Six principles for leading unequivocally in ways that disrupt inequity at its roots.
Chapter 1. More Than Mitigations: Embracing Transformative Equity
Chapter 2. The Equity Literacy Framework
IntroductionWe stood in the main doorway of Green Fields High School's cafeteria during the busiest lunch period of the day. Michael, a dean at Green Fields, pointed toward a table on the left side of the cafeteria where a group of Black students talked, laughed, and ate. Then he nodded toward the table directly in front of us, where a group consisting primarily of second- and third-generation Korean American students did the same. We were visiting the school at Michael's request. He had called us earlier that week. "We have a race problem at Green Fields," he explained. "We need help understanding and fixing it." He pointed again to the tables where Black and Korean American students were eating. "See what I mean about the race problem?" he asked. By all accounts, Michael, a middle-aged, white, cisgender man, was well-liked by students, including students of color. Colleagues at Green Fields, a predominately white but increasingly racially diverse school, recognized him as a champion for diversity. He sponsored the student Multicultural Club. He decorated his office like a shrine to inclusion, with a "Safe Space" sticker on his door and a "Unity Through Diversity" poster pinned to the wall behind his desk. Despite his enthusiasm for inclusion, despite his engagement with the Multicultural Club and diversity decor, Michael couldn't quite manage to recognize how inequity operated right in front of him. He didn't lack goodwill. He wasn't a rabid racist or a zealous xenophobe. Truth is, although the relatively small number of rabid racists and zealous xenophobes we've come across in schools do a great deal of damage, even greater and more dangerous damage can be done by diversity-minded educators like Michael: leaders who don't intend to do damage (Lewis & Diamond, 2015). More on that in a moment. As Michael pointed to those two tables as though the problem was too obvious to miss, we responded that, no, we did not see what he meant. Were we missing something? "Look," he said, "the problem is that the students of color segregate themselves. It's like they don't want to integrate and be part of the school." It was a scene straight out of Beverly Daniel Tatum's (2017) book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race. We scanned the room. Sure, the cafeteria was fairly segregated in the same way we observe in many racially and ethnically diverse middle and high schools. Yes, Black and Korean American students filled those two tables. At the most surface level, we could see what Michael saw. The trouble was, Michael seemed to see only those two tables: the ones full of two groups of color in a veritable sea of whiteness. Those two tables sat at the outer edges, the literal margins, of a cafeteria where 20 tables were filled almost entirely with white students. It hadn't occurred to Michael that perhaps the white students were segregating themselves, or that the Black and Korean American students were simply finding a few moments of ease and safety in a school where they often were the only students of their racial or ethnic identities in their classes, where there were no Korean American teachers, only two Black teachers, and no administrators or counselors of color. We shared this observation with Michael, attempting to help him interpret what he saw in a more nuanced, more equity-literate way. Looking around the cafeteria, he responded, humbly, "I've never seen it that way before." The Trouble, the Struggle, and the CommitmentThe trouble at Green Fields, like the trouble at many schools we visit, was not a shortage of people who cared about their students or who valued diversity. Michael and his colleagues cared deeply about their students. They had plenty of diversity- or inclusion-related programs and initiatives. Instead, the trouble was that Michael and many of his colleagues struggled to recognize with sufficient depth how bias and inequity operated at their school. They struggled ideologically to understand the lived realities of students of color and how the Multicultural Club and diversity decorations did not remedy those realities. Their shaky awareness undermined their abilities to devise suitable and sustainable solutions for their equity problems. The leaders at Green Fields struggled to interpret concerns such as disparate rates of extracurricular participation, disparate patterns of discipline referrals, or even disparate test score data through an equity lens. They struggled to recognize the inequity embedded in their policies and practices. So, despite their efforts, as we learned when we facilitated a series of student focus groups, Black students experienced significant racial bias at Green Fields, and Korean American students largely felt invisible. That reality meant that no matter what leaders thought they were doing in the name of racial equity, the impact tended to cement racial inequity. These students' barriers and frustrations were more related to educators' ideologies and misinterpretation than to practical strategy, programming, complete inattention, or explicit bigotry. In fact, the trouble in many schools is the desire, and sometimes even the desperation, to prescribe equity solutions without understanding the equity problems. Bad equity solutions almost always increase inequity. That's where Michael was stuck. We asked Michael how he intended to address what he interpreted as Green Fields's "race problem": students of color segregating themselves. He shared that the school's administrative team had considered force-integrating the cafeteria. They explored the possibility of assigning students to specific tables but worried that a mutiny might ensue if they tried to enforce table assignments. It hadn't occurred to them that for some students at Green Fields, lunchtime was a respite. Because that hadn't occurred to them, it also hadn't occurred to them that the real problem might be that Black students, Korean American students, and other students of color at Green Fields needed a respite. They needed a respite from racial microaggressions they experienced from peers and adults at the school. They needed a respite from the social and cultural pressures they felt to conform to an institutional culture that largely rendered them invisible. They needed a respite from the curricular erasure, from being "the only" in their classes, from teachers responding inadequately to racist comments and jokes. They needed a respite from the racism. And they needed Michael and his administrative peers to be more concerned with the racism students faced at Green Fields and less with where they sat during lunch. From Good Intentions to Good ActionsIn our experience, the situation at Green Fields illustrates a bit of an epidemic among school and district leaders. Sure, part of schools' equity problem stems from the beliefs and actions of rabid racists and zealous xenophobes, as we said earlier, along with calculating cisgenderists and enthusiastic sexists. But perhaps a bigger portion comes down to the beliefs and actions of people like Michael: people with real concern, people with ostensibly good intentions, people who appreciate diversity but may struggle to understand how injustice operates with enough depth to eliminate it. We want to be clear about this: there's no shame in that struggle. The reality is, most of us do well recognizing and understanding the kinds of inequity we experience but labor to recognize and understand the kinds of injustice from which our identities and positionalities protect us. As people who have committed our lives to fighting for equity and justice in education, we find ourselves perpetually in this struggle. The shame is in choosing not to be in that struggle when students, families, and colleagues who are being harmed desperately need us to be in it. To opt out is an expression of privilege and entitlement, because the people being harmed can't opt out. Part of what we ask you to do while reading this book is to stay with us in that struggle. When we find ourselves feeling defensive or clinging onto old ideas like security blankets, we know it's time to engage more deeply rather than less deeply. Consider