2 No Shortcut Avoiding Equity Traps and
Tropes
By Dr. Dugan Jamila
See the barriers; imagine what is possible.
Abolitionists want to remove what is oppressive, not reform it, not reimagine it, but remove oppression by its roots. Abolitionists want to understand the conditions that normalize oppression and uproot those conditions, too. Abolitionists, in the words of scholar and activist, Bill Ayers, "demand the impossible and work to build a world rooted in the possibilities of justice."
-Bettina Love
Six weeks ago, my dreams for the education system seemed to be fading. My son Kingston, who is considered "on grade level," was beginning to loathe school. He bemoaned not having enough time to run outside since recess had been cut to twenty minutes. (The school's underlying mental model:1 We need to maximize "instructional time"; playtime like recess is secondary to covering the standards.) He felt bored taking notes during math lessons while his teacher lectured at the board. (Mental model: "Engaging activities" are reserved for elective classes and special projects engagement is the exception, not the rule.) Kingston had been spending his nightly reading time delving into stories of the Black experience that captured his imagination, but his teacher wrote a note directing him to read "new material" more closely related to the class content. (Mental model:
Standards and curriculum determine what students need to read, not their identity and interests.)
1 Systems theorist Peter Sene defines mental models as our theories about the way the world works that influence our actions and in turn influence the development of our systems and approaches (Senge, 2000).
As a parent and educator, I was becoming exasperated. Why was this happening?
How could this Black boy full of curiosity, joy, and potential be starting to dislike school in the third grade? Maybe I should settle for what we've been told is the "right way" to educate students so that Kingston "performs" on his first standardized test at the end of the year. Maybe I should set my dreams aside.
Then, the COVID-19 pandemic erupted and disrupted everything. Suddenly, I had to be an educator, a leader, and a mother to my two children in one house, 24-7, all at once.
We had our essentials, and we had each other, but it still felt nearly impossible. It seemed like I couldn't accomplish anything. Our lives were rattled, and internally, I faced a new set of questions about the purpose of education. The reality of trying to educate two small children with limited time felt paralyzing, but it was also a painful reminder of what so many of our students and families go through all the time. It was soul-crushing.
I was transported back to myself as a young woman growing up in East Oakland, California baffled at how the odds seemed to be intentionally stacked against me, my friends, and my family. I began to feel again the fire, agitation, and inspiration to dream that I had experienced when I first entered the teaching profession. There wasn't going to be a magic potion to help me figure this out. I needed to trust my gut, lean on my community for support, and ride the emotional rollercoaster of bringing my own vision for equity into my home.
As the ups and downs of pandemic life led me to reinvent schooling at home, I realized something: The dream of equitable education for every child is alive and well, but our system is designed for us to forget it. Our system is built to deprive us of imagination, especially when it comes to the learning and liberation of Black and brown children. In the moments of (slightly) less chaos in my household, I became a teacher without the constraints of "schooling," and my vision of child-centered learning reemerged.
Imagine a world where school feeds our innate creativity and where educators and students have the time and space to co-construct a vision for learning, not driven by mandates and test scores but by their deepest hopes and dreams for the future. In this world, students' developmental needs and interests drive instructional design. In this world, deep engagement is not a luxury; it is the baseline for every educator and child who enters the school doors. In this world, we are satisfied not by numbers on sporadic tests but rather by observing a moment of "knowing" in our children. This visceral delight rarely comes from a bubble-in test but from our experience of watching mastery happen in real time.
In this world, school and district leaders would see their work as removing barriers to teacher and student prosperity like pruning in a garden. The more space, the more everyone thrives. In this world, teachers share a commitment to cultivating the gifts and talents of their learners and they are given the time, tools, and trust to do it. They aren't asked to batch-process students who will be measured by white supremacist standards but to develop students who have the self-concept, competence, and agency to contribute to an ever-changing world. In this world, every student matters.
This world is possible but challenging to manifest. The pressure and power baked into the DNA of an outdated system makes it feel nearly impossible especially for those of us serving students and families at the margins of society.
That doesn't mean we aren't trying. Every day, before the pandemic, I walked into schools full of educators doing their best. Regardless of the context, the majority of teachers and principals I encountered wanted the best for themselves, their colleagues, and of course, their students. They could articulate a commitment to excellence and to ensuring that every student gets what they need to thrive. They held onto this commitment even when the educational system worked against their goals. These educators were and are operating with a fierce sense of passion and urgency, constantly trying to improve, and working long hours to make a difference in the lives of the people they care about most.
