Process Measures of Educational Justice

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

Abstract

“Process measures” serve an essential role in an improvement science (IS) approach to system transformation by illuminating system breakdowns and serving as quick feedback about changes made to the system (Bryk et al., 2015; Provost & Murray, 2011; Takahashi et al., 2022). These measures capture signals about salient processes, practices, norms, and structures where problems are leading to poor outcomes. Process measures are timely, regular, and actionable. Furthermore, they can catalyze professional discourse that is critically self-reflective, expose assumptions, and spur action towards transformative change (Takahashi et al., 2022). However, the prevailing discourse around IS methods and process measurement lacks explicit attention to what it means to employ these methods towards advancing racial justice in a system designed to maintain a white, upper/middle-class (and cis-gender male, able-bodied, etc.) hegemony. There is increasing acknowledgement that IS methods can be and are used to perpetuate existing sociohistorical power dynamics, and further entrench oppressive systems, especially without explicit, deliberate, and on-going action to counter these processes (Ishimaru et al., 2022; Valdez et al., 2020). If improvers ground their work in an understanding that U.S. educational systems produce, enact, and maintain racial marginalization in its day-to-day practices (Howard & Navarro, 2016), what measures would illuminate these practices to inform the transformation of the status quo? This presentation will focus on an exploratory case of developing process measures in middle grades math classrooms working towards racial justice.
The Math Practical Measurement Project at WestEd is developing a process measure of equity and justice in middle-grades math classrooms. We draw upon scholarship and practice in math equity to conceptualize the middle-grade math classroom in terms of its hoped-for outcomes and classroom routines, practices, and norms that would lead to these outcomes. Scholars of math education have pointed to how race, as a social construct and as an ideology (Howard & Navarro, 2016), is enacted in the day-to-day experience of math classrooms (e.g. Battey et al., 2018; Martin, 2009). Who gets to participate in classroom discussions, which students access what levels of mathematical tasks, how teachers respond to student contributions and behaviors, are just some of the facets of classroom processes that provide educators opportunities to advance (or hinder) justice for students from historically marginalized groups (Battey et al., 2018; Gutierrez, 2012; Shah et al., 2016).
This presentation highlights design principles and tensions of the work of process measurement to advance racial justice. We are uncovering essential features of process measures of justice in classrooms, such as sensitivity to change in practice, linkages to key student outcomes, and meaningfulness to educators and students alike. We also highlight the challenges and pitfalls of doing this work. We are learning that some core measures of math justice in classrooms are slow to shift (e.g. students’ mathematical identity), and that measures can be a catalyst for certain conversations, but they do not provide simple answers. This presentation will contribute to the thinking of the burgeoning field of process measurement for educational equity.

Author

• Sola Takahashi, WestEd
  Presenting Author