an example. As we discuss in greater detail later, researchers who have studied why Black students are suspended or expelled from school at higher rates than their classmates have concluded that the disparity is trackable largely to racial bias, not to Black students misbehaving more often or their families not valuing school enough. What do we know? We know that Black students are suspended and expelled at higher rates than white students, for example. Based on big national studies, including one examining more than a million office referrals (Girvan et al., 2017), we know that the biggest cause of this disparity comes down to differences in how educators interpret and respond to subjective behaviors—the student is behaving in a "disrespectful manner" or the student is being "insubordinate"—leading to higher rates of subjective office referrals for Black students who are behaving in ways for which their white classmates aren't as likely to be referred. We should wonder, then, why most of the popular solutions for addressing racial disparities in discipline seem to focus on everything other than the only possible solution: eliminating this racism. Perhaps we adopt Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) so that we can be clearer about behavior expectations. Perhaps we embrace trauma-sensitive approaches so that we can respond to the underlying causes of behaviors. Perhaps we offer students training in mindfulness and emotion regulation. At best, these are bad solutions based on significant misunderstandings of the problem. At worst, they appear to be purposeful dodging: a way to sustain racist experiences and outcomes while creating the illusion of antiracist concern. The research is clear: the problem isn't a lack of clarity about behavior expectations, a mindfulness deficiency, or some innate cultural value that keeps students from "behaving"; the problem is racial bias and inequitable applications of discipline policies. Perhaps the biggest barrier to equity progress is the struggle among people who value diversity or belonging to understand that offering mindfulness and emotion regulation to students as solutions to racial discipline disparities or interrupting Black or Korean American students' respite from racism while failing to attend to the racism is a way we actually perpetuate racism. Again, the typical trouble is not that leaders aren't doing something about racial discipline disparities or other inequities. Schools generally appear to be doing a whole lot of something. The trouble instead is that most of what that something comprises poses no real threat to the disparities or inequities. Because the something is usually ineffectual, it's also usually inefficient—a misuse of the energy, time, and emotional labor that educators invest in their jobs. Why would we spend precious resources on "equity" approaches, strategies, and initiatives that are bound to fail? As far as we can see, we might answer this question in a couple of ways. Neither lands us at particularly good news. The first possible answer is that it's purposeful. We know, at the very least, that many leaders feel pressure to demonstrate the optics of movement on equity and justice. Unfortunately, that's what often seems to be rewarded or prioritized in school systems: optics. In fact, when we ask school and district leaders to share the most important thing they're doing when it comes to equity, they most commonly describe cool-sounding student programs: a diversity assembly, perhaps, or an antibullying workshop. These sorts of initiatives are high on optics but generally low on impact. They don't identify or eliminate institutional racism, heterosexism, or ableism. They don't change institutional conditions any more than Michael force-integrating the Green Fields cafeteria would change institutional conditions. It's hard not to read the evasion as purposeful after watching school leaders respond to inequitable conditions, not with plans to transform institutional cultures around an antiracist or anti-ableist commitment, but instead with decontextualized community dialogues or statements about how diversity is our strength. Again, these are high-equity-optics, low-institutional-impact responses. We can do better. One way to do better is to begin questioning the presumption of good intentions. After all, how many generations of educational leaders with good equity intentions does it take to substantially transform schools, to wipe out all or even most of the predictable bias and inequity? The courageous move is to put an expiration date on good intentions—our own and one another's. When is actual movement going to be rewarded more than the illusion of movement or the ostensible intention of movement? This is the sort of individual and collective reckoning we should embrace if we are serious about educational equity. This answer to our question, that the problem is purposeful evasion, sounds discouraging, we know. That's why we constructed this book around the second answer, for leaders who don't want their efforts to be about optics, who genuinely want to do right by students and staff, who are horrified to learn that what they've been doing in the name of diversity might perpetuate harm. We're not naive enough to believe that this description covers everybody, including everybody working in education. We have our determined inequitable system-sustainers just like every other field and system. But we do presume that, with deeper understanding and more transformative equity commitments and skills, Michael and other educational leaders can become strong, effective equity leaders. As we discuss in more detail later, we constructed this book on the assumption that you'll read it because you desire equity and have the will to do something about inequity. You want to embrace the most transformative approach possible, because that is what is required to fulfill this equity desire. To be sure, these transformations do not come without resistance and backlash. We return to this point several times throughout this book: inequitable systems do not pass quietly into the night. But if we have the knowledge, skills, and will to push through the backlash, we can effect deep change (Theoharis, 2007). We can, and we must. (We discuss backlash in more detail in Chapter 8.) But this change can happen only when we are willing to embrace transformative ideas, when we shake free of the kinds of ideological blockages with which Michael and his colleagues struggled, when we embrace new ways of looking at things based on a deep and layered commitment to equity. We can't celebrate diversity our way to equity. We can't rely on good intentions that aren't buttressed by good actions. We must reimagine and reconstruct almost everything in our spheres of influence. We need the knowledge to understand the difference between celebrating diversity and eliminating inequity; we need the skills to enact an active, transformative equity vision. Through this commitment we can strengthen what we call our equity literacy: our literacy when it comes to understanding, cultivating, and sustaining equity. A Brief Introduction to the Rest of This BookThis commitment captures the essence of where we're going in the following chapters. In our view, this book's most important feature is detailed descriptions of what we call the basic principles of equity literacy. We conceived these principles to help educational leaders avoid the misunderstandings and missteps so commonly employed in the name of equity and instead embrace and enact deep, transformative approaches to equity leadership. In Chapter 1, we define equity and inequity and distinguish between mitigative and transformative approaches to equity. In Chapter 2, we introduce key concepts, components, and tenets of the equity literacy framework. This includes the four key building blocks of equity desire, equity knowledge, equity abilities, and equity will—the will to lead transformatively for equity. The framework also includes what we call the five abilities of equity literacy: recognizing inequity, responding to inequity, redressing inequity, sustaining equity, and actively cultivating equity. After introducing the framework, we dive into the principles of equity literacy with a chapter dedicated to each. We use case scenarios, student