Fundamental Systemic Change for Equity in School District Central offices: The Promise of Expansive Learning

• In Event: At the Nexus of Continuous Improvement and School District Research: Possibilities, Dilemmas, and Provocations

Abstract

Equity scholars have long highlighted how inequities permeate school districts at the level of individual behaviors, organizational arrangements and policies, and institutional values (Ladson-Billings, 1995, 1998; Lewis & Diamond, 2015; Peurach, et al., 2019; Welton, et al., 2018). But extant research tends to focus on the persistence and occasional disruption of inequities at individual and organizational levels, not the institutional pressures that drive them in a main part of educational systems: the school district central office (Author, 2023). This paper begins with a review of research on educational equity and central office leadership that supports those points and illuminates the importance of (1) focusing reforms at the institutional level within school district central offices as a main driver of educational equity and (2) using participatory design processes to support reform design and implementation. We then review research on common design-based methods in U.S. school systems which confirm their success with the adaptation and invention of novel solutions but mainly at individual and organizational levels not the institutional or in ways that center equity (Bryk, et al., 2015; Bryk, 2020; Fishman, et al., 2013; Gutiérrez, Engeström, & Sannino, 2016; Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016; Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010; IDEO, 2011; Penuel, Fishman, Haugan Cheng, & Sabelli, 2011).

We then present results of a comprehensive review of scholarship on expansive learning from Cultural Historical Activity Theory that addresses that gap. That scholarship specifies that root causes of disfunction in complex systems are driven by values or premises that operate at the institutional level and require approaches to change that are fundamental (premise-focused) and systemic (across multiple, interdependent parts of complex systems). We take a racialized organizations approach to our presentation of those ideas to highlight their potential to surface and address institutionalized racism and other inequities in educational systems (Ray, 2019).

We show that expansive learning leads to fundamental, systemic change when participants engage in an iterative, facilitated process that helps them: (1) Become so dissatisfied with their current ways of working that they realize they cannot and should not continue in their current mode or seek incremental change through methods that focus them on solving discrete problems of practice; (2) see their various daily problems as stemming from a common set of underlying premises that provide a collective focal point for change; (3) develop new premises that better reflect how they want to work; and (4) use various resources to bring a new imagination to the development, field testing, and further refinement of fundamentally new ways of working. In the process, participants develop their transformative agency or capacity for participating productively in expansive learning. We draw on ideas from emerging theories of racialized organizations to help participants center equity in their approach to expansive learning. Such strategies include relentlessly elevating the voices and influence of those historically excluded from central office decision making. We conclude with implications for the research and practice of educational leadership and organizational change in education.

Authors

• Meredith I. Honig, University of Washington

• Noy Sabag, University of Washington