Promising Practices Under Pressure: How ECPI Districts Keep Equity Work Alive

• In Event: Equity by Design: Redesigning Principal Pathways for Systemic Change

Abstract

This paper draws on our study of the design and implementation of ECPI systems to consider: How do districts sustain and deepen equity-centered leadership in light of shifting political winds, leadership turnover and sustainability concerns?

The conditions for engaging in equity-focused reform have become increasingly perilous in recent years. The straightforward translation of the ECPI theory of action, as anticipated by the foundation and by the district teams, has become problematized by internal and external threats to equity work. Our study takes an asset-based perspective on ECPI design to consider how leadership teams reflected on and developed new responses in the course of their leadership pathway design work. This approach enabled us to identify emergent “high-leverage practices” (Ishimaru & Galloway, 2014) that districts developed to support equity-centered systems change.

Our findings are based on a systematic analysis of the data collected by the CALL-ECL research team during the first four years of ECPI. These data include notes from district leadership meetings and initiative-wide convenings; district logic models, work plans, and interim reports, and interviews with district team members. The CALL-ECL research team engaged in an extended, multi-year coding process to identify key shifts in the ECPI districts’ structures and routines related to leadership for equity. We used deductive thematic analysis to map district actions related to leader standards, preservice preparation, hiring, support, and evaluation (Gates et al., 2019).

We identified six high-leverage practices that one or more districts used to expand their capacity to promote leadership for equity. These high-leverage practices were created by district teams to productively manage emergent challenges in the ECPI work:

Creating a local principal residency program that tailored the learning available to aspiring leaders to the district’s unique historical context and connected it to its vision of an equity-centered leader;

Engaging the community in principal selection to ensure a better match between principals and the communities they serve;

Leveraging the district’s partnership with a local university to provide high-quality, equity-focused in-service learning to current school leaders;

Establishing professional affinity groups that enable leaders to receive mentoring that takes into account their intersectional identities,

Developing new principal supervisor standards that reflect a focus on equity-centered leadership; and

Adopting policies and strategic plans to sustain equity-focused leadership pathways.

In each district, emergent design depended on the transformation of existing structures in the design of new routines. The examples above demonstrate how districts drew on existing assets, adapted available tools such as policies, strategic plans, and standards, and developed new partnerships within and outside the district to sustain their vision for equity-centered leadership preparation and support.

This paper argues that equity-centered leadership pathways evolve through iterative, collaborative design processes that foreground local needs and systemic coherence in ways that complement centralized initiatives. The paper shows how resourceful districts can face headwinds of political resistance by adapting established plans for action into new designs for change.

Authors

• John B. Diamond, Brown University

• Daniella Molle, University of Wisconsin - Madison