Developing Adaptive Capacity for Addressing Systemic Inequities in Chesterfield County Public Schools

• In Event: Better Together: District-University Partnerships Responding to Educational Emergencies

Abstract

Current circumstances exacerbate already challenging educational conditions and deepen existing disparities between privileged students and students from minoritized and marginalized groups. A Research-Practice-Preparation initiative between the Chesterfield County Public Schools (CCPS) and the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education and Human Development (UVA) is seeking to overturn the legacy of structural and systemic inequities through the use of improvement science (Bryk, Gomez, Grunow, & LeMahieu., 2015; Lewis, 2015) to develop leaders’ and schools’ adaptive capacities to address rapidly changing circumstances. The CCPS-UVA approach aims to shift how schools tackle equity-grounded instructional challenges by cultivating organizational capacity to adapt, learn, and improve continuously to build the organizational infrastructure and improvement culture that enables a focus on systemic and structural determinants of inequity (Bryk, 2020; Grunow, et al., 2018).

Theoretical framework

Individual reports of district-based improvement science initiatives highlight the ways in which iterative, short-cycle inquiry catalyzes organizational capacity for “learning to learn” or what we label in our approach, adaptive capacity (e.g., Baron, 2017; Bryk, 2020; Callaway, 2019; David & Talbert, 2013; Dixon, 2019; Grunow et al., 2018; Park et al., 2013). Adaptive capacity has been used in studies of crisis planning and environmental management to highlight the resilience of organizations in their ability to identify and adapt to turbulence (Chapman, 2016; Folke et al, 2005; Holling, 1978). We use the term here to characterize how individuals, groups, networks, schools and district central office respond in creative and resilient ways to complex problems like identifying and addressing structural inequities in student learning.
Modes of inquiry and data sources

Our research is designed around the following questions:

• How are district designs enacted with leaders and teachers in schools? What role does the university partner play in the design and enactment of equity-grounded improvement science?

• What are the proximal outcomes in each district for: (a) identifying equity-grounded problems of practice; (b) developing theories of practice improvement that align with improvement science approaches; and (c) using improvement science methods to shift instructional practice? What evidence exists of distal outcomes, including: (i) development of improvement leadership; and (ii) the cultivation of adaptive capacity for addressing systemic and structural inequities in teaching and learning?

To address these questions, we report on a case study of the CCPS learning design based on quantitative (improvement leadership and adaptive capacity survey) and qualitative (interviews, documents) data.
Initial findings

We report on an embedded case study of the CCPS learning design, focused on the development of improvement leadership and the development of organizational adaptive capacity for instructional change. We report on three strands of the improvement leadership learning design: (1) UVA’s initial principal preparation program and the collaborative redesign of approaches to learning and teaching that promote transformational learning; (2) the promotion of culturally-relevant practices supportive of leader, teacher, and student learning mindsets through work with school leaders and teachers in Chesterfield; (3) CCPS in promoting the integration of both research and preparation as key components of system-wide efforts to address equity issues.

Author

• David H. Eddy-Spicer, University of Virginia