Educators as "Equity Warriors"

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early-Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

Although the relationship between social background and educational outcomes has long been central to understanding social inequality, we know surprisingly little about how educators understand their role in overcoming social disadvantages, their attitudes toward closing achievement gaps, and how they prefer to focus their efforts and resources to address the inequalities they encounter in their work. This paper contributes to a greater understanding of these educator beliefs by providing a descriptive analysis of novel survey data we collected in a major urban district with an intense focus on equity. Teachers’ social-psychological traits may offer a missing link in understanding teache
r effectiveness generally, as well as teachers’ ability to reduce disparities in student outcomes.

Our setting, the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), is uniquely valuable for extending our understanding of teachers’ beliefs about overcoming inequality because of its public commitment to equity and reducing disparities among students as a matter of social justice, while serving students from a wide range of family income and racial/ethnic backgrounds. The superintendent recently vocalized this sentiment in a tweet “welcoming our new equity warrior administrators.”

Through a partnership with the Human Resources Department at SFUSD, we recently fielded surveys of 1,340 teachers and 103 administrators. Our surveys included several measures of educators’ attitudes toward overcoming students’ social disadvantage and the importance and desirability of closing gaps. We use six Likert-type items to measure educators’ beliefs about overcoming students’ social disadvantage. We also asked teachers, “How important of a challenge are achievement gaps (e.g. by race, socioeconomic status) for SFUSD?” Then, we listed four different types of gaps between student groups (by race, family income, home support, and level of achievement) and asked respondents to rank the gaps according to the amount of effort they would like to devote to each gap. Teachers ranked the gaps according to their personal preference for allocating their effort and also ranked them according to how much effort they feel their school wants them to devote to each gap. Administrators ranked the gaps according to how they would like their school to direct its efforts. Finally, we asked, “If you could set priorities for SFUSD, which of the following 5-year achievement trends for low and high income students do you think would be a more desirable goal?” Respondents randomly saw just two of the graphs below—either 1 and 2 or 1 and 3—requiring them to choose between conditions of overall improvement and equity, with equity potentially coming at a cost.

We provide a descriptive analysis of these novel measures to address four research questions:
(1) How important do teachers think achievement gaps are? Which gaps do they think are most important?
(2) Are attitudes about achievement gaps related to how empowered teachers feel to overcome social disadvantage?
(3) What other characteristics are associated with beliefs about disadvantage and achievement gaps?
(4) Is there clustering based on beliefs/attitudes of teachers at certain schools in the district? How closely associated are teachers’ beliefs and attitudes with the beliefs and attitudes of their school leaders—and what can this tell us about the culture at individual schools and district-wide?

Among several notable findings we will highlight, preliminary results indicate that educators largely endorse a sense of empowerment to overcome students’ social disadvantage and find achievement gaps important, but a sizable minority feels helpless to make a difference, and educators vary considerably on the achievement gaps to which they prefer to devote their attention. For example, a plurality of teachers (41%) would like to devote the most effort to the gap between higher and lower achieving students, but far fewer rank race (18%) or income (another 18%) gaps as highest priority. Teachers that view achievement gaps as the most important issue facing SFUSD have much more empowered beliefs, whereas teachers who say they are only “moderately important” or “not an important challenge” express significantly more helpless attitudes toward overcoming disadvantage. Other results similarly indicate consistency between educators’ beliefs of empowerment to overcome students’ social disadvantage and the value that they place on closing achievement gaps—except when they perceive a cost (as in the “equity at a cost” condition of Graph 3, above). Race and other demographic traits are strong predictors of teachers’ attitudes, but differences among teachers are generally not associated with their qualifications nor are they entirely explained by school context. Some results suggest that attitudes are correlated with principals’ rankings of their best teachers.

Author

• Jane Rochmes, Stanford University