“Alignment” or “Radical Visioning”: How District Partnership Teams Define and Actualize Equity for School Leadership

• In Event: Reimagining Equity in Educational Leadership Through District Partnerships, Micro Disruptions, and School Board Leadership

Abstract

We examine how school district partnership teams (DPTs), which include universities, state education agencies, and community partners, define and operationalize equity within the context of equity-centered school leadership. We ask: How do DPTs engage in the process of defining equity, struggle to put those definitions into practice, and end up at their initial policy actions? Leveraging Gutiérrez’s equity framework, we find that DPTs include dimensions of access, achievement, identity, and power in their definitions, but only focus on access and achievement in their actions (2011). Difficulties translating understandings of both student identities and power systems into practice remains a barrier to transformative equity work in large school districts.

Authors

• Jordan Mosby, Brown University

• Emily Handsman, Rutgers University

• John B. Diamond, Brown University

• Daniella Molle, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Wehmah Jones, American Institutes for Research

• Richard R. Halverson, University of Wisconsin - Madison