Handling the Heat: District Equity Leaders’ Strategies for Enacting Equity-Oriented Organizational Change

• In Event: Spinning in Circles or Driving Change: The Possibilities and Constraints of Racialized Change and Learning

Abstract

Purpose

Research on district-level equity leadership documents myriad challenges leaders face, including institutionalized racial and gendered oppression within their organizations (Irby et al., 2021; Ishimaru et al., 2023). Equity leaders hold the precarious position of disrupting an organization of which they are a part. Yet, how district-level equity leaders navigate the precarity of their work remains underexplored. This study examines how equity leaders approach their roles and the strategies they employ over time to enact equity-oriented change.

Theoretical Framework

We conceptualize equity leaders as tempered radicals who operate within racialized organizations (Irby et al., 2019; Ishimaru et al., 2023). Tempered radicals are “people who work within mainstream organizations…and want also to transform them” (Meyerson & Scully, 1995, p. 586). We bridge this concept with racialized organizations (Ray, 2019), which theorizes how institutionalized forms of oppression are embedded within organizations, manifesting in ways that require marginalized individuals to simultaneously hold responsibility for change and bear burdens that limit their agency to enact that change (Lerma et al., 2019). This framework allows us to examine how equity leaders work to both disrupt status quo arrangements while navigating organizational resistance, including institutionalized racialized practices.

Methods

We employ a qualitative, interpretive design using document analysis and in-depth retrospective interviews with K-12 district-level equity leaders (Budach, 2012). Data analysis consists of iterative coding and memoing (Miles et al., 2014) to identify patterns in how leaders position themselves and navigate the precarity of their work within different organizational and institutional contexts.

Data

Data include 13 semi-structured interviews and over 80 district documents (e.g., equity policies, newsletters). Participants were leaders who held roles as equity leaders for at least five years spanning before and after 2020.

Results

We find two kinds of tempered radicals. Agitators characterized their role as temporary, accepting backlash as part-and-parcel to the work and aiming to swiftly dismantle existing systems. Gradualists pushed for change slowly and diligently, expecting backlash while prioritizing consensus.

Leaders across types adopted common strategies to enact change. Leaders used racialized decoupling to their advantage. They leveraged district equity policies as reinforcement for their idealized changes to promote tighter coupling between policies and practice. Leaders also decoupled language from practice to make their work more palatable (e.g., avoiding “anti-racism” when creating anti-racist training). Additionally, leaders relied strongly on building coalitions, focusing on student-centered narratives to unite groups. Finally, leaders adopted preservation practices for themselves and/or their teams to combat racialized organizational conditions—e.g., giving their team agency over their schedules and actively resisting workplace competition in favor of collectivism.

Significance

This study contributes to the limited knowledge base about how district equity leaders navigate the precarity of their work, especially amid politically contentious organizational and institutional environments. Further, this paper responds directly to calls from the field to conduct “longitudinal examinations of equity leadership across educational systems” (Ishimaru et al., 2023, p. 364). We contribute evidence of how equity leaders conceptualize their roles and the political strategies they employ to enact change within their racialized organizations.

Authors

• Dayna Muniz, University of Pennsylvania

• Meghan Comstock, University of Maryland

• Deborah Euzebio, University of Maryland

• Ditra Backup, University of Maryland