Learning to See the System That Shapes Educational Opportunity, Experience, and Equity

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session Seven
  In Roundtable Session: Toward a Critical, Social Justice–Focused Improvement Science (Table 3)

Abstract

Problems of educational equity are complex and multicausal; they do not lend themselves to predetermined, straightforward procedures (Gomez, Russell, Bryk, & LeMahieu, 2016). It is imperative that efforts to address complex problems like attending to issues of race, culture, and equity in education focus not only on what works, but what works, for whom and under what conditions (Bryk, Gomez, Grunow, & LeMahieu, 2015), raising questions of great importance: How is work actually carried out in classrooms? How do larger institutional forces and people shape this process? What are the experiences, needs, and motivations of users (i.e., students, teachers, administrators, families, communities, etc.)?
Improvement science (Bryk et al., 2015) is a reform framework that centers these questions. The first three of its six core principles require the work to be problem-specific and user-centered, consider variation an opportunity to learn, and see a system as perfectly designed to achieve the results it gets. Users have the best understanding of the conditions that cause a problem of practice to manifest in their context because they experience it daily. While IS tools and methods (e.g., empathy interviews and process mapping) have been valuable for centering user experience, we need better characterizations of user experience within the complex system that produces the results we see. Without purposeful application of an equity lens, IS tools can unintentionally reproduce inequities if the “user” being centered, or those doing the centering, have their own biases or blindspots that prevent them from seeing systemic oppression.
The Systems Space is one tool that can be employed to help scholars and practitioners think about how their actions fit into a broader context (Neri, Lozano, & Gomez, 2019; Neri, 2019). A visualization tool that captures important sub-parts across multiple levels in the system of a schools’ ecology (e.g. governance, structural variation, instruction, student support, etc.), the Systems Space offers an illustration of the institutional terrain that shapes opportunity and experience.
Interventions are highly variable; their effectiveness stems from the characteristics of their enactment in local contexts, specifically their connection to a particular, or multiple, regions of the System Space. How these dimensions interact produces the impact experienced as a result of intervening. The Systems Space can contribute to a better characterization of the leverage points that most effectively alter system performance, offering decision-makers guidance about where and how to invest their resources in pursuit of educational equity.
Furthermore, if implementation constitutes 90% of the impact of any intervention (O’Day & Smith, 2016), adaptation to local experience is essential. The Systems Space can be leveraged by scholars and practitioners as a diagnostic and conversational tool to more comprehensively pinpoint, anticipate, and preemptively address the multilevel factors that contribute to the development of complex problems of educational inequity and that might impede the implementation of various interventions. The paper explores how the Systems Space tool can be used to better see the system that shapes educational opportunity, experience, and equity.

Authors

• Rebecca Colina Neri, Indiana University
  Presenting Author

• Jahneille Cunningham, WestEd
  Presenting Author