Under intense pressure from external forces, they aspire to be deemed "successful" by entities that are often disconnected from their day-to-day work. Sometimes it's the district or charter office: "We need to get to more equitable outcomes. There's an achievement gap, and we have to improve our test scores." And sometimes, it shows up inside our classrooms: "The curriculum says students have to know all of this material to prepare them for the state test." This could easily have been the behind-the-scenes experience of my son's teacher.
And yet ...
Something doesn't feel right. There's a constant air of discomfort. In conversation after conversation, we acknowledge that we are suffering. Somehow, the dialogue about the achievement gap doesn't sit right. We talk the talk of test scores, but it doesn't sit well in our spirits. We appreciate the gold star for being a "successful" school, but we question if the success is real. At worst, we internalize a deficit frame-the problem lies in the children, not the system-subscribe to limited ways of defining success, and fall into equity traps and tropes.
So many of us enter the field of education with hopes that our work will meaningfully impact students. However, we are often asked to focus our attention on ways of teaching and learning that aren't always connected to those goals. We take a satellite view of student needs rather than being on the street in the details and joys of improving the student experience a framework we will explore in this book.
What if I told you that equity has nothing to do with test scores and traditional metrics? What if I told you that benchmarks are not only a distraction from equity, they are often the very tools used to solidify and justify the perpetuation of inequity? What if I told you that trying to measure an equitable experience can happen right here, right now, side by side and in dialogue with the learner? What if we were able to pull out of the current paradigm and use our imagination to lead us to liberation?
Throughout this book, we seek to answer those questions. We will offer ways to flip the paradigm of how we design and measure the success of schooling from the macro or satellite view and take our work down to the micro moments-street data that can help us transform our schools. We must begin, though, with deeper awareness of what gets in the way. We must understand the landmines that lay before us as we attempt to redefine what it means to work toward equity in schools.
Awareness is the core stance of this chapter. Becoming aware of the shortcomings of the oppressive system within which we work is the first step toward dismantling it.
Cultivating an awareness of common barriers to equity, such as prioritizing "silver bullet" solutions over deep learning, will take us beyond "good intentions" to meaningful change.
This is the subject matter of the remainder of this chapter. With an understanding of some of the traps and tropes, we hope to offer framing vocabulary that will provide a lens to view the complexity of the work ahead.
Defining Terms: Equity, Traps, and Tropes
What does equity mean to us, your coauthors and guides along this journey? We ascribe to a simple definition that requires deliberate action. Equity is an approach to ensuring equally high outcomes for all by removing the predictability of success or failure that currently correlates with any racial, social, economic, or cultural factor.
Ensuring high outcomes for all is not a task that can be checked off a list. Equity isn't a destination but an unwavering commitment to a journey. It can be easy to focus on where we hope to land and lose sight of the deliberate daily actions that constitute the process. Day to day fires and the weight of the system make it enticing to hold others and not ourselves accountable. Thus, we reorient ourselves to working toward equity, which requires us to
Acknowledge that our systems, practices, and narratives are designed to perpetuate disparities in outcomes for marginalized students
Deliberately identify barriers that predict success or failure and actively disrupt them
Consistently examine personal identity, bias, and both personal and collective contributions to the creation and/or reproduction of inequitable practices
(Re) Allocate resources (tools, time, money, people, support) to ensure every child gets what they need to succeed to thrive socially, emotionally, and intellectually
Cultivate the unique gifts, talents, and interests that every person possesses? 2 This definition is adapted and amended from definitions offered by Promise 54, National Equity Project, and the work of researchers including Bell, 2005; Bensimon, 2005; Brayboy et al.,
2007; DeCuir & Dixson, 2004; Delgado & Stefancic, 2012; Gotanda, 2004; Gutierrez & Jaramillo,
2006; Jencks, 1972; Noguera, 2008; Darling-Hammond, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 2006; Lynch &
Baker, 2005; North, 2008 (all of these as cited by Galloway & Ishimaru, 2015).
Street data--real time, on the ground, systematic information-is our guiding light as we work toward equity. It is going to take a radical shift in our data paradigm to propel the kind of instructional transformation we need: deep, equitable, culturally sustaining learning. The traps and tropes are landmines that exist to deter us from this understanding.