voices, and other tools to illustrate why the principles are important and to demonstrate them in action. Throughout, we provide reflection prompts that challenge readers to apply the concepts and principles to their own leadership practice. The direct confrontation principle, which we discuss in Chapter 3, reminds us that the path to equity requires direct, decisive action. We begin by recognizing the ways inequity related to race, ability, sex, socioeconomic status, gender identity and expression, sexual identity, size, ethnicity, language, citizenship status, religion, and other identities operate in our spheres of influence. Then we ask of our equity efforts: To what extent is what we're doing a real threat to inequity and injustice? To what extent does it activate and accelerate equity and justice? Celebrating diversity by itself doesn't do that. Cultural competence by itself doesn't do that. We can hold the cultures of people who are culturally different from us in high esteem while still enacting policies that harm them racially, economically, or otherwise. The direct confrontation principle is not simply about confronting people but about honestly naming and directly addressing the conditions that perpetuate inequity. In Chapter 4, we explore the fix injustice, not kids principle. This principle challenges us to reconsider programs and initiatives that attempt to achieve equity by adjusting the cultures, mindsets, values, behaviors, grittiness, or attitudes of the people who are experiencing inequity. Equity is never about fixing or adjusting students and families who are racially, economically, or otherwise marginalized, an approach often called deficit ideology (Fergus, 2021; Gorski, 2016). Instead, it's about eliminating the conditions that marginalize students and families. In this chapter, we outline ways we can root out deficit approaches and bridge ourselves and one another to what we call a structural equity approach. When we do so, we equip ourselves to more clearly recognize and more effectively attend to the root causes of disparities and inequities. The prioritization principle, the focus of Chapter 5, challenges leaders to learn how to intentionally prioritize the best interests, joys, needs, and access of students and families who historically have been, and presently continue to be, denied equitable access and opportunity. The only way to do this with the level of transformation required is to reimagine policies and practices and rebuild institutional cultures in ways that account for historical and present inequity and its ramifications. We must commit to pacing equity efforts in ways that prioritize the people most desperate for equity and justice rather than stepping gingerly, protecting the people most resistant to equity and justice. This is not just ideological posturing; it's consistent with organizational change theory and research about how to lead significant institutional change. In Chapter 6, we introduce the just access principle, which insists that we move beyond concerns about access and outcomes to nurture truly transformative equity. Too often school policies, practices, and initiatives, including those posing as something new, uphold historical efforts to assimilate, marginalize, police, and punish students. For example, so much of our curriculum has been focused on the values, beliefs, and assumptions that perpetuate discrimination and oppression, even when these intentions are hidden behind promising-sounding initiatives such as advanced coursework or character education or social-emotional learning. We reconsider what we are working so hard to provide equitable access to, and whether it is itself equitable. Chapter 7 examines the evidence-based equity principle and the ways conventional approaches to collecting and analyzing data can cloud our understandings of inequity and hinder our ability to eliminate it. We point to the need to gather more meaningful data to help us assess a school's equity health. Finally, in Chapter 8, we share the care, joy, and sustainability principle. As we finished writing this book, the pushback against educational equity efforts was increasingly organized and well-funded. It can be hard not to despair at the resistance to even the most menial inclusion efforts. However, the push for equity also has never been stronger or the need for it more apparent. This principle emphasizes the importance of joy and community-building in cultivating and sustaining transformative equity. We also discuss self- and community care for equity leaders who face blowback and reprisals for taking strong equity stands. Starting AssumptionsBefore we jump into Chapter 1, we want to be as clear as possible about our givens. These are the assumptions we carry into this book. Assumption One: Equity Leadership Does Not Require Positional AuthorityIn many schools and districts, the most important, most transformative equity leadership comes not from principals or other people with positional authority but from teachers, counselors, parents, students, and others who, despite not having positional authority, do everything they can to push equity efforts forward. In fact, sometimes the most substantive equity leadership we witness is provided by people who are doing everything in their power to lead transformative change despite inaction and insufficient support from positional leaders. We have been blown away, for example, by the equity leadership assumed by student and alumni groups who are organizing on social media to demand that school and district leaders pay more serious attention to racism, heterosexism, cisgenderism, and other forms of oppression. Of course, principals, superintendents, and other positional leaders can be—ought to be—equity leaders too. Many of the examples of equity leadership we offer throughout this book draw on our experiences with people who have positional authority. The best-case scenario is that positional leaders work alongside all those other leaders, the people our brilliant colleague Marceline DuBose calls passion leaders, to enact and sustain equity efforts. After all, positional leaders have the authority to quicken the pace of change, and often passion leaders have the experience and expertise to understand most clearly what change needs to happen. We share all of this to say that we wrote this book not just for principals, equity directors, and central office administrators, but also for anybody bent on leading transformative equity efforts. Whatever your sphere of influence or official role, if you are advocating for equity, we believe the principles in this book will help you do so in the most transformative way possible. Assumption Two: There Is No Magic Equity BlueprintIf you're looking for a book that describes "10 strategies you can implement tomorrow, making all things equitable," this is not that. And if you find a book claiming to be that, our recommendation is, don't trust it. This is the first cognitive challenge we pose to many educational leaders. Let go of the expectation that equity leadership is about this or that strategy, program, or initiative. We understand that in an education culture where the supposed building blocks of good schooling often are marketed as what we call the "shiny new things," this cognitive shift can be difficult. But ask yourself this: How have those programs and initiatives been working so far? Have they helped us eliminate any disparities? The reality is that, for generations, we in education have churned through program after program, initiative after initiative—all the shiny new things—and for the most part they have made little or no difference when it comes to equity and justice, especially when implemented in a sort of mindless plug-and-play fashion. It's time for a different approach. We remember when "learning styles" was the shiny new thing, embraced in many schools as a salve for achievement disparities. It wasn't. It couldn't be, because attending to learning styles has nothing to do with identifying and eliminating the racism, cisgenderism, sexism, ableism, or other oppressive conditions that cause and sustain inequity. It also couldn't be the salve because, as it turns out, the notion that adjusting teaching to students' learning styles improves learning is among the most thoroughly debunked presumptions in