Stuck Improving: Racial Equity & School Leadership

[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_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Dr. Dakota Irby. Dr. Irby is an associate professor in the Department of Education Policy Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where he teaches and advises in the college's Urban Education Leadership Program. He researches equity-focused school leadership as a lever to improve black children's academic and social-emotional experiences and outcomes. And he's the author of the new book, Stuck Improving, Racial Equity and School Leadership.

[00:42] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:44] SPEAKER_00:

Dr. Irby, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thank you for having me.

[00:47] SPEAKER_01:

I appreciate it.

[00:47] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I'm excited to talk with you about this idea of being stuck improving. What does it mean to be stuck improving? And tell us a little bit about the work that this book comes out of.

[00:58] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, thank you. I'll start with saying that the phrase stuck improving really stemmed from the, you know, the kind of exact words that I heard people saying over an extended period, a five year period where I conducted a research study of a large diversifying suburban high school. The research process is a participatory process where I was with the school and we're working on issues of racial equity, really with the goal of helping to create a more affirming school for its black and brown student population, which was increasing at the time, and to improve their social, emotional well-being and academic outcomes that they experience while at the school. And it's a story that is playing out in many, many districts and many schools across the country. So over that five year period, one of the things that the people who are in the school, predominantly white adults, would say as part of the work that they were doing was that they felt stuck.

[01:55]

They would say this, you know, more times than I can count, like we feel stuck, we're stuck or I feel stuck or we're stuck. At the same time, though, they were improving. They were getting better at their practice. They were changing their instructional practices. They were changing their discipline practice, their relational practices. And in many ways, they were improving, always kind of felt like they were stuck.

[02:16]

And so the idea of stuck improving, language that I came up to try to capture the way that they talked about their work. Now, it means it has a couple of different means. So in one way, stuck improving refers to a process where when people Pursuing racial equity as a matter of kind of school leadership that you and people who are engaged in that work will experience this process of like making some progress and then not making progress. Kind of that two steps forward, a step backwards, three steps forward, four steps backwards type thing where you have you experience these setbacks. So in one way, that's a very practical way of thinking about stuck improving. But what I think the more substantial contribution that I hope that the book will make is understanding Stuck Improving as a particular form of racial consciousness.

[03:06]

And so by racial consciousness and understanding Stuck Improving as racial consciousness, what that means is that if you engage, if you decide to engage in work that's anti-racist, that's oriented towards racial injustice, so on and so forth, you will begin to understand that on the other side of every victory is a new complex dilemma or problem that will leave you feeling stuck. So I think that this is something that people of color, Black people in particular, have long articulated. Like, you know, we're going to make this progress. But we know on the other side of progress, there's going to be backlash. So, you know, Obama is president, but we know on the other side of that, there's going to be a wave of anti-Blackness. There's a consequence of that step forward.

[03:49]

And so the consciousness that when you do this work, part of the work is realizing and recognizing that you will be stuck is a resource that allows you to know where you are in a particular process and hopefully be able to identify ways to get past being stuck.

[04:06] SPEAKER_00:

I like that idea of there's always another mountain to climb. There are mountains beyond mountains. You climb one peak and you say, okay, we're proud of what we've done. We've seen some progress. We've seen some gains, but this was not the final peak. We have more work to do.

[04:20]

Sometimes we go down again. We have as you said, two steps forward, one step back, and there's always more to press for. Help us distinguish between that realization that there are always further goals to pursue in terms of our pursuit of racial equity, and this feeling that we're just never good enough, this feeling that there's no sense in even trying because we're just never going to get there, and the hopelessness that can set in when people don't have that recognition of the progress that they have made or don't see the gain. Help us distinguish between those two things.

[04:54] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, well, you know, this is one of the things that I think is so important is I write about in the book and as part of the research process, I saw a lot of people, in particular white people, giving up. And it helped me understand that, you know, they will often come into a process of racial equity leadership and engaging in kind of particular reforms. With this idea that there was going to be this particular outcome, and when they didn't get to that outcome or they didn't get to that outcome in the timeline that they anticipated, then people did give up on a regular basis. One of the distinctions that I saw is that oftentimes people of color, Black people, were less likely to give up. They were more willing to be creative, to continue to push forward, so on and so forth. And what that helped me realize is that this idea of stuck improving is what I call in the book a racial equity resource.

