to engage and reach graduate students and parents. She also sees it affecting future policymaking.

“I’m going to engage parents in 2025 so that we all have the same understanding of what justice looks like,” she says. “Once policies are co-created by parents, school leaders, and students, we can bring local candidates running for public office to the next conference to hear from them.”

Pogodzinski says Vassar’s work through CBCE also allows those in higher education to see through a moral lens how scholarship might make a difference.

“Her work has informed how we collectively think about community-engaged work, both through research as well as in our engagement with students, families, and community, with a commitment to equity and justice,” he says.

The CBCE inspired Dr. Ashley Woodson to apply to Wayne State. She is now research director of the Black EpiSTEMologies Research Project and an assistant professor of teaching.

“Asking about Black children can still be controversial,” says Woodson. “We can raise issues that are historically, culturally, even spiritually unique to Black children, and someone echoes with, ‘Black children and all children’.”

Woodson credits Vassar with creating a safe space for those who unapologetically care about Black children.

“There’s an audacity in that, that Rema leads with and lives by,” says Woodson.

‘I was compelled to be an educator’
Vassar spent two decades in K-12 roles as a teacher, counselor, and administrator after receiving her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. She focused on Urban Schooling and was advised by Dr. Tyrone Howard, a well-known scholar of race and urban education.

“He consistently said, ‘research is me-search,’ and if you look at my work, it literally is me trying to understand me,” says Vassar. “It’s thinking about the ways that Black folks have been the moral compass of this country and the world.”

But it was her early life with her mother that set her on the path to higher learning.

Growing up, Vassar said, education was the holy grail.

“It was premium in our house,” she recalls. “I thought teaching was one of the most esteemed professions. I felt compelled to be an educator.”

Her mother read to Vassar every night. She held schooling in high esteem, and she made sure her children had library cards and took them to the library.

As soon as Vassar was old enough to get to the library on her own, she checked out all the books she could get her hands on. She read all the Little House on the Prairie books, and all about the Hardy Boys. She read Beverly Cleary, beginning with Ramona Quimby. She moved on to Judy Blume.

But then, in eighth grade, she found the missing piece. In a nearly all-white rural town, surrounded by books full of white faces, she found one that stood out. The author was Black, and his face was on the cover.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X added a different layer to her elementary school experiences, she says, and created a fire in her that strengthened and emboldened her to follow her moral imperative toward justice and equity.

Committing to equitable leadership
When Vassar won a seat on the Michigan State’s Board of Trustees in 2020, she intended to continue her work on equity and justice, bringing her Black experience and voice to leadership. In 2023, the trustees elected her the board chair.

“I learned very quickly what it means to be a politician,” says Vassar. “But I saw myself as an educator going to this board to effect change at the policy level for those whom I knew most needed it.”

She says that now is the time to have candid conversations about governance, and what that means for minoritized faculty, students, school communities, and the marginalization that happens if there is a lack of equity, inclusion, and justice within colleges and universities.

She says she knows this work often results in pushbacks. If a group is not made up of people who share a vision of creating equity and justice, she adds, “then it becomes the lone or lonely task of those who do” have that focus.

One year later, after some very public (and familiar) attacks, she resigned from the chair position at Michigan State but remains an active board member. She says that she wants to continue the work as effectively as she can and sees her experiences as global, recognizing that she is a part of a collective community of Black women leaders.

“The decisions that they make at the system level have far-reaching effects on the operation and life of the students within that institution, but boards are not representative of the persons who experience the impact of these decisions,” she says.

Vassar says that she is now interested in studying governance and how governing boards can be more culturally sustaining.

“That’s where you can think about race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, ability, gender, religion, and sexual orientation,” she says. “We can work at it from a policy lens, but that means that we have to change the way boards govern.

“I see leadership as everyone’s responsibility,” she continues. “Students are leaders, parents are leaders, counselors are leaders, teachers are leaders, and administrators are leaders as well.”

Hope for the future
Vassar’s work galvanizes her hope for the future.

“There are people who’ve been doing [equity and justice] work for a long time, and I’m feeling like the squad is expanding,” she says. “In this very moment, I feel like there’s hope for folks to come alongside the scholars who have been doing this work for three, four decades to enter into the conversation.

“I think we’re at a moment where we can do that.”

Although she has had harrowing experiences throughout her life, she sees it differently, as the experiences that have helped to shape her into whom she is today.

She continually reminds herself why she has had to be courageous since kindergarten, and why she must keep doing the work she feels compelled to do.

“I don’t separate my work from me,” she says. “There’s no delineation or defining line between me and my work. I am my work.

“Today, I fight not just for myself, but for every child who has ever felt invisible, silenced, or oppressed by the weight of systemic racism.”