education (Pashler et al., 2008). But it sure was marketed as a salve for a good decade before research demonstrated its ineffectiveness, in the same way some more recent studies have suggested growth mindset interventions have little impact on learning (Sisk et al., 2018). Neither is resilience or antibullying or diversity programming or SEL or PBIS the salve. If we start with a school where, say, socioeconomic inequity operates in a variety of ways and we sprinkle all of this in—the diversity programming, the cultural competence, the kindness—we're still left with socioeconomic inequity, because none of these ingredients poses any substantial threat to inequity. Which of these ingredients identifies and eliminates inequitable policies and practices? Which substantially addresses the root causes of discipline disparities? Which transforms institutional cultures not just to celebrate diversity but also to normalize conversations about and actions toward justice? The problem here is not that we as educational leaders don't recognize the problem of inequity but rather that we misunderstand it. As a result, our solutions pose no serious threat to it. Again, it's a lot of optics with no serious potential for change (Stevenson, 2014). This reality doesn't mean some of these shiny new things aren't beneficial to children and families. For example, we're proponents of SEL when it is informed with an equity lens. It just means that no combination of them can, in itself, make schools more equitable or just, especially schools where leaders refuse to embrace more transformative equity commitments. So we must let go of the expectation that there's an outline or equation that tells us which practices and initiatives to stir together to concoct the equity potion. Nothing replaces the hard work of identifying inequity, eliminating inequity, and actively cultivating equity. There's no blueprint for that. But there are some key understandings and abilities to help us do it. Those are the principles we detail in this book. Assumption Three: Ideological Shifts Drive Practical ShiftsIn the spirt of Assumption One, we offer in this book something that we have learned is more valuable and, in a way, even more practical than practices: the critical understandings we need to make those transformative commitments and lead for equity in meaningful ways. These are the principles, the values, that can guide the programs, practices, and literally everything else we do. They help achieve clarity about our ends so that we can embrace the best possible means. We offer a framework to inform all of the doing rather than a step-by-step guide to the doing. In other words, the shifts we're proposing are, as much as anything, ideological and institutional adjustments. The fix injustice, not kids principle, for example, requires that we ditch deficit perspectives and quit grit as solutions for educational disparities, and focus instead on addressing the conditions that marginalize students and create the disparities. Doing so requires an ideological shift for many educators. Without that shift, equitable practices aren't sustainable anyway. This step, the ideological shift, is one we too often skip in education. Bad ideology explains why there are more initiatives focusing on resilience, social-emotional learning, and behavior adjustment than on antiracism in schools that desperately need antiracism. Bad ideology doesn't mean bad people. It means we need to prepare ourselves to understand more precisely why conditions exist so that we can address them deeply rather than dancing around them. So our third assumption grows out of our belief that there is no shortage of equity-related programs and initiatives, but there is a shortage of equity because those efforts are almost always (1) built on misunderstandings or evasions, such as professional development on debunked concepts such as the "mindset of poverty"; or (2) not specifically constructed with equity in mind, such as PBIS. When we address the misunderstandings and evasions and embrace deep equity principles that facilitate profound understandings and more direct and effective eradications of inequity, we will prepare ourselves to lead more transformatively for equity. If we choose instead to hold onto our ideological blockages, we render ourselves incapable of serious change. Assumption Four: Desiring Equity Is Not EnoughIn the same spirit, we start with the assumption that you, like Michael and his Green Fields colleagues, want to lead for equity. We also assume, as Michael illustrated, that the desire to lead for equity is an unsuitable, and maybe even dangerous, stand-in for the knowledge and skills necessary to lead for equity. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," "Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will." Without deep understanding and just actions, good intentions—talking the equity talk—add up to precisely no meaningful equity movement. This book is about how we can leverage deep understanding and goodwill to promote transformative action in equity leadership. We also start with the assumption that we do not need to convince you that equity and justice matter, or that sexism, racism, ableism, classism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression exist and wreak havoc in and out of schools. Nor do we try to convince readers that we all are responsible for attending to inequity and injustice in serious, transformative ways. They do, and we are. That's our point of departure. Instead, our guiding questions are What does serious, transformative equity leadership look like? On what values and understandings is it conceived? Based on the work we've done with hundreds of schools and districts, and considering the values embraced in schools we've observed making substantial strides versus those that expend substantial resources but make little progress, we ask these questions: What are the basic principles and values that can guide transformative equity leadership? What ideals and understandings do effective equity leaders embrace that other, perhaps well-intentioned, leaders fail to, or choose not to, embrace? Assumption Five: We Must Listen to StudentsAs you read this book, you'll notice we often refer to lessons we've learned from students, especially those who experience substantial inequity in their schools. Sometimes these lessons come from the hundreds of focus groups we've conducted, and sometimes they are from individual, even informal, conversations we've had with students. Sure, we cite other sorts of evidence where appropriate, including big national quantitative studies, but we have learned that nothing can replace what we call the listen and believe commitment. Listen to students' stories about how they experience school and believe what they say. If we're going to be evidence-informed, we should ask ourselves what kinds of evidence we're ignoring. Stories and counter-stories are evidence—valuable, powerful evidence. We come back to this point throughout the book, but especially in Chapter 7. Students' stories also illustrate the impacts of inequitable conditions in classrooms and schools, so we draw on them a lot. We do so both because they are vital evidence, important illustrations, but also because we worry that so much equity work in schools is guided by presumptions about what students need rather than what they are explicitly demanding. ConclusionIn the rest of this book, we describe an approach to equity leadership that eases our reliance on prepackaged, nonlocalized, plug-and-play strategies—all the stuff that tends to be high on optics and low on impact. We build our approach on well-evidenced principles for transformative and sustainable equity leadership, relevant both to individual leaders and to schools, districts, and other educational institutions. It starts with strengthening our equity literacy. Printed by for personal use only |
We stood in the main doorway of Green Fields High School's cafeteria during the busiest lunch period of the day. Michael, a dean at Green Fields, pointed toward a table on the left side of the cafeteria where a group of Black students talked, laughed, and ate. Then he nodded toward the table directly in front of us, where a group consisting primarily of second- and third-generation Korean American students did the same.
