Fundamental Systemic Change for Equity in School District Central Offices: The Promise of Expansive Learning

• In Event: Creating Systemic Change for Improvement and Transformation: Affordances and Limitations of Five Efforts to Improve Instruction at Scale

Abstract

A common refrain in education is that realizing equity requires fundamental, systemic change—deep shifts in the premises that drive policies and practices across school systems. Those premises historically have valued efficiency and assimilation not teaching and learning or diversity (Khalifa, et al., 2014; Peurich, et al., 2019). But extant scholarship reveals little about what such change looks like in main parts of school systems: district central offices.

For example, research on educational equity shows central offices perpetuate inequities through curriculum, assessment, professional development, and discipline and school boundary policies, among other mechanisms, but not how central offices enable equity (Brayboy, et al., 2007; Ladson-Billings, 1998; Milner, 2008; Rotberg, 2020). Central office scholarship identifies broad features of districts closing test-score gaps but not why districts with similar features have not seen those results (e.g., Leithwood, 2010). Other studies capture superintendents’ reports of their equity-focused leadership without evidence that their actions created fundamental systemic change (e.g., Rorrer, 2006; Skrla & Scheurich, 2001) and with other studies refuting their findings (Truillo, 2012; Turner, 2020). Some scholarship now details which fundamental changes—in principal supervision and human resources, for example—support teaching and learning generally but not equity specifically nor how leaders realize those changes (Anderson, et al., 2012; Authors, 2015, 2020).

We address that knowledge gap with a synthesis of almost 200 empirical and theoretical pieces on expansive learning from Cultural Historical Activity Theory, used across sectors largely outside education to realize fundamentally new ways of working in complex systems (e.g., Engeström, 2001, 2011; Engeström & Sannino, 2010, 2016). We draw on Critical Race Theory (CRT) to focus expansive learning on inequities specifically. We illustrate key concepts with examples from our empirical work on expansive learning for equity in central offices, which involved ~300 hours observing expansive learning processes in action in central offices (Authors, 2020, 2021).

Expansive learning can lead to fundamental, systemic change by engaging participants in a dynamic, facilitated, iterative process with four distinct phases. First, participants do not start by identifying a problem of practice as in some other change approaches. Instead, they relentlessly confront data, cases, and other information which helps them realize they must not tinker with their current work but abandon it. They then identify the premises underlying their current ways of working that provide focal points for change. Participants then have sufficient foundational knowledge and motivation to develop new premises that better reflect how they want to work. They use research and other knowledge resources to bring a new imagination to the development, field testing, and refinement of new work models that reflect those premises. Throughout, participants develop their transformative agency or capacity for leading fundamental, systemic change (Haapasaari, et al., 2016; Haapasaari & Kerouso, 2015). CRT helps participants center equity in expansive learning, for example, by relentlessly elevating the voices of those historically excluded from central office decision making.

Implications include the importance of educational leaders recognizing the potential of expansive learning for equity and researchers engaging in interventionist-researcher roles that push boundaries of conventional scholarship.

Author

• Meredith I. Honig, University of Washington