Doing the Work of Equity Leadership for Justice and Systems Change

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Dr. Dakota Irby and Dr. Anne Ishimaru. Dr. Irby's life work focuses on creating and sustaining organizations that contribute to Black people's self-determined well-being, development, and positive life outcomes. He is professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Department of Educational Policy Studies, and he's the author of Stuck Improving, Racial Equity in School Leadership, which we've talked previously about here on Principal Center Radio.

[00:40]

Dr. Anne M. Ishimaru is an award-winning scholar, writer, educator, and the Killinger Endowed Chair and Professor of Educational Foundations, Leadership, and Policy at the University of Washington College of Education. Through her work, she cultivates the leadership and solidarities of educators, organizational leaders, and racially minoritized youth, families, and communities to realize more transformative futures. In addition to many peer-reviewed articles in top-tier educational research journals, she is also the author of Just Schools, Building Equitable Collaborations with Families and Communities. And they are the editors of the new volume, Doing the Work of Equity Leadership for Justice and Systems Change, which we're here to talk about today.

[01:17] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[01:20] SPEAKER_01:

Dr. Irby and Dr. Ishimaru, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thank you so much. Thank you for having us. So this book is an edited volume with contributors who have written chapters on a variety of topics.

[01:31]

Talk to us a little bit about the work that this book comes out of and the needs that you saw in the field for the work that's in this book.

[01:39] SPEAKER_00:

This book really began when we started to realize that there was a proliferation of equity directors in the field. And as we looked back across time, we realized that there was a kind of catalyzing moment, what we call awakenings in the book, after the killing of Trayvon Martin and the way that the federal government at the time, the Obama administration, issued a dear colleague letter to schools around racial disproportionality in discipline and around the ongoing racism in the schools. So that was kind of the beginning of districts really taking up equity leadership work. And so we thought we really need to understand not only the role of equity directors, but the work of equity leadership across time. And in this particular moment of the beginnings

[02:29]

at that time, and then moving into the current moment, which is, of course, a very different time now.

[02:35] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and I think that I'd add, as you mentioned, this is an edited volume, and we were fortunate to have many of the people who participated and shaped and have influenced our thinking and our scholarship around equity leadership, and with an emphasis on equity directors, the people who are in formal positions and have formal titles to actually engage in equity leadership practices and districts. So the book is an edited volume and it brings together collaborators that we've worked with and been influenced by over the past decade or so.

[03:11] SPEAKER_01:

And was there a research project that this book came out of?

[03:15] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. So about 2017, we were invited to this small kind of conference in Minnesota. It was Ann, myself and our colleague, Dr. Terrence Green, were having lunch in between sessions and some kind of way we got on the topic of our friends, people who we personally knew who were in equity leadership roles in districts. And it was relatively new. And we thought to ourselves, we really kind of don't know what people are doing in a formal capacity.

[03:44]

We know what our friends are sharing with us in terms of the work that they're doing. That conversation in 2017 led us to implement a formal research project where we reached out to equity leaders across the country and did interviews with very basic questions. Tell me about how the role was created. What do you do on a day-to-day basis? What do you want to do on a day-to-day basis? Where are you situated within the organization?

[04:10]

Are you on a superintendent's cabinet? Are you in curriculum instruction? Where are you and what is the impact of your work? So those were the initial questions that we started asking leaders from around the country in, like I said, about 2017 and 2018. And from there, after we analyzed that data, we pursued a research grant from the Spencer Foundation And they gave us funding to study equity leadership in three districts across the country over an extended period of time. And so the primary base of research that the book is written from is a combination of the formal research project that we engaged in, as well as some of the practitioners, as I mentioned, that are collaborators and people who have contributed chapters to the book, their own kind of experiences, and their own research that they've been doing as they actually enact the role of equity leadership in districts.

[05:07] SPEAKER_01:

And this is entirely anecdotal on my part, but it's my sense that people in these roles are not always maximally set up for success. Maybe the intentions are good in a district. Maybe the resources are there at the beginning. But I think because in a lot of cases, these are new roles, there's often not a lot of thought put into the design and making sure that that person is successful and making sure that they have a job that they actually have the ability to carry out with the resources and the influence they're given. What did you find on that front? Because I have heard from at least a few people that these can be impossible to succeed in jobs, depending on the context.

[05:48] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that's a great insight that really dovetails with what we found. So actually, the book is organized around sort of these different phases. And so I heard you use the phrase, you know, in the beginning or at the time, So we really think about what is the work of equity leadership across the kind of cycle of a day. So we're thinking about these sort of catalyzing moments that are awakenings, that there's the morning time is really what you're speaking to when these positions were very new. And you're right that we did find that they were often under supported and there wasn't clarity about what these roles were and what people were going to do. But there were big ambitions.

