Читать книгу Five Practices for Equity-Focused School Leadership - Sharon I. Radd - Страница 8

Introduction

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Schools in the United States, while providing many great experiences and opportunities, are still grossly inequitable. Consider these facts:

 School discipline disproportionately targets students of color, students with disabilities, and transgender students. Black students are suspended or expelled at three times the rate of White students (U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, 2014, 2016); they represent 16 percent of the student population, but up to 40 percent of students suspended and 27 percent of students referred to law enforcement. Students with disabilities are twice as likely to be suspended than their nondisabled peers. These statistics worsen for students of color with disabilities: Nearly 25 percent of boys of color with disabilities are suspended and approximately 20 percent of girls of color with disabilities receive suspension, compared to 6 percent of students without disabilities. Transgender students are twice as likely to be disciplined than their cisgender peers (Kosciw, Greytak, Palmer, & Boesen, 2014). Those who are suspended are less likely to graduate and more likely to enter the juvenile justice system than those who aren't.

 White and Asian students are twice as likely as their Black and Latino/a/x peers to attend high schools where the full range of math and science courses—Algebra I, geometry, Algebra II, calculus, biology, chemistry, physics—are available. Further, Black and Latino/a/x students as well as students with disabilities and English learners (ELs) are less likely to be in these classes even when they are offered.

 While students with disabilities represent 12 percent of the student enrollment, they make up 58 percent of students placed in seclusion or involuntary confinement and 75 percent of students who are physically restrained (U.S. DOE OCR, 2014, 2016). These students comprise 22 percent of students who are retained and only 2 percent of students in an AP class. More than 1.1 million students have minimal or no access to general education and limited inclusion with their peers; in many places, this disproportionately impacts students of color (U.S. DOE OCR, 2016).

 English learners have graduation rates (Layton, 2014) at approximately 59 percent nationally, with some states graduating only 24 percent of their ELs. While making up approximately 5 percent of high school students, ELs represent 11 percent of students retained or held back, and 21 percent of ELs are chronically absent (U.S. DOE OCR, 2016).

 Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, and intersex (LGBTQIA+) students are targeted at alarming rates. Seventy-four percent are verbally harassed, 36 percent are physically harassed, and 17 percent are assaulted. While the majority of LGBTQIA+ students miss school and stay away from extracurricular events because they feel unsafe, most (57 percent) do not report it to school officials as they feel nothing will be done. They're not off-base in their predictions: 62 percent of LGBTQIA+ students who did report harassment or assault to school authorities indicated that nothing was done (Kosciw et al., 2014).

 Since 9/11, Muslim and Arab students and their families have faced heightened concerns about harassment and being targeted. In 2014, more than 50 percent of Muslim students reported being insulted or abused because of their religion (Blad, 2016; Shah, 2011). Approximately 30 percent of girls who wore hijabs reported that their head coverings were inappropriately touched or pulled. Many have experienced teachers, principals, and fellow classmates profiling them as associated with terrorists.

We believe much can be done to change these circumstances, yet school leaders don't always have the tools, knowledge, and resources to actually do so. We wrote this book because we wanted to offer an actionable framework that individual leaders and school, district, and interorganizational teams can use to address this need.

As an author team, we have experience as practicing preK–12 educators and administrators, preparing preK–12 educators and administrators, and as consultants supporting inservice preK–12 educators and administrators. We have connected with practitioners from across the United States and in other countries to understand the challenges and barriers—and also the opportunities for transformation—that exist in our educational systems. Over the span of our professional careers, we have seen hundreds of attempts at school reform. We have had the fortunate opportunity to participate in, study, and learn from these efforts. We have learned a lot about what works and what doesn't. We want to share that with you!

We also want to share the diversity of perspectives from which this book is written: As an author team, we are a White woman (Sharon), a Black woman (Gretchen), a Black man (Mark), and a White man (George).¹ We are each cisgender, straight, English-speaking, and currently nondisabled and financially secure. We share this information because we believe each aspect of a person's identity is a space where inclusion or marginalization can occur, and that school leaders must seek to be anti-oppressive and commit to full inclusion across this wide spectrum of sociocultural identities. (We'll discuss this in greater detail later in the book.)