We were visiting the school at Michael's request. He had called us earlier that week. "We have a race problem at Green Fields," he explained. "We need help understanding and fixing it."
He pointed again to the tables where Black and Korean American students were eating. "See what I mean about the race problem?" he asked.
By all accounts, Michael, a middle-aged, white, cisgender man, was well-liked by students, including students of color. Colleagues at Green Fields, a predominately white but increasingly racially diverse school, recognized him as a champion for diversity. He sponsored the student Multicultural Club. He decorated his office like a shrine to inclusion, with a "Safe Space" sticker on his door and a "Unity Through Diversity" poster pinned to the wall behind his desk.
Despite his enthusiasm for inclusion, despite his engagement with the Multicultural Club and diversity decor, Michael couldn't quite manage to recognize how inequity operated right in front of him. He didn't lack goodwill. He wasn't a rabid racist or a zealous xenophobe. Truth is, although the relatively small number of rabid racists and zealous xenophobes we've come across in schools do a great deal of damage, even greater and more dangerous damage can be done by diversity-minded educators like Michael: leaders who don't intend to do damage (Lewis & Diamond, 2015). More on that in a moment.
As Michael pointed to those two tables as though the problem was too obvious to miss, we responded that, no, we did not see what he meant. Were we missing something?
"Look," he said, "the problem is that the students of color segregate themselves. It's like they don't want to integrate and be part of the school." It was a scene straight out of Beverly Daniel Tatum's (2017) book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race.
We scanned the room. Sure, the cafeteria was fairly segregated in the same way we observe in many racially and ethnically diverse middle and high schools. Yes, Black and Korean American students filled those two tables. At the most surface level, we could see what Michael saw. The trouble was, Michael seemed to see only those two tables: the ones full of two groups of color in a veritable sea of whiteness. Those two tables sat at the outer edges, the literal margins, of a cafeteria where 20 tables were filled almost entirely with white students.
It hadn't occurred to Michael that perhaps the white students were segregating themselves, or that the Black and Korean American students were simply finding a few moments of ease and safety in a school where they often were the only students of their racial or ethnic identities in their classes, where there were no Korean American teachers, only two Black teachers, and no administrators or counselors of color. We shared this observation with Michael, attempting to help him interpret what he saw in a more nuanced, more equity-literate way.
Looking around the cafeteria, he responded, humbly, "I've never seen it that way before."
The trouble at Green Fields, like the trouble at many schools we visit, was not a shortage of people who cared about their students or who valued diversity. Michael and his colleagues cared deeply about their students. They had plenty of diversity- or inclusion-related programs and initiatives. Instead, the trouble was that Michael and many of his colleagues struggled to recognize with sufficient depth how bias and inequity operated at their school. They struggled ideologically to understand the lived realities of students of color and how the Multicultural Club and diversity decorations did not remedy those realities. Their shaky awareness undermined their abilities to devise suitable and sustainable solutions for their equity problems.
The leaders at Green Fields struggled to interpret concerns such as disparate rates of extracurricular participation, disparate patterns of discipline referrals, or even disparate test score data through an equity lens. They struggled to recognize the inequity embedded in their policies and practices. So, despite their efforts, as we learned when we facilitated a series of student focus groups, Black students experienced significant racial bias at Green Fields, and Korean American students largely felt invisible. That reality meant that no matter what leaders thought they were doing in the name of racial equity, the impact tended to cement racial inequity. These students' barriers and frustrations were more related to educators' ideologies and misinterpretation than to practical strategy, programming, complete inattention, or explicit bigotry.
In fact, the trouble in many schools is the desire, and sometimes even the desperation, to prescribe equity solutions without understanding the equity problems. Bad equity solutions almost always increase inequity. That's where Michael was stuck.
We asked Michael how he intended to address what he interpreted as Green Fields's "race problem": students of color segregating themselves. He shared that the school's administrative team had considered force-integrating the cafeteria. They explored the possibility of assigning students to specific tables but worried that a mutiny might ensue if they tried to enforce table assignments. It hadn't occurred to them that for some students at Green Fields, lunchtime was a respite.
Because that hadn't occurred to them, it also hadn't occurred to them that the real problem might be that Black students, Korean American students, and other students of color at Green Fields needed a respite. They needed a respite from racial microaggressions they experienced from peers and adults at the school. They needed a respite from the social and cultural pressures they felt to conform to an institutional culture that largely rendered them invisible. They needed a respite from the curricular erasure, from being "the only" in their classes, from teachers responding inadequately to racist comments and jokes. They needed a respite from the racism. And they needed Michael and his administrative peers to be more concerned with the racism students faced at Green Fields and less with where they sat during lunch.
In our experience, the situation at Green Fields illustrates a bit of an epidemic among school and district leaders. Sure, part of schools' equity problem stems from the beliefs and actions of rabid racists and zealous xenophobes, as we said earlier, along with calculating cisgenderists and enthusiastic sexists. But perhaps a bigger portion comes down to the beliefs and actions of people like Michael: people with real concern, people with ostensibly good intentions, people who appreciate diversity but may struggle to understand how injustice operates with enough depth to eliminate it.
We want to be clear about this: there's no shame in that struggle. The reality is, most of us do well recognizing and understanding the kinds of inequity we experience but labor to recognize and understand the kinds of injustice from which our identities and positionalities protect us. As people who have committed our lives to fighting for equity and justice in education, we find ourselves perpetually in this struggle.