A trap is a mechanism or device designed to catch and retain. It quickly allows entry but does not allow exit. A trope is a recurring theme we've seen happen before. Over my years as an educator, I have found myself and have watched others unintentionally fall victim to the very circumstances we are trying to change stepping into oppressive traps and replaying oppressive tropes.
Exhibit A: Traps and Tropes in Action
A while back, I sat with a colleague who was frustrated about the lack of progress she was seeing in her school. Ashleigh shared that student attendance was decreasing, staff frustration with administration was increasing, and despite many hours of collaborative work, classroom instruction had failed to change. I asked her what she was focusing on for the year.
We've had inequitable outcomes for our African American and Latinx males for a while, including disproportionality in suspensions and lower passage rates in English, Science, and Math exams. The leadership team agreed this needed to be addressed. We brainstormed and decided to first make sure our vision statement named a commitment to equity so that all of our staff would understand our dedication to the work. We also realized that we needed to be doing work around culturally responsive teaching, bias, and community engagement. We knew we couldn't do all of it at once, so we decided to focus on culturally responsive teaching (CRT). We developed a plan to have our teachers do a book study around CRT, and the leadership team developed a checklist of observable practices we wanted to see in the classrooms. The checklist made our leadership team feel really good that we were finally doing equity work! We started all of our planning sessions by reading our new vision statement and made sure that every teacher was consistently observed, using the checklist. Despite all of that, we saw no real change. I just don't know what I am missing at this point.
I could tell she was at her wits' end. Ashleigh and I are African American women who have had ongoing conversations about systemic racism and the importance of being change agents. She wasn't short on commitment, resilience, or follow-through. How could she and her team have done so much and seen so little movement?
Exhibit B: Traps and Tropes in Action
Gary, a white male central office leader, and I are close colleagues but have different beliefs about how to support Black and brown students to thrive. Despite our differences, I have appreciated his contributions to my learning over time. Recently, Gary helped a team of educators open a new school that serves predominantly Black students. I asked him to update me on how the school was doing and quickly experienced déjà vu: as Gary spoke, I felt just like I had during my conversation with Ashleigh.
You know that I am very excited about this school. The leaders are committed to making sure that students of color have a great place to learn. The idea is that if the school has a strong standards-aligned curriculum and community engagement, students will feel deeply connected and achieve at high levels.
Right now, it's a new school. We are experiencing growing pains. When you look at classrooms, students aren't yet engaged or feeling particularly connected, but the leadership team is working on it. The lead team hired a new dean of culture and they're hoping that he will be able to help engage the families and students.
I will admit: In talking to Gary, a white man, the reference to hiring a new dean of culture raised my racial antennae. I decided to pull up the website and look at the school demographics. I found that the only Black staff members in this school of 94 percent Black students were the teacher's assistants, two out of fourteen certificated teachers, and, as I had predicted, the new dean of culture. Every other staff member was white. I asked him if he was concerned about the staffing demographics, and he told me the following:
Everyone is committed to doing the best work for kids at this school. It isn't right to say that just because someone is not the same race as the students, they can't create a great place for kids to learn. The staff cares about equity. They know that they need to add staff of color, which is why they hired the new dean. They have two awesome trainers coming in during their summer professional development, and they are going to learn about restorative practices, so I fully expect that the classroom and school culture will improve.
This conversation reminded me of how our prevailing approach to educational reform makes it possible, even likely, to fall into traps and tropes that are harmful to kids, tokenize educators of color, and reinforce the blinders our colleagues wear. We gravitate toward test scores and satellite-level understandings of community needs and take action guided by what we think versus what we know from those who are most important; students, caretakers, and staff on the street. Gary and his colleagues had good intentions, but I was struck by how they had been undermining their own efforts almost from the start. Thinking back to my conversations with Ashleigh and Gary, their situations were different but evoked the same feeling in me. Ashleigh wasn't seeing results and Gary, by the end of the school year, had lost the two Black teachers, 30 percent of his students, and community partnerships had never come to fruition. Both were working hard, but their progress toward equity had stopped before it even started.
What Are the Equity Traps and Tropes at Play in
These Scenarios?
As I reflected earlier, we've been viewing our educational system through a lens and discourse that has reinforced deficit narratives about Black and brown students, promoted narrow definitions of success, and reproduced inequitable outcomes over and over again.
