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by Krystal Clemons (Author), Borbie L. Davis (Editor), Baruti Kafele (Foreword by)
It Takes a Village to Raise a Classroom: Black Family Wisdom in Education
by Dr. Krystal L. Clemons
What if schools stopped trying to "engage" Black families-and instead learned from them?
For generations, Black families have cultivated powerful systems of learning, advocacy, resilience, and care-often outside of, and in spite of, traditional school structures. In It Takes a Village to Raise a Classroom, Dr. Krystal L. Clemons reframes family engagement by centering the cultural wealth Black families already bring to education and showing how schools can partner with, rather than police or marginalize, that wisdom.
Blending research, lived experience, and vivid storytelling, this book helps educators, counselors, administrators, and community partners rethink how they build trust, identify giftedness, support neurodivergent learners, and create equitable systems of care. Through real classroom scenarios, family narratives, and actionable strategies, Dr. Clemons challenges deficit-based approaches and exposes how outdated engagement models contribute to disproportionality, misidentification, and fractured school-family relationships.
This is not a book about doing more programs.
It's a book about doing engagement differently.
Readers will:
- Recognize Black families as co-educators and knowledge holders, not obstacles to overcome
- Learn how cultural wealth shows up in homes, churches, community spaces, and everyday parenting practices
- Understand the hidden ways schools unintentionally gatekeep opportunity-especially for gifted, twice-exceptional, and marginalized students
- Gain practical tools to build authentic school-family-community partnerships that actually improve student outcomes
Written for educators who are ready to move beyond performative equity work, It Takes a Village to Raise a Classroom is both a mirror and a roadmap-calling schools to honor the villages that have always been raising brilliant children and inviting them to finally pull up a chair.