The shame is in choosing not to be in that struggle when students, families, and colleagues who are being harmed desperately need us to be in it. To opt out is an expression of privilege and entitlement, because the people being harmed can't opt out.
Part of what we ask you to do while reading this book is to stay with us in that struggle. When we find ourselves feeling defensive or clinging onto old ideas like security blankets, we know it's time to engage more deeply rather than less deeply.
Consider an example. As we discuss in greater detail later, researchers who have studied why Black students are suspended or expelled from school at higher rates than their classmates have concluded that the disparity is trackable largely to racial bias, not to Black students misbehaving more often or their families not valuing school enough. What do we know? We know that Black students are suspended and expelled at higher rates than white students, for example. Based on big national studies, including one examining more than a million office referrals (Girvan et al., 2017), we know that the biggest cause of this disparity comes down to differences in how educators interpret and respond to subjective behaviors—the student is behaving in a "disrespectful manner" or the student is being "insubordinate"—leading to higher rates of subjective office referrals for Black students who are behaving in ways for which their white classmates aren't as likely to be referred.
We should wonder, then, why most of the popular solutions for addressing racial disparities in discipline seem to focus on everything other than the only possible solution: eliminating this racism. Perhaps we adopt Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) so that we can be clearer about behavior expectations. Perhaps we embrace trauma-sensitive approaches so that we can respond to the underlying causes of behaviors. Perhaps we offer students training in mindfulness and emotion regulation.
At best, these are bad solutions based on significant misunderstandings of the problem. At worst, they appear to be purposeful dodging: a way to sustain racist experiences and outcomes while creating the illusion of antiracist concern. The research is clear: the problem isn't a lack of clarity about behavior expectations, a mindfulness deficiency, or some innate cultural value that keeps students from "behaving"; the problem is racial bias and inequitable applications of discipline policies. Perhaps the biggest barrier to equity progress is the struggle among people who value diversity or belonging to understand that offering mindfulness and emotion regulation to students as solutions to racial discipline disparities or interrupting Black or Korean American students' respite from racism while failing to attend to the racism is a way we actually perpetuate racism.
Again, the typical trouble is not that leaders aren't doing something about racial discipline disparities or other inequities. Schools generally appear to be doing a whole lot of something. The trouble instead is that most of what that something comprises poses no real threat to the disparities or inequities. Because the something is usually ineffectual, it's also usually inefficient—a misuse of the energy, time, and emotional labor that educators invest in their jobs. Why would we spend precious resources on "equity" approaches, strategies, and initiatives that are bound to fail?
As far as we can see, we might answer this question in a couple of ways. Neither lands us at particularly good news.
The first possible answer is that it's purposeful. We know, at the very least, that many leaders feel pressure to demonstrate the optics of movement on equity and justice. Unfortunately, that's what often seems to be rewarded or prioritized in school systems: optics. In fact, when we ask school and district leaders to share the most important thing they're doing when it comes to equity, they most commonly describe cool-sounding student programs: a diversity assembly, perhaps, or an antibullying workshop. These sorts of initiatives are high on optics but generally low on impact. They don't identify or eliminate institutional racism, heterosexism, or ableism. They don't change institutional conditions any more than Michael force-integrating the Green Fields cafeteria would change institutional conditions. It's hard not to read the evasion as purposeful after watching school leaders respond to inequitable conditions, not with plans to transform institutional cultures around an antiracist or anti-ableist commitment, but instead with decontextualized community dialogues or statements about how diversity is our strength.
Again, these are high-equity-optics, low-institutional-impact responses. We can do better.
One way to do better is to begin questioning the presumption of good intentions. After all, how many generations of educational leaders with good equity intentions does it take to substantially transform schools, to wipe out all or even most of the predictable bias and inequity? The courageous move is to put an expiration date on good intentions—our own and one another's. When is actual movement going to be rewarded more than the illusion of movement or the ostensible intention of movement? This is the sort of individual and collective reckoning we should embrace if we are serious about educational equity.
This answer to our question, that the problem is purposeful evasion, sounds discouraging, we know. That's why we constructed this book around the second answer, for leaders who don't want their efforts to be about optics, who genuinely want to do right by students and staff, who are horrified to learn that what they've been doing in the name of diversity might perpetuate harm. We're not naive enough to believe that this description covers everybody, including everybody working in education. We have our determined inequitable system-sustainers just like every other field and system. But we do presume that, with deeper understanding and more transformative equity commitments and skills, Michael and other educational leaders can become strong, effective equity leaders. As we discuss in more detail later, we constructed this book on the assumption that you'll read it because you desire equity and have the will to do something about inequity. You want to embrace the most transformative approach possible, because that is what is required to fulfill this equity desire.
To be sure, these transformations do not come without resistance and backlash. We return to this point several times throughout this book: inequitable systems do not pass quietly into the night. But if we have the knowledge, skills, and will to push through the backlash, we can effect deep change (Theoharis, 2007). We can, and we must. (We discuss backlash in more detail in Chapter 8.)
But this change can happen only when we are willing to embrace transformative ideas, when we shake free of the kinds of ideological blockages with which Michael and his colleagues struggled, when we embrace new ways of looking at things based on a deep and layered commitment to equity. We can't celebrate diversity our way to equity. We can't rely on good intentions that aren't buttressed by good actions. We must reimagine and reconstruct almost everything in our spheres of influence. We need the knowledge to understand the difference between celebrating diversity and eliminating inequity; we need the skills to enact an active, transformative equity vision. Through this commitment we can strengthen what we call our equity literacy: our literacy when it comes to understanding, cultivating, and sustaining equity.
This commitment captures the essence of where we're going in the following chapters. In our view, this book's most important feature is detailed descriptions of what we call the basic principles of equity literacy. We conceived these principles to help educational leaders avoid the misunderstandings and missteps so commonly employed in the name of equity and instead embrace and enact deep, transformative approaches to equity leadership.
