The Persistence of Inequity in Education
Equity is the through line of this project. In its simplest form, equity means providing every student with the resources he or she needs to learn and thrive.
Shane Safir
I am entering my 20th year in education. I have served either as a classroom teacher or administrator in four different schools, both secondary and elementary. Student populations varied from building to building in many areas.
One of the few consistencies throughout my four experiences is the persistence of inequity in education.
The primary reason has not been the level of the parents' education. It hasn't been how much money a family makes, or the conditions of the building, or the level of community support, or the quality of the curriculum materials. What has been the "through line" through every school is the beliefs and values that the group of educators collectively held about the students they chose to work with, myself included.
By our nature, we are hardwired to identify differences and make quick assumptions about another person based on limited information. Maybe helpful for our early ancestors, yet in our current world it often leads to misaligned belief systems and misappropriated resources.
So what, if any, solution is there? Shane Safir has offered a seemingly simple premise for leaders: to listen. In her book The Listening Leader: Creating the Conditions for Equitable School Transformation, Shane challenges the reader to pause and reflect on their work. She is not asking educators to change who they are, but rather to reconsider what they believe about all of their students and why this may be so.
We all have some misconceptions about our students and the learning environments we create for them. In my last school, it was almost a source of pride that 60-70% of our students qualified for free or reduced lunch. When our kids did well on a state assessment, we owned it. Yet when our students didn't do so well, I felt the urge to seek blame in the perceived obstacles in our school. How can both mindsets be true? This was a question I should have asked myself at that time.
Shane presents Listening Leadership not as "a recipe or a curriculum but an adaptive framework anchored in a few core beliefs" (pg. 6-7):
Communities have the ability to solve their own problems.
Although we can learn from other schools and districts, the best solutions are homegrown.
Every community must shape its own path to excellence.
Through listening, leaders can create the conditions for equitable school transformation.
This skill, listening as a leader, is not easy to develop. I've gone through an excellent yearlong instructional coaching course recently and I feel like I've only scratched the surface. We are trying to unlearn years of developed biases and limited perspectives; this work takes effort and patience. It also takes self-compassion. There is little time for retroactive guilt. Our students now need the best we can offer today.
We are reading and responding to The Listening Leader this summer because we know that the only way to facilitate collective change is through community. I hope you are able to explore this resource with us, and maybe respond on your own blog and/or leave a comment on a post here. Although the plan is to read through the summer, there is no set date in which we will call this book study "finished". Just like our work in striving toward equity in education, where every student gets what they need regardless of where they learn.
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