We fully intend to work toward equity, yet we have internalized the wrong set of change drivers (Fullan & Quinn, 2015; Mintrop, 2016), tipping us over and over again into equity traps and tropes.
In the following section, we examine ten common equity traps and tropes, deconstructing what it looks and sounds like to fall into the trap. The following chapters offer a robust guide for getting ourselves out.
Equity Tropes and Traps
Table 2.1 Traps and Tropes at a Glance
TABLE 2.1 Traps and Tropes at a Glance
TRAPS AND
TROPES
Doing equity
Siloing equity
Equity warrior
Spray and pray equity
Navel-gazing equity
Structural equity
Blanket equity
Tokenizing equity
Superficial equity
Boomerang equity
DESCRIPTION
Treating equity as series of tools, strategies, and compliance tasks versus a whole-person, whole-system change process linked to culture, identity, and healing
Locating equity work in a separate and siloed policy, team, or body
Nesting equity with a single champion and holder of the vision
Engaging "equity experts" to drop in for a training with no ongoing plan for learning or capacity building
Keeping the equity work at the level of self-reflection and failing to penetrate the instructional core and/or school systems and structures (e.g., instructional planning, student tracking)
Redesigning systems and structures (e.g., master schedule) without investing in the deeper personal, interpersonal, and cultural shifts
Investing in a program or curriculum rather than building the capacity of your people to address equity challenges as complex and ongoing places of inquiry
Asking leaders of color to hold, drive, and symbolically represent equity without providing support and resources to thrive nor engaging the entire staff in the work
Failing to take time to build equity-centered knowledge and fluency, leading to behavioral shifts without understanding deeper meaning or historical context
Investing time and resources to understand your equity challenges but reverting back to recycled, status quo solutions Doing equity: Treating equity as a series of tools, strategies, and compliance tasks versus a whole-person, whole-system change process linked to culture, identity, and healing
In the first story, Ashleigh struggled to see progress as a result of the investments her team was making. Her team accelerated from a commitment to addressing inequities in their building to immediately taking action- following a well-prescribed program for creating change. When something is not working, you "do" something else. We've been taught to find the framework, the new observation checklist, or the new teaching approach and to implement it without deeply understanding what we are doing and how it connects to our overall goals. In Ashleigh's case, the team uncovered that there was racial disproportionality in their suspensions and standardized test data. With this information, they identified a problem and found a "solution": pursuing culturally responsive teaching in book groups. Scholars have long cautioned against this approach. Working toward equity is not a journey of implementation. The work requires us to understand the specific ways inequity plays out in our context, to engage in praxis-the integration of constant reflection and action (Freire, 1970)-and to engage in a continuous cycle of learning. (Chapters 3 and 7 will illuminate how street data can animate and fuel such a cycle.) "Doing equity" reduces the complexity of our work to a set of straightforward tasks without thinking about the school as a complex ecosystem requiring a holistic approach to change.Siloing equity: Locating the equity work in a separate and siloed policy, team, or body
Look at the strategic plans of many organizations and schools working toward equity: You will likely find a policy, new "equity" vision statement, or a newly formed task force designed to increase equitable outcomes. These task forces may generate good ideas and even strong plans. Siloing equity happens when these task forces are disconnected from the overall work of the school or system. For example, if the equity task force sets priorities for increasing staff diversity but the broader staff cannot articulate those goals, then working toward equity in the task force is likely a siloed effort. If the task force meets as a unit but never engages with any other body in the system-especially those related to instruction-the work toward equity is likely siloed. siloing equity leads us to believe that equity is separate from instruction, which is separate from culture, which is separate from every other aspect of student experience and learning.Equity warrior: Nesting equity within a single champion and holder of the vision
The equity warrior is an incredible educator, often treated as a martyr for their work. This person is eager to push their colleagues and school forward and willing to take on significant additional work to bring the team along. Unfortunately, the equity warrior can easily become the default holder of the school or system's vision for equity, allowing colleagues to opt out, stay inside their comfort zones, or refuse to invest in their own equity learning, which is critical to the change effort. When "siloing equity" is at play, this person is often asked to be the lone voice for change. In the example of hiring for staff diversity, the school administration may ask the equity warrior to join the hiring committee and ask at the end, "So what do you think of this candidate? Are they an 'equity teacher'?" Despite the school or district's espoused commitment to equity, it's the warrior's job to make it happen. The equity warrior can be elevated for their contributions or sometimes obliterated for them. In either scenario, the work rests on their shoulders, and if they are not present, the work tends to fizzle out.