[05:45]

It's a knowledge resource so that when you go into a process of trying to improve an organization, trying to improve the learning opportunities for black and brown students, you go into it knowing that stuck improvement is a phenomenon that you will experience and that you will encounter as part of the process itself. And so part of it is just like the knowledge that, you know, things might not work out as you want them to or as you expect them to, is a resource that actually helps you to continue to pursue whatever it is that you want to pursue. This is the story of people of color, and in particular, the story of Black people in the United States. We know that there are going to be setbacks. We know that there is another sometimes higher peak on the other side of political justice is the mountain of economic justice. we don't give up on that.

[06:34]

We continue to fight and figure out ways to pursue that form of justice. And so what I'm hoping is that as people read this book, they're able to really name the knowledge of that process as a resource that you have in your pocket so that you know, you know, giving up, I guess, is an option, but you know that you're not going into it with the clear, definite endpoint in mind, it's a worthwhile pursuit. It's a worthwhile pursuit to engage in the work regardless.

[07:04] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I wonder if we could talk a little bit about your research studying this school over a five-year period. And I think you had a unique perspective as an observer, as a researcher, as probably a participant to some extent in that work. What did you see unfolding as the school embarked on this journey?

[07:20] SPEAKER_01:

So I was invited to come in and work with this district basically in a consulting capacity. And once I started to get a better understanding of what was happening, I said, you know, I don't know how to consult you all. I have to like leave my job and be here on a regular basis. This was back in 2013. And this was before districts were hiring equity directors and those sorts of things. And so the model was still largely driven by hiring consultants to help address these issues of racial disparities in special education or access to AP or discipline disparities and so on and so forth.

[07:55]

So I said to the folks at this particular school and in this district that I'd be happy to go alongside you all in the process. And the return that I would get would be to learn what you all do and to see what happens. And so we started off in terms of the research design, started off with the research team. And we played a very active role early in the process of collecting data, gathering data that

[08:21]

racism and racial disparities culture climate discipline so on and so forth and we played a very heavy role early on and over time we built the capacity of folks who were insiders of the school community begin to take on that work so by year five I was working solely with only the administrative team and the department chairs and once their capacity was at a certain level it was you know

[08:49]

subsequent two years, making occasional visits and also doing retrospective interviews with members of the school community, people who stayed as well as people who left. And that's what I asked them in that period of time was like, what were the most important things that happened over the last five years that, you know, you feel people in a school facing this situation and in the circumstances that you all encounter, what would they need to know? What would you want to tell them? And so that's really how I began to identify the main themes that I wrote about in the book. So some of the things that I saw, it was a mixed bag. Some things worked well, some things didn't work well.

[09:28]

There was a lot of turnover. One of the things that I learned is that, you know, people leave when they're asked to do this kind of work. And it's not only people who you would think are, you know, not on board or not interested in pursuing racial equity work or have different ideas about racism and injustice. It was also the people who were the champions for it. They left, too, because they felt that the pace was too slow or they were frustrated at the kind of questions that the people who had less knowledge and experience were asking. And on the other hand, you had people who were just like, you know, this is ridiculous.

[10:03]

Like if this child does this in my classroom, they should be suspended. No questions asked. And so you had people across the ideological spectrum, you know, leaving. So that was one big thing. It was a lot of conflict. I saw a lot of people really struggling with the discomfort of trying to change their practices and trying to better support students.

[10:25]

And I saw a lot of, you know, there was a lot of tears, you know, people crying. It was rough, especially around year two or three, which was an important thing that I discovered in this book is that it's very difficult to understand how this change can work on a relatively short time horizon. The students that were in ninth grade when we started the project, by the time they graduated, the school was very different for that incoming class. But the interesting thing was that that incoming class, five years later, still had critiques about the problems in the school. They still experienced problems, but their problems were qualitatively different than the problems that students experienced.

