District Leaders' Strategies for Sustaining Equity Work in the Face of Obstacles

• In Event: Equity Work in the Current Moment

Abstract

Building school capacity for racial equity requires leaders to contend with traditional barriers to organizational change as well as systemic racism (Irby, 2022). It requires developing new—and strengthening existing—structures that make it difficult for racial inequity to persist. This case study examines three large urban school districts’ efforts (pseudonyms: Freeport, Northridge, and Riverside) to build equity capacity.

This study asks: What strategies do districts deploy to make equity work sustainable, especially when facing opposition? The data comes from academic years 2021-2025 and includes interview transcripts, meeting notes, and policy documents. To see how each district built their capacity for equity, I arranged the relevant data segments using temporal bracketing (Langley, 1999). This method is helpful for understanding change processes by mapping actions across discreet units of time (e.g., years). Drawing on Kotter’s (1995) organizational change framework, I then looked at two of the eight components: form coalitions and empower actions.

Coalitions. From the start, each district partnered with two universities who provided expertise in anti-racist policymaking. Freeport also deliberately sought to forge relationships with community stakeholders in the first year. Riverside began similar actions in Year 2. Northridge did not make these types of moves, but leaders noted in Year 4 how their coalition had organically grown to include a diverse set of external partners. These coalitions served as a bulwark against state legislatures’ attempts to pass “DEI bans.” In an interview, Northridge’s superintendent noted that community support was crucial to continuing the work when facing legislative attacks.

Actions. In Year 4, the districts faced increasing challenges to equity work—some external, others internal—and took strategic action to preserve their efforts. Northridge and Riverside are located in states with new “DEI bans.” Northridge closed its Equity Department and relocated the work into a department responsible for student well-being. Riverside created a strategic plan describing their equity plans without using the word. While Freeport has not faced legislative obstacles, they noticed many staff perceiving “effective” classrooms as different from “equitable” ones. In response to this internal challenge, Riverside began using access in place of equity.

In theorizing schools’ equity capacity building, Irby (2021) calls leaders to create structures that make racial inequity visible and inoperable. This study surfaces a tension in those two goals. Despite differing political contexts, each district has acted strategically to make their equity work less explicit. Scholars have cautioned that race-neutral policymaking often reinforces the status quo (e.g., Diem et al., 2021). While the districts’ decisions appear analogous, they are not identical, and the consequences are unknown. Renaming equity is a communication strategy that might jeopardize the coalitions. One leader said, “My concern is that you need to have a North Star” (interview, 2025). However, it could enable the work to continue by protecting state funding or providing mission clarity to staff. These districts are part of an ongoing, multiyear research project. The coming years will reveal whether masking equity contributed to mission drift or helped districts weather the storm.

Author

• Caleb Probst, University of Wisconsin - Madison