It is hard to be an equity warrior regardless of your identity. However, it is important to name that not all equity warrior experiences are created equal. Tropes Within the Equity Warrior Trap: The Great WhiteHope and the Lone Ranger of Color
The Lone Ranger of Color
Racism puts enough burdens on educators of color; white colleagues can't also expect them to end it.
-Clarice Brazas and Charlie McGeehan
This trope can be hard to spot in its early stages. A school team is excited to elevate the leadership of a staff member of color and shower them with praise for taking on the work. As time goes on and the work gets deeper, the burden on the Lone Ranger of Color begins to increase. The Lone Ranger asks colleagues to demonstrate coalition and cross-racial leadership for equity, only to have white colleagues treat these requests as an add-on ("I already have too much on my plate."). They are asked to be the resident culture and behavior specialist when white colleagues are unsure what to do. At worst, they're encouraged to bring ideas to the table, but when they step into their power and express a dissenting view, they have the devastating experience of being subtly or overtly reprimanded. There is nothing worse than turning a passionate advocate into a lone soldier in charge of carrying the weight for everyone.
The Great White Hope
The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.
-Teju Cole
The Great White Hope trope rests in a savior mentality-the belief that it is this person's responsibility to rescue students of color from an oppressive situation or even from themselves. This leader has been to antiracism conferences, read equity-focused literature, and is committed to the cause.
The trap is to view this leader as an equity "expert" rather than a dedicated, lifelong equity student. We are in dangerous territory when this leader is elevated for their warriorship while silencing the leaders of color around them. Sometimes, the leader may have a decisive approach to school improvement, much like Gary and his colleagues, but proceed to cherry-pick approaches to fit their (often misguided) perspective around what is "right" for kids. This leader may be valorized in a way that leads to the behavior we saw in Gary's white colleagues-a stance that says, "We know more than you. We are here to save you." This is a song of the colonizer's tongue: "As long as you listen to me, you shall be set free." If the leader is called out for this behavior, they can often become defensive and begin to attack those attempting to bring awareness to their entitled position (often, the Lone Ranger of Color). This leader must be vigilant in developing awareness of their positionality in the work, as they have the potential to undermine working toward equity under the guise of heroism. White leaders must be careful of their approach to leadership and see much of their work as uplifting the voices of others, holding other white people accountable, and taking action in coalition with people of color.
• 4. Spray and pray equity: Engaging "equity experts" to drop in for a training with no ongoing plan for learning and capacity-building
Gary and his colleagues felt strongly that if they had summer trainers come in to help their staff learn about restorative practices, the staff would become more equity centered. Many of us are convinced that if we just get the right trainer, including someone like myself, everything will be "fixed." A common refrain Shane and I hear is, "If we just train our teachers around their implicit biases, then they will treat students better." While such training may benefit staff, training without a commitment to ongoing learning and development will likely result in temporary or no change. Sleeter (1992) found that even when teachers receive long-term daily training for a full six weeks, change in their practice dissipates within three months. Authentic commitment to working toward equity requires a comprehensive approach to capacity-building, including coaching, reflection, and collaborative learning processes, which we'll discuss in Chapters 5, 6, and 7. Imagine breaking all of your bad habits after a one-day training. Highly unlikely.
• 5. Navel-gazing equity: Keeping the equity work at the level of self-reflection and failing to penetrate the instructional core and school systems and structures (e.g., master schedule, tracking)
It would be unfair to say that there aren't schools and organizations across the country doing deep work around issues of equity. Another trap that we can fall into, though, is having our deep work live in one part of a complex puzzle. Navel-gazing equity may look like a staff that completes training around bias, privilege, and identity but never takes that work into any other domain of the school. How do bias and privilege show up in our academic counseling systems, disciplinary procedures, grading, and so forth? Transformation requires investment in personal and interpersonal development, awareness and creation of shared cultural practices, and the redesign of inequitable systems--all at the same time. I've seen countless schools and districts make heavy investments into personal transformation work for themselves and their staff, but if you ask them what systems or structures they've changed as a result, there is often a long pause ... followed by silence. If you ask them how their adult culture has shifted, another pause. It is easy to spot navel-gazing equity when a group of staff members participate in bias training and then proceed to engage in instructional and leadership planning in a business-as-usual fashion without applying the personal work to transform the system.