In Chapter 1, we define equity and inequity and distinguish between mitigative and transformative approaches to equity. In Chapter 2, we introduce key concepts, components, and tenets of the equity literacy framework. This includes the four key building blocks of equity desire, equity knowledge, equity abilities, and equity will—the will to lead transformatively for equity. The framework also includes what we call the five abilities of equity literacy: recognizing inequity, responding to inequity, redressing inequity, sustaining equity, and actively cultivating equity.
After introducing the framework, we dive into the principles of equity literacy with a chapter dedicated to each. We use case scenarios, student voices, and other tools to illustrate why the principles are important and to demonstrate them in action. Throughout, we provide reflection prompts that challenge readers to apply the concepts and principles to their own leadership practice.
The direct confrontation principle, which we discuss in Chapter 3, reminds us that the path to equity requires direct, decisive action. We begin by recognizing the ways inequity related to race, ability, sex, socioeconomic status, gender identity and expression, sexual identity, size, ethnicity, language, citizenship status, religion, and other identities operate in our spheres of influence. Then we ask of our equity efforts: To what extent is what we're doing a real threat to inequity and injustice? To what extent does it activate and accelerate equity and justice? Celebrating diversity by itself doesn't do that. Cultural competence by itself doesn't do that. We can hold the cultures of people who are culturally different from us in high esteem while still enacting policies that harm them racially, economically, or otherwise. The direct confrontation principle is not simply about confronting people but about honestly naming and directly addressing the conditions that perpetuate inequity.
In Chapter 4, we explore the fix injustice, not kids principle. This principle challenges us to reconsider programs and initiatives that attempt to achieve equity by adjusting the cultures, mindsets, values, behaviors, grittiness, or attitudes of the people who are experiencing inequity. Equity is never about fixing or adjusting students and families who are racially, economically, or otherwise marginalized, an approach often called deficit ideology (Fergus, 2021; Gorski, 2016). Instead, it's about eliminating the conditions that marginalize students and families. In this chapter, we outline ways we can root out deficit approaches and bridge ourselves and one another to what we call a structural equity approach. When we do so, we equip ourselves to more clearly recognize and more effectively attend to the root causes of disparities and inequities.
The prioritization principle, the focus of Chapter 5, challenges leaders to learn how to intentionally prioritize the best interests, joys, needs, and access of students and families who historically have been, and presently continue to be, denied equitable access and opportunity. The only way to do this with the level of transformation required is to reimagine policies and practices and rebuild institutional cultures in ways that account for historical and present inequity and its ramifications. We must commit to pacing equity efforts in ways that prioritize the people most desperate for equity and justice rather than stepping gingerly, protecting the people most resistant to equity and justice. This is not just ideological posturing; it's consistent with organizational change theory and research about how to lead significant institutional change.
In Chapter 6, we introduce the just access principle, which insists that we move beyond concerns about access and outcomes to nurture truly transformative equity. Too often school policies, practices, and initiatives, including those posing as something new, uphold historical efforts to assimilate, marginalize, police, and punish students. For example, so much of our curriculum has been focused on the values, beliefs, and assumptions that perpetuate discrimination and oppression, even when these intentions are hidden behind promising-sounding initiatives such as advanced coursework or character education or social-emotional learning. We reconsider what we are working so hard to provide equitable access to, and whether it is itself equitable.
Chapter 7 examines the evidence-based equity principle and the ways conventional approaches to collecting and analyzing data can cloud our understandings of inequity and hinder our ability to eliminate it. We point to the need to gather more meaningful data to help us assess a school's equity health.
Finally, in Chapter 8, we share the care, joy, and sustainability principle. As we finished writing this book, the pushback against educational equity efforts was increasingly organized and well-funded. It can be hard not to despair at the resistance to even the most menial inclusion efforts. However, the push for equity also has never been stronger or the need for it more apparent. This principle emphasizes the importance of joy and community-building in cultivating and sustaining transformative equity. We also discuss self- and community care for equity leaders who face blowback and reprisals for taking strong equity stands.
Before we jump into Chapter 1, we want to be as clear as possible about our givens. These are the assumptions we carry into this book.
In many schools and districts, the most important, most transformative equity leadership comes not from principals or other people with positional authority but from teachers, counselors, parents, students, and others who, despite not having positional authority, do everything they can to push equity efforts forward. In fact, sometimes the most substantive equity leadership we witness is provided by people who are doing everything in their power to lead transformative change despite inaction and insufficient support from positional leaders. We have been blown away, for example, by the equity leadership assumed by student and alumni groups who are organizing on social media to demand that school and district leaders pay more serious attention to racism, heterosexism, cisgenderism, and other forms of oppression.
Of course, principals, superintendents, and other positional leaders can be—ought to be—equity leaders too. Many of the examples of equity leadership we offer throughout this book draw on our experiences with people who have positional authority. The best-case scenario is that positional leaders work alongside all those other leaders, the people our brilliant colleague Marceline DuBose calls passion leaders, to enact and sustain equity efforts. After all, positional leaders have the authority to quicken the pace of change, and often passion leaders have the experience and expertise to understand most clearly what change needs to happen.
We share all of this to say that we wrote this book not just for principals, equity directors, and central office administrators, but also for anybody bent on leading transformative equity efforts. Whatever your sphere of influence or official role, if you are advocating for equity, we believe the principles in this book will help you do so in the most transformative way possible.
If you're looking for a book that describes "10 strategies you can implement tomorrow, making all things equitable," this is not that. And if you find a book claiming to be that, our recommendation is, don't trust it.
This is the first cognitive challenge we pose to many educational leaders. Let go of the expectation that equity leadership is about this or that strategy, program, or initiative. We understand that in an education culture where the supposed building blocks of good schooling often are marketed as what we call the "shiny new things," this cognitive shift can be difficult. But ask yourself this: How have those programs and initiatives been working so far? Have they helped us eliminate any disparities?
The reality is that, for generations, we in education have churned through program after program, initiative after initiative—all the shiny new things—and for the most part they have made little or no difference when it comes to equity and justice, especially when implemented in a sort of mindless plug-and-play fashion. It's time for a different approach.