That said, you will find that we begin with and center race as we think about educational equity. We do this for a couple of reasons. First, race is similar to other aspects of identity in that it is a social construction; the social construction of race results in profound inequality, and inequality related to this aspect of identity is persistent across history. On the other hand, race is unique in our society because we are deeply segregated based upon this identity. People receiving advantages related to having a White identity (i.e., people who identify as, or are identified as, White) are shielded from seeing or acknowledging their advantages. And, with a few exceptions, race is a fixed aspect of our identity, unlike some other aspects of our identities where we see segregation (e.g., socioeconomic class, religion).

Next, we recognize that this book will most likely be read and used by a majority White audience. While more than 50 percent of school children are of color (National Center for Education Statistics, 2020a), fewer than 20 percent of teachers (National Center for Education Statistics, 2020b), approximately 22 percent of principals (National Center for Education Statistics, 2020c), and 6 percent of superintendents (Kowalski, 2013) are of color. We wrote this book with that reality in mind.

Last, in our experience, we've found that racism is the most difficult form of inequality for educators to discuss and address. We begin with and center race in our approach because we believe that if you can understand and work on racism in schools, you can understand and work on inequality and inequity in many of its other forms.

Given all of this, we hope to help White educators and leaders become more comfortable thinking and talking about racism and, more importantly, skilled antiracist and anti-oppressive leaders. Further, we think this book is useful for educators and leaders of color as we guide you to examine all aspects of your identity and experiences through strengthening your antiracist and anti-oppressive approaches, and thinking systemically about equity-focused change.

Our framework outlines five meta-practices for building equity-focused systems as illustrated in Figure I.1. We refer to these as meta-practices for three reasons:

 Your professional work is a "practice," and the meta-practices in this book are to be applied in that professional practice.

 We mean that these are literally practices, that you should rehearse and perform them repetitively and cyclically. As opposed to believing that "practice makes perfect," we believe that practice builds new and needed habits and that your new habits will be necessary for effective and authentic equity leadership.

 Each meta-practice contains a robust set of practices for you to use in your professional work.

Figure I.1. Five Practices for Building an Equity-Focused System

The practices build on one another, so it is important that this book be read from beginning to end, in order, and in its entirety. Further, to make progress in your leadership, you will need to open yourself and your team to emotional and intellectual work. This work will be on yourselves, with each other, and in your schools/organizations. For example, to really learn from the book, you will need to engage with the content and consistently surface your thinking and reflect on your meaning-making, starting here and now, and continue to do so for the rest of your career. We have structured this book so it gives you the foundation, time, and space to do all these things both individually and together with your team, using written reflections, discussion prompts, and online resources. When it's time to reflect in the book, we signal this with the words Pause and Reflect. We know it will be challenging, and at times uncomfortable, but taking the time to think deeply, and perhaps differently, is essential if you want to create more equity. When it's time to try a new strategy or action, we signal that with the words Try This; to put your learning to use, look for the word Application. We do not pretend any of this is easy, nor does this book have all the answers. We offer ideas, strategies, and processes to engage you and your colleagues in the hard labor of working and leading toward equity. We know that although it will be challenging and at times uncomfortable, the promise of greater equity is worth it!

It's important that you engage right from the start. Before you go any further, write your responses to the questions that follow.

Pause and Reflect

 How do you think of yourself in relation to equity leadership? What do you know? Feel? Experience?

 What are you thinking and how are you feeling as you begin this book and learning experience?

 The beginning of the book offers facts for your consideration. However, not everyone will take away the same meaning from these data. Before going further, what is your reaction to the facts presented? What do you think? How do you feel?

 How does your school's current situation compare to the data? What have you learned in past experiences that influences how you see your school?

Endnote

¹ Throughout the book, we have elected to capitalize Black and White, based upon the use of these terms to refer to people in a racialized way. In order to reflect our antiracist stance, we do not capitalize white supremacy/ists, white nationalism/ists, white privilege, white fragility, and whiteness.