• 6. Structural equity: Redesigning systems and structures (e.g., master schedule) without investing in the deeper personal, interpersonal, and cultural shifts
Structural equity is the converse of navel-gazing equity. Many eager educators are ready to radically change their systems so much so that they figure out the biggest shift they can make to disrupt an inequitable system-for example, exchanging the use of suspensions for restorative justice.
There is clear research that suspensions can cause great harm to students (Losen & Gillespie, 2012), and making systematic shifts to counteract those effects is a courageous move. However, many leaders fall into the dangerous trap of making a seismic shift without recognizing the political, social, and cultural impact of the change. Does our staff understand and agree with the new approach of restorative justice? Are we well-grounded in both the theory and the practices? What instructional and leadership practices will need to change to make this more than a cosmetic shift? How much time will we need to invest in starting and reinforcing the shift? How will we need to engage our families in the change process? People don't accept changes simply because they are executed at a structural level.
There must be an equal investment in the interpersonal, cultural, and social dimensions for all of the players involved in the process. Moves like eliminating suspensions, de-tracking, or extending the school day may be a result of thoughtful research and great intentions, but we set ourselves up to flounder if we fail to align structural changes with the deep learning our teams must do to actualize
them
• 7. Blanket equity: Investing in a program or curriculum rather than building the capacity of your people to address equity challenges as complex and ongoing places of inquiry
Ever heard the phrase, "There is an app for that"? Well, if you want to achieve equitable outcomes, there is apparently a curriculum for that. Students aren't learning at similar levels. Great, this new curriculum will fix that. Students don't feel safe and valued. Great, there is a program for that.
While curriculum can be a helpful tool, schools across the country have made sweeping investments in buying new curriculum, hoping that if educators just follow the material, all students will achieve.
This trap can cause leaders to become hyper-focused on accountability and implementation, completely forgetting that if equity could be addressed by curriculum, we would have solved our nation's greatest challenge years ago. Whether you opt to use curriculum as a tool or not, our work requires stitching together a quilt with many different textures and features. A blanket will not do.
• 8. Tokenizing equity: Asking leaders of color to hold, drive, and symbolically represent equity without providing support and resources, nor engaging the entire staff in the work
In my earlier example with Gary, I shared that when he mentioned his mostly white staff had hired a new dean of culture, my racial antennae went up. I was worried that the school had fallen into a trope that can emerge from the mental model of the Great White Hope leader: "I know everything about leadership and instruction, but culture, climate, and the behavior of our students? We'll leave that to you, expert leader of color." A mostly white team of educators is hired, and one of the few people of color, usually a Black or brown person, is thrust into the "culture" role and implicitly asked to be the Lone Ranger of Color. This may be the security guard, the parent liaison, or the teacher who is given the
"difficult" class. These are extremely important positions, but when a staff is predominantly white and the few leaders of color have to play these roles, a dangerous, implicit message is sent: "You are responsible for dealing with 'these' students."
Tokenizing equity can also look like asking a staff member of color to take on the equity initiative because we assume it is personally important to them. "I know how much equity work means to you.
You've helped us realize a lot of our missteps, so I am wondering if you'd be willing to lead our equity task force." I've heard this type of refrain too many times, and it does nothing but deplete our colleagues' internal resources, reinforce oppression, create Lone Rangers, and leave educators who have racial privilege with little responsibility to change.
• 9. Superficial equity: Failing to take time to build knowledge and fluency around issues of equity, leading to behavioral shifts without understanding deeper meaning or historical context
Superficial equity essentially amounts to grasping any equity-centered practice with little understanding of its origins, its purpose, and how to engage in it with depth and authenticity. In both Ashleigh and Gary's example, there was clear evidence of this trope. In moving through the "doing equity" trope, Ashleigh's team decided to "do" culturally responsive teaching (CRT). CRT isn't something to "do"; you can and should not attempt to engage in culturally responsive teaching or any practice without understanding its history, building deep knowledge of its meaning, and practicing the work on your own. In Ashleigh's school, CRT was reduced to practices on an observation checklist, which created a superficial attempt to move toward equity. In Gary's example, educators developed a vision for an equitable, community-based school that served 94 percent Black students but led the school with a 90 percent white staff. It is nearly impossible to demonstrate to families, students, and staff that your pledge is authentic when your behavior demonstrates a lack of understanding of what you are committing to and doing.