[11:13]

And so this, again, gets to the point that, you know, change is very complex to understand because, you know, the students leave. They have a memory of how the school was, you know, five years before. There were teachers who came into the school, you know, year four, year five. And they would describe it as they heard that things were really, really tough and that it was not a good place to work four years before. But they didn't have the experience anymore. to know what it was like before that.

[11:40]

But the people who had been there for a while really described it mostly as very difficult, discomforting, and sometimes even like painful process to go through.

[11:50] SPEAKER_00:

And I think it's notable to point out that you asked students to share their experiences at multiple points in time, because often we don't ask, right? We just look at data, we ask teachers what they think, and we ask outside people to see what they think. But asking students, I imagine, was a very rich source of evidence. What did students highlight as changing over that period of time? Because obviously there's a cost to doing this work. As you said, it is painful, it is uncomfortable.

[12:14]

What did students highlight as some of the changes that they experienced over that time?

[12:17] SPEAKER_01:

You know, it was interesting because It depended on which students, right? Because the interesting thing about schools, especially high schools, is that you can have teachers who have a longer time horizon to look back on because they've been in the school 10 years. So they can say, this is what things were like 10 years ago. Well, students are in and out for pretty much max five years. So I think asking the students about what they experienced in school, they almost kind of said similar things, But the affordances and opportunities that students had by year five were radically different than year one. So for example, there was no Black Student Union.

[13:00]

There was no LGBTQ Student Alliance. There was no Latinos United. There were none of these kind of organizations. There was no social justice class. There was no African-American history class. There were none of those things.

[13:15]

There was no Latino studies class. The music department didn't include hip hop and jazz as part of the repertoire of what students would be learning, so on and so forth. And there were very few, no teachers of color in year one. There was none. Out of the school, teachers and staff were about 200. 1,600 or so students.

[13:39]

So the students still had, in some ways, a pretty similar critique. And I think a lot of this had to do with 2016 election, right? Heightened polarization around issues of race and racism by that year five. This is a year when, you know, white students were wearing MAGA hats to school. And there was all those kinds of different things. One incident that I write about in the book is when white students were taunting Latinx students by saying, we're going to build that wall.

[14:10]

We're going to build that wall, right? So they had a not good experience, right? The difference was, is that adults were ready to address and deal with those issues in a way that they wouldn't have five years earlier. And so five years earlier was a different context, but all of those things that I mentioned weren't there, didn't exist for students. And so when they had a grievance, when they had a problem, they didn't even have an affinity space or the teachers and faculty and the willingness of leaders to even listen to what they wanted to say, what they thought, how they felt. Whereas five years later, all of those organizational resources were available for students.

[14:50]

And they knew that, right? So they, if in the first year, if someone made racial taunts, and I write about this in the book, it was kind of just swept under the rug. Whereas when people, if someone did that by year five, the students would still have a comment like this school is racist. However, the opportunities and resources they had to seek recourse or address for those injustices were fundamentally different. And so they could go to Black Student Union. They had teachers they could go to.

[15:20]

They had leaders who would actually listen. They had community partners. So the resources in the school were very different. And that's what I really try to focus on here is how do you create the kind of organizational environment and conditions So that you're better equipped to have a higher capacity to address the issues of racism as they're experienced by students and when they emerge.

[15:43] SPEAKER_00:

So you're highlighting the importance of student organizations. And were there any kind of processes that were put in place to deal with those? Because I mean, I think for a lot of our listeners, you know, we think we want to hire more diverse staff. But, you know, we do have majority white faculties in many schools. And we want to not have any student experience, you know, that kind of racist treatment. But at the same time, we know in many communities that that kind of thing is quite common and we don't always know exactly what to do about it in the school environment.

[16:13]

So you said the student groups, affinity groups were a big part of that. Were there any processes that were put in place as far as addressing, you know, like if there is hate speech or name calling or taunting some type or, you know, some sort of slogan that's being chanted? What actions was the school able to take and what systems were put in place to make sure that those actions could take place?

