Surfacing the Undiscussable: Foregrounding Race, Gender, and Class in the Application of Improvement Methods to Educational Systems

• In Event: Improving for Socially Just Schools and Equitable Communities

Abstract

Improvement methods have gained traction as tools for educational change. However, while they have demonstrated some success overcoming longstanding challenges with reform implementation, they have struggled to significantly engage with educational inequities based on race, gender, and class. We hypothesize this struggle is due to two inherent features of improvement methods. First, their reliance on practitioners to surface and define problems enables avoidance of “undiscussable” issues of social inequity. Second, their bias towards action may overwhelm practitioners’ efforts to address inequities that stem from macro-level forces. Drawing on data from four case studies, we highlight how social inequities influence the implementation of various improvement methods and explore the conditions under which practitioners leverage these methods to identify and address inequities.

Authors

• Rebecca Horwitz-Willis, Harvard University

• Amelia Peterson, Harvard University

• Maxwell Yurkofsky, Radford University

• Kim Frumin, Harvard University

• Jal David Mehta, Harvard University