[06:30]

and visions around that. So the morning work was really about creating clarity, creating policies and positions, and fighting for the organizational resources that are really important for being able to enact the leadership and to implement the kinds of plans that emerged during those times. We're kind of in a darkness moment here. Really thinking about building networks. and really working to sustain the work both internal to schools and systems and then externally across them. And that's also when it becomes really important to think beyond any particular one role.

[07:03]

And I know that on this podcast, we're really speaking to school leaders. We had some instances where principals in particular played a really crucial role. They weren't waiting for anyone to give them permission or to give them a title, especially Black women leaders and other women of color at the school level. In one of our chapters, Constance Dawn, her colleagues were talking about a network that they built within their system. They weren't waiting for the district to give them permission. They were leading from their own schools and then coordinating and collaborating in this broader network to move systems change across their district.

[07:42] SPEAKER_02:

I guess the thing that I would add is that a lot of how well the roles were resourced, supported, and how successful they were depended on geography. It also depended on the person who stepped into the formal leadership position. For example, Anne wrote a brilliant chapter in the book about racial and gendered experiences and how organizations have these kind of racial gender dynamics that actually marginalize and minimize the contributions that women of color, in particular Black women, it minimizes their contributions as they do the work and makes the work more difficult for them. We also saw, for example, that men who inherited the roles oftentimes had Fewer educational credentials, but more resources and more supports and more economy to actually shape the work the ways that they wanted to see it.

[08:34]

So those were some of the things that we learned. In one of the chapters, chapter seven of the book is a national view where the authors conducted a national survey. And in that chapter, we were actually able to capture some differences geographically that we didn't get in our qualitative study. because the qualitative study, we had to have IRB approval. So the book kind of skews towards the positive. The people who were in districts, for example, in the Southeast that experienced earlier kinds of legislative mandates to pursuing equitable outcomes for students, those people unfortunately didn't participate in the qualitative aspects of our study.

[09:14]

So the book skews towards more positive stories, but we do know that throughout the country, depending on the geography, depending on the local political context, that the resources and the successes that leaders experience differ pretty tremendously.

[09:30] SPEAKER_01:

Let's talk about some of those impacts and some of those success stories, because certainly we have seen the political wind shift from hey, you should definitely create these roles and hire people for these positions to know you can't, by law, you can't. We've seen the pendulum swing there. In terms of the work itself, what did you hear from participants that they ended up doing in these roles? Because certainly there's the bigger political question of whether the roles exist or not, but it sounds like you got an up-close view of the work itself that people were doing in these roles.

[10:05] SPEAKER_02:

Sure, I can get us started. So there were a lot of different ways that people went about their work. And some of it was dependent on, you know, what phase their districts were in. Again, whether it was a kind of a morning, a midday or kind of an evening type of work. Everything from creating policies like these are the people who have written and worked with school boards to adopt policies all across the country. professional development, the creation of data dashboards and data systems that allow for both data collection, as well as disaggregation of data to be able to learn from, to use for purposes of improvement, to engaging with families and communities, to spearheading the creation of affinity groups for Black students, LGBTQI students.

[10:54]

These are also the folks who are responsible for making sure there are gender-affirming restroom facilities in buildings throughout the country. So if you name a lot of the things that we kind of I think at a moment started to take for granted in terms of more representation in the curriculum, a broader representation of racial, cultural, ethnic, gender identities in books and classes and classrooms. These are the people who in large part spearheaded and organized to make sure that a lot of these things that until recently, a lot of folks kind of took for granted happened in schools.

[11:33] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I guess I would just add, like, especially in this moment, I think one of the things that there's a tendency to do is to think that the work that has happened in the last, to take that work for granted, even though it didn't realize some of the ambitions that were fueling that, it really actually made some profound change. And I think that's one of the things that we have to be careful about in this given moment, that we don't let those changes and the lessons from that work get erased in the current moment. And I think the other thing is just that the kind of focus and priority that the work in the last eight or so years have brought to schools and school systems wasn't there before. There was a tendency to approach issues of equity and injustice as a kind of putting out fires way.

[12:27]

And one of our chapters, Maurice Sweeney writes about how they really got to a place of recognizing that there's always going to be fires all across systems. And it's easy to get overwhelmed by that. And so one of the things that his team did is they built tools to enable folks to really focus and prioritize the given the context that they were in because there really isn't a one-size-fits-all that works in every system in every moment but it becomes really important to move beyond just putting out fires when we're doing systems change and to really figure out where the effort And the focus can be that will be rooted more deeply in the systemic inequities and kind of disrupting those. And so I think that that's another thing that we come out of this time with is a set of tools and processes and focus that we didn't necessarily have when this work was beginning to unfold.

[13:31]

Right, right.