We remember when "learning styles" was the shiny new thing, embraced in many schools as a salve for achievement disparities. It wasn't. It couldn't be, because attending to learning styles has nothing to do with identifying and eliminating the racism, cisgenderism, sexism, ableism, or other oppressive conditions that cause and sustain inequity. It also couldn't be the salve because, as it turns out, the notion that adjusting teaching to students' learning styles improves learning is among the most thoroughly debunked presumptions in education (Pashler et al., 2008). But it sure was marketed as a salve for a good decade before research demonstrated its ineffectiveness, in the same way some more recent studies have suggested growth mindset interventions have little impact on learning (Sisk et al., 2018).
Neither is resilience or antibullying or diversity programming or SEL or PBIS the salve. If we start with a school where, say, socioeconomic inequity operates in a variety of ways and we sprinkle all of this in—the diversity programming, the cultural competence, the kindness—we're still left with socioeconomic inequity, because none of these ingredients poses any substantial threat to inequity. Which of these ingredients identifies and eliminates inequitable policies and practices? Which substantially addresses the root causes of discipline disparities? Which transforms institutional cultures not just to celebrate diversity but also to normalize conversations about and actions toward justice? The problem here is not that we as educational leaders don't recognize the problem of inequity but rather that we misunderstand it. As a result, our solutions pose no serious threat to it. Again, it's a lot of optics with no serious potential for change (Stevenson, 2014).
This reality doesn't mean some of these shiny new things aren't beneficial to children and families. For example, we're proponents of SEL when it is informed with an equity lens. It just means that no combination of them can, in itself, make schools more equitable or just, especially schools where leaders refuse to embrace more transformative equity commitments. So we must let go of the expectation that there's an outline or equation that tells us which practices and initiatives to stir together to concoct the equity potion. Nothing replaces the hard work of identifying inequity, eliminating inequity, and actively cultivating equity. There's no blueprint for that. But there are some key understandings and abilities to help us do it. Those are the principles we detail in this book.
In the spirt of Assumption One, we offer in this book something that we have learned is more valuable and, in a way, even more practical than practices: the critical understandings we need to make those transformative commitments and lead for equity in meaningful ways. These are the principles, the values, that can guide the programs, practices, and literally everything else we do. They help achieve clarity about our ends so that we can embrace the best possible means. We offer a framework to inform all of the doing rather than a step-by-step guide to the doing.
In other words, the shifts we're proposing are, as much as anything, ideological and institutional adjustments. The fix injustice, not kids principle, for example, requires that we ditch deficit perspectives and quit grit as solutions for educational disparities, and focus instead on addressing the conditions that marginalize students and create the disparities. Doing so requires an ideological shift for many educators. Without that shift, equitable practices aren't sustainable anyway.
This step, the ideological shift, is one we too often skip in education. Bad ideology explains why there are more initiatives focusing on resilience, social-emotional learning, and behavior adjustment than on antiracism in schools that desperately need antiracism. Bad ideology doesn't mean bad people. It means we need to prepare ourselves to understand more precisely why conditions exist so that we can address them deeply rather than dancing around them.
So our third assumption grows out of our belief that there is no shortage of equity-related programs and initiatives, but there is a shortage of equity because those efforts are almost always (1) built on misunderstandings or evasions, such as professional development on debunked concepts such as the "mindset of poverty"; or (2) not specifically constructed with equity in mind, such as PBIS. When we address the misunderstandings and evasions and embrace deep equity principles that facilitate profound understandings and more direct and effective eradications of inequity, we will prepare ourselves to lead more transformatively for equity. If we choose instead to hold onto our ideological blockages, we render ourselves incapable of serious change.
In the same spirit, we start with the assumption that you, like Michael and his Green Fields colleagues, want to lead for equity. We also assume, as Michael illustrated, that the desire to lead for equity is an unsuitable, and maybe even dangerous, stand-in for the knowledge and skills necessary to lead for equity. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," "Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will." Without deep understanding and just actions, good intentions—talking the equity talk—add up to precisely no meaningful equity movement. This book is about how we can leverage deep understanding and goodwill to promote transformative action in equity leadership.
We also start with the assumption that we do not need to convince you that equity and justice matter, or that sexism, racism, ableism, classism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression exist and wreak havoc in and out of schools. Nor do we try to convince readers that we all are responsible for attending to inequity and injustice in serious, transformative ways. They do, and we are. That's our point of departure.
Instead, our guiding questions are What does serious, transformative equity leadership look like? On what values and understandings is it conceived? Based on the work we've done with hundreds of schools and districts, and considering the values embraced in schools we've observed making substantial strides versus those that expend substantial resources but make little progress, we ask these questions: What are the basic principles and values that can guide transformative equity leadership? What ideals and understandings do effective equity leaders embrace that other, perhaps well-intentioned, leaders fail to, or choose not to, embrace?
As you read this book, you'll notice we often refer to lessons we've learned from students, especially those who experience substantial inequity in their schools. Sometimes these lessons come from the hundreds of focus groups we've conducted, and sometimes they are from individual, even informal, conversations we've had with students. Sure, we cite other sorts of evidence where appropriate, including big national quantitative studies, but we have learned that nothing can replace what we call the listen and believe commitment. Listen to students' stories about how they experience school and believe what they say. If we're going to be evidence-informed, we should ask ourselves what kinds of evidence we're ignoring. Stories and counter-stories are evidence—valuable, powerful evidence. We come back to this point throughout the book, but especially in Chapter 7.
Students' stories also illustrate the impacts of inequitable conditions in classrooms and schools, so we draw on them a lot. We do so both because they are vital evidence, important illustrations, but also because we worry that so much equity work in schools is guided by presumptions about what students need rather than what they are explicitly demanding.
In the rest of this book, we describe an approach to equity leadership that eases our reliance on prepackaged, nonlocalized, plug-and-play strategies—all the stuff that tends to be high on optics and low on impact. We build our approach on well-evidenced principles for transformative and sustainable equity leadership, relevant both to individual leaders and to schools, districts, and other educational institutions. It starts with strengthening our equity literacy.