[16:34] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, some of the important things were, you know, there were systems, there was policies. Of course, the schools have these policies. Many schools have these policies on a record, you know, no tolerance for, you know, kind of hateful speech and that sort of thing. You know, they adopted restorative processes.

[16:51]

But I would say the most important things that they began to put in place were opportunities for students to participate actively in leadership activities. Some of those organizations, including classes, and so, for example, a class that the faculty created was kind of a social justice class, and this class used issues that were happening in the school as their curriculum. And so if there was something that was happening or, you know, I write about this process that students developed in the class to teach their peers as well as to teach the teachers and the leaders about the use of the N-word and the history of it, why it shouldn't be used, who can use it, so on and so forth. And they did this to address a real issue of people using the N-word in the school.

[17:43]

And so having these different mechanisms, in particular, when we get down to the level of kind of like instruction and classes and courses, having courses where they could use their real-world experiences and conduct research and produce you know materials that could be used right there in the school for teachers for students for community was i think one of the most powerful things that i saw happen it was just very powerful and i mean i'm talking about when i say that this was a this was a class project but i mean it came with everything from video they did interviews so the students were doing the interviews they were collecting their own information And it wasn't only students of color, like this was a process that white students were involved in too, right? So they, as part of the class, they did interviews, they did research, they did interviews and they synthesized the data and used what they learned to create a lesson plan, to create a video, so on and so forth.

[18:38]

So I think those, that's an example of one of the most powerful things that I saw that I think is more powerful than the policies that they came up with, because now you're putting students, high school students in the driver's seat as partners in addressing the problems that they actually see.

[18:57] SPEAKER_00:

Wow. And it's powerful to me that this was actually a four credit class, right? This was part of the curriculum that students were actually developing. It wasn't just an afterschool program. It wasn't just a student association. It was actually a class where they were responding, kind of a project-based learning class, it sounds like, where they were responding to things that were actually happening in the school.

[19:17]

I want to get your thoughts on how issues of student speech are dealt with, because I think we've seen over the past couple of years, both an increase in our awareness of the need to be thoughtful about how we talk about people, with the terminology that we use, but also an increase in some people's willingness to just be offensive on purpose and to intentionally raise other people's hackles through the things that are said. And that can become a game that is only fun for one party there. And I think we've seen a little bit of a pendulum swing in terms of wanting to be more thoughtful about speech and more aware of the impact of speech. But also, we can't completely police student speech, but at the same time, we want our students not to be jerks to one another.

[20:08]

And we don't want an increased awareness of what you should not say to be a jerk to other people, to just give people ammunition for making everybody else furious and kind of getting away with it, if that makes sense.

[20:20] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think it was, you know, my sense is that, you know, again, there was a broad policy of what's not acceptable. then a lot of the stuff would be handled on a relative case-by-case, situation-by-situation basis, which is important because there's certain school communities where it's just not dealt with at all. People just kind of wish it away and give it time.

[20:48]

But I think that their response at the site where I conducted research was to confront the language and confront the speech through a process of Thoughtful challenge, direct challenge and kind of thoughtful engagement. Right. And so not just saying don't say that, but saying what you're saying is problematic. We need to have a conversation to explore why you think that's OK. And, you know, and so that was kind of more of the response and approach. I have in the book, I have a chapter called Courageously Confrontational School Culture as a resource.

[21:29]

And I write about this idea of a courageously confrontational school culture as distinct and different from a collegial school culture or a congenial school culture. And so I write about how a confrontational, a courageously confrontational school culture is one that deals with these sorts of issues head on. And in a way that again, uses these opportunities as an opportunity to learn, which goes back again to the example that I gave earlier about the use of the N-word when white students were using the N-word in the context of like rap music. And it was creating a lot of conflict because they were saying, this is still not, this is not okay. Like I can say these lyrics, you can't. And then the question was like, well, I'm cool with this person.

[22:12]

And they said I could, or we say it, but you can't say it around me. And it became very complex. And so the approach that the students as well as the faculty took was to like, let's engage this head on, not necessarily as putting up signs to say you can't say this and there's zero tolerance if you say this, which there was no tolerance for saying it, but brought in a level of nuance to say we need to address this openly as a full school community. If one person or two people are saying this, we need to acknowledge it and address it as a community. And, you know, it's a difference in terms of organizational culture when a community has their eyes and ears on the street. Right.