• 10. Boomerang equity: Investing time and resources to understand your equity challenges but reverting back to previous mental models in ways that lead to unintentionally harmful solutions (e.g., measuring progress toward equity solely through state testing exams)
Boomerang equity may be one of the hardest tropes of all to disrupt. It is the trope that feeds itself back to the econometric, test-driven education frame we seek to dismantle. Many organizations and schools may actually arrive at a deep understanding of why they are facing equity challenges.
However, boomerang equity happens when we move from a deep understanding of our challenge (i.e., increased suspensions for Latinx students) to immediately brainstorming solutions that mirror everything we've ever tried before. "Our Latinx students are being suspended because they aren't engaged. To help them get engaged, we must increase their confidence in school and the support we offer." Here is where it boomerangs. "Let's pull them out for intervention. This way, we can help them read more. We will assess them every six weeks and by the end of the year, we should see less suspensions and higher achievement on the state exam." In this example, we've gone from promising analysis to harmful decisions leaving the team who did such thoughtful work back to where they
started
The dominant narrative about what schools are and how they should treat students- especially those of color-has got us beat. Our sense of urgency gets in the way of understanding complexity, and it feels too hard to disrupt the current state of things. Reflecting deeply about how we are contributing to our predicament takes too much time. We ingest such a constant prescription of how to create equitable change that we sometimes miss the forest for the trees. Another world is possible. I've experienced it as a student. I've felt it in classrooms that I will never forget, and now, I've worked with friends and colleagues to recreate schooling for our own children during an unprecedented pandemic.
The potential impact couldn't be any more clear.
Awareness: A Core Stance for Climbing Out of the Traps and Tropes
The core stance for this chapter is awareness. One of the things that makes the traps and tropes so seductive is the way we've been taught to engage with change-our discourse and approaches reflect a lack of understanding of how complex our challenges really are. In Ashleigh's case, the leadership team went from a concern around Latino male achievement to a checklist for culturally responsive teaching. Gary's team diagnosed the problem as students failing to meet standards and decided they needed a new school to boost test scores. Equity challenges require us to build awareness of our default discourse and behaviors that lead us to approach the work as if it is complicated rather than complex.
If we are to meaningfully shift our paradigm toward street data, there are specific concepts we must tune into. In the Fluency First sidebar, you'll find a few essential terms we will use throughout the book to bring complexity to the work and become more aware of the traps and tropes.
Fluency First: Core Concepts
Complex Versus Complicated Challenges
Complicated Challenges
The solution to the challenge is not immediately obvious but can be known prior to taking action.
These challenges are hard to solve but can be addressed by assembling the right technical expertise.
Examples of complicated challenges include
Designing a middle school master schedule to de-track classes
Increasing diversity by hiring more staff of color
Complex Challenges
The solution to the challenge is not known and can only be seen or known during or after the action unfolds. Equity challenges are complex in nature. There is no set of steps or algorithm that will tell you how to respond. Examples include
Shifting the adult culture so that de-tracked classrooms feel inclusive for every learner
Creating an inclusive and collaborative staff culture in which Black, Indigenous, and brown staff are valued, empowered, and able to be authentic
White Supremacy
White supremacy is the global system that confers unearned power and privilege on those who become identified as white while conferring disprivilege and disempowerment on those who become identified as people of color. While white supremacy is a system of beliefs and structures created by white people, it can also infiltrate the ideologies and actions of people of color as well.
Luis Urrieta (2010) explains, "whitestreaming" begins in schools through a curriculum that is founded upon the "practices, principles, morals, and values" of white supremacy (Aronson & Boveda, 2017).
Anti-Black racism:
A feature of white supremacy, anti-Blackness is a two-part formation that both strips Blackness of value (dehumanizes) and systematically marginalizes Black people. This form of racism is overt, historical, and embedded in all of our institutions. Beneath anti-Black racism lies the covert structural and systemic racism that is held in place by anti-Black policies, institutions, and ideologies. Anti-Blackness is also the disregard for Black institutions and policies privileging outside practices over Black traditions. Defining anti-Black racism is important as white supremacy is not a system of oppression that operates under a "one size fits all" approach. Instead, it targets people differently depending on how much capital it takes from a particular community and how much power and brutality it wields over them. In other words, the difference between anti-Blackness and white supremacy is that anti-Blackness in the United States is a more pervasive, systematic and brutal form of white supremacy (Council for the Democratizing Education, n.d.).