[13:32] SPEAKER_01:

I wanted to ask about kind of the sustainability and the systems that can remain in place precisely because the pendulums have been swinging so fast on many of these issues in our society. And you have a chapter toward the end of the book on precarity and turnover. And perhaps quite a few people who have been in these roles might say, yes, precarity and turnover are significant issues that... You know, maybe I was hired in one moment and then the pendulum swung back or our community, you know, reacted in some way.

[13:59]

And it's feeling like it's, you know, often this is multi-year work and positions may not last multiple years as the winds shift. Talk to us a little bit about that sustainability and precarity tension.

[14:11] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, so that was a chapter that I had the fortune of co-authoring with one of my colleagues, Autumn Hahn. And yeah, so we saw a lot of turnover. I think that many of the people that we interviewed in that very first stage of our research, where we were doing qualitative interviews of equity leaders around the country, by the time we started doing the in-depth case studies, those folks were no longer in their roles. So we realized that there's a lot of turnover. There's a lot of change. Superintendencies, for example, also turnover and change.

[14:43]

And what we realized is that depending on whether the work was sustained and sustainable depended on two things. One, the structures and routines that those equity leaders were able to put in place. was one and number two were the relationships that people cultivated over time. So for example, there were a lot of districts that would create like these committees And while those committees may no longer exist, a lot of the routines and practices that they engaged in, for example, looking at disaggregated data, using specific kinds of courageous conversation talk protocols, centering students of color and including students as part of the decision-making process, ESO student voice, Those things are the kinds of interactions that don't go away when you actually just disband the committee.

[15:39]

A lot of folks continue to engage in those kinds of practices and routines, even at the school building, at their departments and so on and so forth. If and when the leaders at the district level were very intentional about putting those kinds of practices and routines in place. And then on the other hand, we have examples throughout the book of people who really leaned heavily on relationships and the relationships create a kind of continuity, a historical memory of what was accomplished and done in the district. And also people understanding one another's why that allowed the work to be sustained beyond the tenure of any one particular leader. But in the best situations, districts had a combination of both the relational as well as the kind of like structural supports that were established and put in place that allowed the work to be sustained. But in all cases, the work has not been sustained.

[16:32]

We don't have, as I mentioned, methodologically, we don't have a lot of those stories in the book because it skews towards where we had successes. However, we know anecdotally and from or engagement with leaders throughout the country, that there are some districts where the work has largely stopped. And then in other cases, it stopped formally, but it's still operating in these kind of underground subversive ways that we know people, we know because people are telling us that, you know, we're changing the name of what we're doing, but we're still doing the same kind of things. And so in the areas of the country where the political climate is conducive to the equity leadership that we write about in the book, the work is very much being sustained for the time being at least.

[17:20] SPEAKER_00:

The other thing that I would add to that is the intentionality that folks had in ensuring that learning was part of those processes. So where you had these routines and you were collecting data or using student voice, there was a real intentionality involved. around ensuring that there was ongoing learning built into those routines, that that was part of the process of whatever it was. So if they were building a plan or if they were looking at data, that learning was an ongoing part of that. And if you look at the chapter by Theresa Lance, I think that's a really good example of there were different phases across time that she was stewarding the work in various ways, starting with an equity audit and collecting data, then building coalitions with people, and then building a plan.

[18:14]

And one of the things that she was tending to across all of that was ensuring that learning and professional learning were an ongoing part of all of those processes. when that gets instituted as part of those routines, then that continues on even as maybe the language and the policies and the external conditions are changing.

[18:38] SPEAKER_01:

Right. And I'm thinking especially about changes in job title, where in some cases you might have someone who's an executive director or an associate superintendent or director of curriculum and instruction. And then, you know, because of the time we were in, maybe they are moving into a position that's, you know, equity director, executive director of, you know, equity, some job title that's specific to that. And then the winds shift again, that job title is, you know, banned by the state legislature or something. So we have somebody moving into a different role, maybe back to a curriculum director role or another central office role. Talk to us a little bit about the work that reaches students that can be sustained, even if the job titles don't remain the same.

[19:22] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I think some of the examples in the chapter around the principals who were really leveraging their own schools and then their own relationships give some good examples of the kinds of work that are really sustaining, even though the titles are changing. So things like the work with families and communities in particular changed. So these partnerships that school leaders have built across time to really stay focused on what young people are experiencing, their priorities, the challenges, and then also, you know, their dreams and what they're trying to pursue. So there's an example in that chapter of some work around literacy in particular. and the partnership with both families and community leaders in a particular school, they developed a, I think they call it literacy for justice and literacy for all, an effort to really enable

[20:20]

students to build their skills in not just reading, but also creating stories. So they actually created films around particular topics that the students were interested in digging into, in that case around indigenous sovereignty and Black liberation. The integration with curriculum And then the partnership with families and communities in that chapter is a really good example. And I think there are other ones across the chapters as well that are thinking about what is the role of youth voice and them being part of the leadership and decision-making. And that is, I think, a really crucial way that some of our systems are seeking to stay rooted in, as they say, doing the work.