[22:58]

Which is, you know, a different way of thinking about what school a different way for school leaders to think about what they're attempting to cultivate. And so that means that you're not just in trouble with, you know, the dean of students or a teacher who doesn't like what you say, but that you're letting down a community. Right. You're reflecting poorly on an entire community of people. And the only way to be able to get to that point is to deal with a lot of these issues in a way that brings it to the forefront of acknowledgement for that community of folks.

[23:30] SPEAKER_00:

That's not a simple answer. Like if you just said, well, here's the correct policy to have, go apply it, like everybody would be happy. But the engagement there, it sounds like it was really critical to both students and faculty to have a seat at the table. Was student involvement in governance increased? Was there a student council or somebody like that that became more active over that time period?

[23:50] SPEAKER_01:

Yes, there was a student council and then there was also like a site council that made kind of like site based decisions. Some of the things changed in the district over time. It used to be a site based managed school where they had a lot of autonomy and then things went to a more centralized process where the district facilitated a lot more of the kind of decision making. But yes, there was when we started, there was no student representation. And then there became this student representation was included as well as parent and community representation as well.

[24:21] SPEAKER_00:

Let's talk a little bit about leadership, if we could, as we wrap things up, because you said there was turnover over this period of time, and yet the work continued. Where was their key turnover, and what was it that allowed the work to continue despite that turnover?

[24:35] SPEAKER_01:

After the very first year, there was a leadership team that was a principal, and for the sake of this... So there was a principal, and then there were Three, four associate principals. I'm just going to just for the sake of ease, people had different titles, but for the sake of the conversation, there was a five person administrative leadership team. And then there were teacher leaders.

[25:00]

And I'll talk a little bit about the cultivation of the teacher leaders, which was really, really important. Well, the first round of turnover was with the administrative leadership team. Two people remained after the first year. First year, they begin to implement their reforms. Two people remain.

[25:23]

a district level person who came in that was very supportive of the work. So the administrative turnover of three people from year one to year two, and a lot of the turnover happened within the ranks of the teachers. I want to say probably by year three, there were maybe 35 new teachers. It was a lot. I can remember the back to school first day that staff had to show up. And they were all lined up in front of the auditorium introducing themselves.

[25:56]

And it took a long time. I mean, it was a lot of teachers. So there was quite a bit of turnover after the second year. So administrative turnover from year one to year two and then year two to year three, a lot of teacher turnover less. And then they started to subside after that. But I would say overall, over the course of the five years, probably out of 150 teachers, maybe about about 40 to 50.

[26:22]

I don't want to give specific numbers, but about 40 to 50 or so came and went. The teachers play a huge role in. sustaining the work. That came through the process of people volunteering to be what were called at the time relationship ambassadors. And then they started to call themselves teacher ambassadors. By the time the project ended, there were also student ambassadors.

[26:47]

And then there were also parent and community ambassadors who were engaged in the racial equity work. And so they really did a nice job. The administrative leadership team did a really nice job of engaging the teachers who had no previous formal leadership role in the work. And so this actually combined with rethinking and retooling the formal leaders, like the department chairs and the department heads, some of who were engaged and some of who were not engaged. And so by the end of the process, you had these people who previously were informal leaders who participated in the relationship ambassadors group. then you had department leaders, and then you had administrative leadership teams.

[27:33]

So we went from really a group of, if we just counted the administrative leadership team, five people in the building working on these issues, to the second year, about 20, and then the second year, an additional. Now, the process that the team designed to get more people engaged was to engage people at multiple different levels, whether they were skeptical or whether they were fully on board. And what they would do is use kind of almost like this process of saying, we're going to have five people. We're not going to try to invite everybody and get everybody on board. We want each of these five people to identify two people who they think will benefit, not necessarily support, but will benefit from being a part of this planning And typically that will be a deliberate conversation and intentional outreach to one person who is a skeptical or critic and one person who they thought would be supportive.

