Equity-Driven Leadership Perpetuating Racialized Outcomes: Failing to Recognize Educational Opportunity as an Expectation of Whiteness

• In Event: 79.050 - MTCC Roundtable Session 36
  In Roundtable Session: 79.050-7 - Complexities of Defining Equity in Audit Culture

Abstract

Though equity-minded or socially-just leadership practices and school improvement plans are prevalent across the K-12 landscape, the racialized “achievement gap” maintains its durability across the U.S. This research calls attention to how educational opportunity operates as propertied expectation of whiteness in K-12 spaces as a meaningful explanation for this durability. Specifically, findings from this critical race theory research demonstrate how socially-just improvement efforts often fail to decouple educational opportunity and whiteness which results in socially-just improvement efforts actually widening opportunity gaps along racial lines. Implications do not call for an end to socially-just improvement efforts, but instead call for leaders to purposefully decouple educational opportunity from whiteness through the use of critical theories such as critical race theory, AsianCrit, or TribalCrit.

Author

• Jason Salisbury, University of Illinois at Chicago