[21:07] SPEAKER_02:

I mean, I was going to say the same thing, lift up some of the same points that Ann just made. In particular, I think the emphasis on engaging families. So, for example, in Teresa Lance's chapter, she writes about creating these kind of affinity groups with community members, family members, students, creating mentoring programs, all of these different sorts of things. With the emphasis on engendering a stronger sense of belonging for students, as well as promoting things like dual credit, college going, college applications, rigor, almost all of these roles had some kind of focus on diversifying the teaching force, diversifying the number of leaders. And all of those are instances that actually touch down on student experiences in the classroom and in the school buildings.

[22:01] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Dr. Irby and Dr. Ishimaru, if you had some advice to give to perhaps superintendents or school boards who are considering creating a cabinet level position, like a director of equity or whatever the job title may be, what advice would you give them to set someone up for success in that role? Because as I mentioned earlier, we've certainly seen cases where the expectations were unrealistic or the support was not there and the The position ended up not having the impact that it was intended to have. So what advice would you give to school and system leaders who want to create a position like this and want someone to succeed in it?

[22:38] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I mean, I guess that like I would go back to our earliest work and talk about really configuring the role. in a way that makes sense for your system and where the local contacts and power dynamics are gonna play out. So that person needs to have access to decision-making tables, They need to have organizational resources, so actually money, budgets, people. And then also just sort of focus, because I think that's a resource in educational systems that we often don't think about. But I think that, you know, actually the question is, For me, it's kind of, I don't know how many systems right now are going to be creating these new roles, frankly.

[23:35]

I think it's about how do we recognize and sustain and prepare, really. So sustain the work that's already been going on, if it's been happening, and then also think about how do we prepare for a new day? So, you know, we're in this evening time and we think about what do you do at night? You reflect on the lessons, right? of the day. Maybe you figure out how to give people some rest and respite, and then you strategize in new ways for the coming day and the context that are coming ahead.

[24:08]

So I think one of the things I'm thinking about right now is related to some of the work that Dana Mooney's did, in one of the chapters and thinking about professional networks and building the networks both within systems and then across systems to continue to sustain the work and to prepare for that new day. And so she really helped folks who were in these roles and folks who were in other roles, but who were really saw themselves as doing the work. to come together and to provide these networks not only for support, but to also strategize with each other, given some of their local and regional contexts, how to move collectively in the work and not be the only one in their system trying to carry this work on. And so it's really like those networks are really essential, even when the conditions aren't conducive.

[25:04]

And so, I mean, I think if there was a piece of advice for superintendents in the current moment would really be to think about how they can create or enable the folks who are already doing this work spaces to build networks with each other and to strategize and continue their professional learning as we move through these really very challenging times. for young people and for educators.

[25:35] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. I think the things that I would add is one, superintendents need to realize that the work is not only the outward kind of work that we can see and observe that there's this level of emotional work that the people in these positions have to do to stay in the positions and be able to make a change. So having that understanding is closely related to making sure superintendents provide whoever's in these kinds of leadership roles with access and resources to be a part of the kinds of networks and communities of support that are going to sustain them emotionally in terms of their wellness and Also, intellectually and that sort of thing, it can be very isolating for folks to be in a role with a set of knowledge and experiences that the people who they're working with just don't have. And so one of the sustaining parts of one of the things that the leaders in the book

[26:28]

described as being sustaining was having access to communities and networks. So one of the important things that we learned from two of the authors in Chapter seven of our book is that leaders and this is also supported through the accounts of our collaborating authors, is that these leaders want to actually be on the ground in schools. They want to have the opportunities to learn from and talk with students. When people have the opportunity to be in schools, frequently talking with students, observing, talking with teachers, being on the ground with leaders, they have a much better sense of what they actually need to do to move the district towards its equity aspirations. And then the final thing is pretty straightforward, being a part of the decision-making around strategic plans, budgeting, progress monitoring, setting goals for the district and that sort of thing.

[27:19]

Those were two top priorities that folks in one of the chapters indicated wanting to be able to do, but indicated they were things that they weren't able to regularly do.

[27:31] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is Doing the Work of Equity Leadership for Justice and Systems Change. Dr. Irby and Dr. Ishimaru, if people want to learn more about your work, where's the best place for them to go online, respectively?

[27:43] SPEAKER_02:

I'm pretty active on it, which is also connected to my Facebook. It's at Dakota Black. And people can also visit my website, dakotairby.com.

[27:54] SPEAKER_00:

I'm more active on LinkedIn. You can follow me there and you can also find links and more information on my other book and other work at annishimaru.com. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Thanks so much.

[28:10] SPEAKER_02:

Thank you.

[28:11] Announcer:

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