Dr. Carol D. Lee: Picking up the Baton

As an eleventh-grader at Crane High School in Chicago, Dr. Carol D. Lee faced the same wall of disrespect so many African Americans have experienced. The students were preparing to take the ACT and Lee asked questions about the application process. Nearly 60 years later, she vividly remembers her teacher telling her, “It doesn’t matter because you won’t pass anyway.”

Not only did Lee receive a high score, but she received college scholarship offers. That teacher’s dismissive comment, along with other slights by educators, helped shape her current views on education and research. Lee considers her five decades of involvement in independent, community-based, African-centered elementary schools the most important part of her 54-year career.

Lee, along with her husband, renowned poet and publisher Haki Madhubuti, and activist Soyini Walton, started three African-centered schools in Chicago in the early 1970s. “We were always inventing ways of trying to incorporate a strong sense of identity and self-pride among our young people,” Lee says, explaining that the courses, including math, were developed using African-centered principles. “We’ve been doing this work for over half a century and these institutions that we founded are still in operation.”

Dr. Carol D. LeeLee is now professor emerita at Northwestern University in the School of Education and Social Policy and in African-American studies. Much of her research examines the role of culture in teaching and learning and the role of culture in academic literacies. “The work that I do as a researcher focuses on trying to understand how people learn,” Lee explains via Zoom from her suburban Chicago home, surrounded by jammed bookshelves and African American art. “One of the things that is foundational to understanding how human beings learn is understanding the role of their participation in cultural practices, the ways in which people identify themselves, and the nature of social relationships they have with each other.”

Lee, who earned her Ph.D. in education and M.A. in English from the University of Chicago and her B.A from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has written more than 108 journal articles and book chapters and authored or co-edited 10 books.

Before entering graduate school, Lee and the other activists started an elementary school venture called New Concept as a Saturday project that grew into three full-time schools that are still operating today. Two of them are charter schools under the umbrella of Betty Shabazz International Charter Schools which enroll between 550 and 600 K-8 students and where Lee serves as chair of the board of directors. 

“As we came to understand our history as a people, we felt that a baton was being passed to us and we made the decision to pick it up,” she recalls, describing the New Concept founders’ decision to venture into educating Black children.