[28:34]

So they would reach out to those people and that would create the next group. And then that group, you know, two of those people would be asked to identify two additional people and so on and so forth until you had what we at the school, they called a critical mass. And at about year three, they started to talk very differently about the work that they were doing. because they argue that they had a critical enough mass where there wasn't a meeting that you could go to in the school that didn't have someone in that room, someone at that table who clear about wanting to make the school a more promising place for black and brown students and had gone through some training and understood that they were gonna facilitate and X, Y, and Z. And so what I would encourage leaders to think about is creating Not necessarily a number, a hard number, but thinking about their own context and thinking about how can you have, how many people do you need to ensure that the likelihood or the probability of having at least one of those people be at every formal meeting that happens in the school, somebody's likely there.

[29:41]

That's where you want to actually try to get. That's going to depend on what your meeting cadence is, how many people participate.

[29:50]

you have grade level teams, if you have departments, you'll want to have some people who are champions of the racial equity work and leadership participating in each one of those settings. And once you started to do that and start to implement some routines with the support of that person, and some of those routines might be, for example, a very basic one is assign an equity keeper as part of the meetings, right? And so you have a timekeeper, you have a redirector, you have a note taker, you have to have an equity keeper too, right? So that equity keeper defining that person's role and responsibility is making sure multiple voices are represented, asking questions about like, have we considered the perspectives of people who aren't in the room, so on and so forth. In the same way that you give somebody permission to move you along the agenda based on time,

[30:42]

the agenda in terms of making sure that the decisions and the conversations are being as inclusive of multiple diverse perspective as possible. And the cool thing about having somebody who can engage that practice is that it's a very simple practice that anybody can engage in, in the same way note-taking is. People may take notes slightly differently, but if you know your role is to take notes, then you can try to get better and make sure you're good at taking notes in the same way that you can get good at becoming an equity keeper even though you're not the equity champion, when you go around and assign roles, you can even pick it out of a hat. Oh, today I'm the equity keeper. And then you just take on that role and you get better at it over time. And so those are the kind of small routines that really built the capacity, but they started with people who were committed.

[31:28]

And like I said, might not have necessarily been the champions or the people who you would have expected to jump into the work, but they, Even the skeptical people, inviting them into the work, because if they're going to work here, they're going to be here, inviting them into the work as well, and taking the questions that they ask and the critiques that they have serious enough to really take them up as a matter of learning for the group and then working.

[31:53] SPEAKER_00:

I love it. Having an equity keeper. I love just the nuance and the engagement that is pervasive all throughout this story of the school that you worked with over a five-year period. Just such impressive and deep engagement and not simple answers, not simple policies, but engagement with the complexity of all of this work.

[32:14] SPEAKER_01:

And I think one thing that's really, really important that I try to, and I write about this in the introduction, I try to kind of steer away from like charismatic, you know, leaders and leaders that could just motivate people and that sort of thing. Because there was a little bit of that, but not enough to improve the school. So I really tried to focus on leadership as a collective endeavor and activity that is shaped around multiple people working.

[32:43]

students as well. And so one of the things in the book is that the leaders don't emerge as great leaders necessarily, but I think the leadership comes across as strong and powerful. And the administrative leadership team played a role in fostering strong leadership throughout the school, both through their advocacy and their organization, but also through their vulnerability and willingness to let other people step in and lead the work too.

[33:13] SPEAKER_00:

I love the capacity building angle there. I think that's so powerful because as you said, people leave, there's turnover. There are maybe unrealistic expectations when everything falls on one person to be kind of the champion. But when we build that capacity, much more sustainable and long-term things can happen. So the book is Stuck Improving, Racial Equity and School Leadership. Dr. Irby, if people would like to learn more about your work or get in touch with you, where are the best places for them to go online to reach out?

[33:43] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so I can be reached at stuckimproving.com, S-T-U-C-K, improving.com. And I can also be reached on Twitter with the same hashtag, at stuckimproving.

[33:56] SPEAKER_00:

Thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[33:59] SPEAKER_01:

Great, thank you.

[34:00] Announcer:

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