Author: Tanesha Peeples

South Side community leader Tanesha Peeples is a Chicago Public Schools alumna and proud Englewoodian. She currently serves on the board of the Montessori School of Englewood. Formerly, she served the Deputy Director of Outreach for Education Post, for whom she penned the long-running column Hope and Outrage. As an undergraduate student at Northern Illinois University, Tanesha began to develop a passion for and understand the importance of public service. After obtaining her bachelor’s degree in political science and public administration, she returned to Chicago with a new perspective on community, politics and civic engagement. Tanesha then attended and graduated from DePaul University with a master’s degree in public service management and urban planning and development. Throughout her professional career, Tanesha has used her education, passion and experience to navigate a number of nonprofit, political and independent ventures, advancing her mission to educate and empower marginalized populations. Prior to joining Education Post, she also managed her own consulting firm specializing in community relations. Tanesha’s vision is one where everyone—regardless of ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender or zip code—can have access to a comfortable quality of life and enjoy the freedoms and liberties promised to all Americans. Find her on Twitter at @PeeplesChoice85.

We Don’t Give a Damn About Equity Initiatives Without Intentional Investment in Our Kids

It’s been a year since this piece was written and since CPS chief education officer (then chief equity officer) Maurice Swinney committed to developing the CPS Black student achievement task force. In that year, there’s been significant leadership transition, with Pedro Martinez stepping in as CEO, and it’s recently been announced that Patti Salzmann will replace Swinney as chief education officer.

I’ll Believe Y’all Are Serious About Black Lives Mattering When You Send More of Our Kids to College Instead of Prison

This post originally appeared on Hope+Outrage on June 17, 2020. I’m hearing a lot of people now all “rah-rah” for Black lives mattering. Meanwhile, I’m over here rolling my eyes at it all because to me, talk is cheap and history has receipts. Black lives didn’t matter in America when Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Jordan Foster, Rekiya Boyd, Eric Garner…

School Discipline Is the Modern Day Chattel Slavery and Damn Near Everybody Is In On It

This post originally appeared in Hope + Outrage on March 5, 2021. Let me drop some numbers on y’all real quick. We know that starting as early as Pre-K, Black students are three times more likely to be suspended and expelled from school than white students and represent 31% of school-related arrests. To add to that, Black kids are five times more likely to be detained…

Critical Race Theory Bans Are White Supremacy’s Trojan Horse

This post originally appeared on Hope and Outrage from Tanesha Peeples on July 15. Y’all, are they still teaching Greek mythology in schools? Interestingly, it used to be one of my favorite subjects in grammar school. Now, in retrospect—and with an abolitionist mind—I realize it was just another subject taking up space that could’ve been used to teach real history.…

girl studying

Education for Black Kids Cannot Look the Same as It Did in 2020

We lost so many lives this year—lives that could’ve been saved if people just gave a damn for once. And I’m not referring to the close to 300 thousand Americans who have succumbed to the coronavirus. I’m talking about the casualties lost as a result of a trash ass education system. No shock here—a recent study conducted by McKinsey & Company revealed that…