Settler colonialism:
A feature of white supremacy, settler colonialism involves the removal and erasure of Indigenous peoples in order to take land for use by settlers for permanent use. According to Laura Hurwitz and Shawn Borque's Settler Colonialism Primer, "This means that settler colonialism is not just a vicious thing of the past, such as the gold rush, but exists as long as settlers are living on appropriated land and thus exists today."
Settler-colonialism plays out in the erasure of Indigenous presence and the ongoing dispossession of land and other resources from Indigenous peoples. For example, American schools rarely teach about Native Americans, past or present; when they do, information is often distorted or incomplete. Students are rarely taught about contemporary Native peoples who have survived the settler-colonial process and continue to thrive, create, practice their traditions, and live modern lives (A. Morris, 2019).
BIPOC
Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) is used to highlight the unique relationship to whiteness that Indigenous and Black (African Americans) people have, which shapes the experiences of and relationship to white supremacy for all people of color within a U.S. context (BIPOC Project, n.d.).
Intersectionality
Intersectionality is a theory and way of framing the various interactions between race, gender, and other identities as well as explaining how systems of oppression interact with each other in complex ways to impact people's lived experiences. Intersectionality acknowledges the nuances of our human experiences based on how the social world is constructed. For example, it is often assumed that diversity will improve students' schooling experience by simply adding a person of color to staff. Intersectionality asks us to consider, for example, what it means for a Latino male teacher who attended the school in which he works to work alongside a majority of white female staff who live outside of the city. Another example is how LGBTQIA youth of color experience particular intersections of oppression in schooling that marginalize them and have deleterious effects on social, academic, and mental health (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991).
Implicit Bias
Implicit biases stem from implicit associations we harbor in our subconscious that cause
us to have feelings and attitudes about other people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, age, and appearance. These associations are activated involuntarily and without individual awareness as they develop over the course of a lifetime beginning at an early age through exposure to direct and indirect messages. In addition to early life experiences, the media and news programming are often-cited origins of implicit associations (Kirwan Institute, 2015). Stereotype Threat
Stereotype threat is a theory developed by social psychologist Claude Steele to describe how the performance of women, people of color, and others often dips in the face of the psychic threat of being viewed as inferior. As this threat persists over time, students may feel pressured to protectively disidentify with achievement in school. This protects the person against the self-evaluative threat posed by the stereotypes but may have the by-product of diminishing interest, motivation, and ultimately, school achievement (Steele & Aronson, 1995).
Stereotype threat is an unappreciated source of classic deficits in standardized test performance suffered by Black students and other stereotype-threatened groups such as those of lower SES and women in mathematics (Herrnstein, 1973; Jensen, 1969, 1980; Spencer & Steele, 1994)
Voices From the Street Students
"Yesterday, my math teacher was saying if you're Chinese or Vietnamese, it's easier for you to learn math than if you're Latino. This is an example of him not knowing that he is essentially discouraging students of Latin descent. The non-Asians were joking around, 'Maybe that's why I'm stupid! I am not sure all of our teachers know the harm this can cause."
-High school student, San José, California
It is our hope that reading the equity traps and tropes allows you to see the ways in which the system has set us up for false starts. Our intentions may be spot on, but if we aren't aware of our discourse, understanding, and the moves we are making, we are liable to reinforce the system we seek to dismantle. In summary, we argue that there are no shortcuts when it comes to leading for equity. If we hope to transform our institutions into vibrant spaces of learning for every student, we must revisit the fundamental purpose of education and commit to a long-term change process.
Getting Up Close and Personal: Reflection Questions
Which traps and tropes sound or feel familiar to you?
How does the author's series of provocations around how we approach working toward equity align with or challenge your beliefs?
Where do you see a trap or trope playing out in your school or organizational context?
What traps or tropes might students and families identify in your context? Are they the same or different from the ones you identified? Why might that be?
How does reading the essential terms influence your understanding of the traps and tropes?