Sustaining Equity Work in an Anti-Equity Context

• In Event: Equity Work in the Current Moment

Abstract

In the current political context, the civil rights infrastructure that has been built since the 1960s is being turned on its head by anti-CRT/DEI executive and legislative action. Both K-12 and higher education institutions have faced a major external shock that is reshaping, and in some cases undermining, how they approach educational equity work. These efforts challenge a set of widely held beliefs about the importance of equity in the education field. A small but growing body of work is examining the negative impact of the anti-CRT/DEI landscape even as it is shifting almost daily (Pollock & Yoshikawa, 2024; Jayakumar & Kohli, 2023). Less work has focused on how educators and educational institutions are working to sustain this work and how these efforts vary by context.

In this paper, we focus on how educators work to sustain their equity-oriented work in the context of government pressure to dismantle it. More specifically, we draw on evidence from a national initiative in which school districts, universities, and state departments of education in eight locations throughout the U.S. collaborated to design equity-centered principal pipelines between 2021 and 2025. Drawing on interviews, meeting observations, and document analyses, and using institutional theories of organizations, we demonstrate that educators engaged in symbolic compliance with external mandates by decoupling their public language about their work from their actual practices (Meyer & Rowan, 1977), finding loopholes in mandates to skirt compliance, using pre-existing equity-oriented organizational commitments to legitimize their work, and leveraging the institutionalization of equity-oriented practices in the education field to try to justify their efforts (Zucker, 1977).

To analyze our evidence, we used an analytic approach that meets the twin goals of theoretically informed and contextually grounded analysis. To accomplish this, we borrowed from the “flexible” coding approach (Deterding and Waters, 2021) and work by Richards (2014). We used a multistage process in which we used descriptive, topic, and analytic codes to analyze all of our evidence. The topic codes were broad and informed by prior theory, while the analytic codes moved back and forth between theoretically informed and more grounded analysis.

While we document these various resistance strategies, we also show that this work was time-consuming, emotionally draining, and made the work more difficult. We also argue that the persistent effort to redefine the meaning of equity in the education field, and the legal and normative infrastructure surrounding it, will likely have a long-term negative impact on educational opportunity.

Authors

• John B. Diamond, Brown University

• Emily Handsman, Rutgers University

• Jordan Mosby

• Emily Nott, University of Wisconsin - Madison