Embracing Equity in Education

On November 18th, academics, practitioners and community leaders gathered online to consider the emerging lessons about how a focus on equity is changing education, and how education equity can be measured and advanced.  This listening session – the sixth in a series hosted by Well-being and Equity (WE) in the World and the WIN Network – offered a wide range of education equity topics, reflecting the latest emerging lessons from the perspective of racial justice in measurement.  The pre-meeting readings are available here, the archived recording is here, and the slides are available here.  This session is part of WE in the World’s stewardship of the WIN Measures.

The session opened with presentations from Dr. David C. Turner III, InnerCity Struggle; Dr. Terry Vaughan, III & Ms. Marisha Addison, The Pell Institute; and Dr. Carrie McWilliams, Great Schools Partnership.

As the Manager of the Brothers, Sons, Selves, Dr. Turner leads a coalition of 10 community-based organizations working to end the school-to-prison pipeline and decriminalize communities of color. Dr. Turner opened his remarks by differentiating traditional research and community-driven research–solutions to achieving education equity through data, justice, and community.  

“When people traditionally think about research, [it’s] just done with some intent right around objectivity and authority, used in some way either for the general public, academia, or to try to create knowledge. 

With community driven research, this is a very different model, because this is collaboration between researchers and community members. It's used primarily to transform, so with community driven research the fundamental premise of it is to ensure that whatever condition that these communities are experiencing, changes.” - Dr. David C. Turner III, PhD.

Dr. Turner then described recent research on community-driven indicators in the Student Equity Needs Index and Black Student Achievement Plans in the LA Unified School District.  He described these takeaways:

• Reframe questions - problem-posing is more community-driven and equitable than problem-solving

• Driven by communities/youth/students most impacted by the issues, determine most important factors

  • Community-driven indicators may not be school-based data as students’ lives do not start and end at school (“whole-picture” educational life)

• Budget advocacy, not through grants, but through the regular operating budget

  • Highest needs schools receive highest dollars in investment

• Holistic view of student achievement – in order for students to achieve, faculty, staff, parents, students, and community members are needed (it takes a village!)

Dr. Terry Vaughan, III & Ms. Marisha Addison from the Pell Institute of Opportunity in Higher Education spoke next on embracing an asset-based perspective for indicators of higher education success. 

Marisha presented data that showed that since 1970, college participation rates have narrowed, but gaps still persist across race and ethnicity. Taking an asset-based approach to mitigate this inequity requires co-design and collaboration with practitioners, community members, and students to identify best practices, programs, and services.

This shifts the problem from being solely on the students and demonstrates that involvement is needed at each level in the education system to address these complex challenges. 

Asset-based perspectives are strengths-driven, gift-cultivated, and opportunity-focused. Marisha and Dr. Vaughan described how overall, asset-based indicators related better to students’ conditions, increased engagement with practitioners and community members, and increasingly create stronger proposals for funding. Dr. Vaughan offered examples of how taking on this perspective can help to lift up low-income students, first-generation students, and students of color: 

“We can create a more holistic narrative about student success and why a funder should invest in education equity financially. For example, among college graduates that received the Pell Grant, how many of these students transition into careers, such as teaching, medicine, engineering, among other fields?

If we were to apply an asset-based perspective, the argument for increasing the Pell Grants just from a focus on simply there being a gap between aid and cost, to include a focus on the reality that the Pell Grant also helps students pursue careers, and it can help the economy. This has implications for generational wealth and well-being.” - Terry Vaughan III, PhD.

Marisha suggested drawing measures not only from data itself but through narratives of the most impacted by higher education inequities, with narratives driving the metric of higher education student financial aid success: 

Students enrolled in private 2-year institutions receive financial aid nearly 3x higher than students attending private and public 4-year institutions. An asset-based approach may ask the 33% of the private and public 4-year students ‘what resources and connections they use to secure their financial aid?’ The feedback from the narratives of the students could create new indicators and measurements related to financial aid and success.

Dr. Carrie McWilliams, Great Schools Partnership, closed the formal presentations on personal stories about oral histories:

Those [narratives, stories] aren't captured, and because they're not captured, they're not able to be analyzed and studied as much. Systemic racism in this country is built into policies and procedures so that we are not able to hear the voices of so many generations. [Those stories have not been recorded], so that when you go to the archives in the library or your city and you want to do research, it is not there. So how do you capture that information of centuries where it was illegal for Black and Brown people to learn and get an education? We do it through community.

Dr. McWilliams also raised an important issue of connecting measures to policy change, and that policy change alone will not change behavior:

I think here in the United States, one of the things that is really holding us back is that we're steadily trying to put policies in place to change behaviors. Policies will not change behaviors; practices and speaking and putting humanity on what is happening will change behaviors. 

For example, the GI Bill was a policy put in place that everyone returning from WWII would receive a VA [Veterans Affairs] loan and money to go to school. Yet Black and Brown veterans did not receive that money, they did not get to buy a house, and build equity and wealth for their families that directly impacts the amount of student loans that my generation and the generation right before mine had to get to go to school… The problem is the wealth gap. 

Dr. McWilliams closed with personal connections to generational education equity, reiterating the necessity for stories to drive data interpretations:

We have to remove the stigma of anecdotal oratorical history as being invalid. It is not invalid–my grandmother’s story, my great-grandmother’s stories, they are real and they have meaning. But in our academic setting, if it doesn't have a number or come out of a Bureau or come from DC, or somebody’s repository, many times it is seen as not being valid. Capturing people’s stories needs to be part of that repository.

We need street data. [Effective community-driven data] will come from actually having conversations with people who have had these histories and they have lived them and giving them validity, agency, because that was stripped away from people.

The rest of the meeting focused on gathering responses and insights from the online participants.  For these breakouts, participants were invited to respond from both an intergenerational well-being perspective and a racial justice perspective.  The full text of all participant comments is available here.

Measures‌ ‌and‌ ‌ideas‌ ‌to‌ ‌capture‌ ‌Intergenerational‌ ‌Well-Being‌ ‌

• Well-being - how to define that? We can [through] families - students and their families? Understand how well-being changes over the life course

• % of educators hired directly from the community the school / education system is set in 

• # or percent of programs that support cradle-to-career pipelines

• Opportunities to take care of your families, for e.g., differences in higher education debt as beginning of adulthood, trying to balance school with work for students vs privilege of going to school without needing a job

• ‌# of spaces and programs where older adults and youth can learn together, and from each other

• Measure of student loan debt (has implications for generational wealth)

• foster care experience, but as a proxy for trauma; ACES as having educational impact

• Dr. Goldy Muhammad’s work on reparations in education, to develop curriculum for all students

• Digital Divide now considered a SDoH

• Infrastructure and capacity measures: level of engagement by schools to involve students, families in the education process and broadly at all levels of decision-making

• Using alternative methods to support parent engagement- does everyone have equal access to information and opportunities to participate?

Selected measures and ideas to capture racial justice perspectives on equity in education

• ‌Can't talk about any measures with schooling without talking about school climate → diversion, SROs [school resource officers], suspension, expulsion, etc.

• # of education systems that explicitly teach historical legacies of racism, trauma, and exclusion (boarding schools that assimilated and erased Indigenous culture, knowledge, and practices; GI Bill supporting white veterans and declining black veterans educational, housing, and job training benefits; affirmative action being created in the 1600s for white people; school-to-deportation pipeline’s effect on immigrant communities’ education and livelihood)

• Who are the Karens of the classroom?

• % of educators, superintendents, custodians, principals, lunchroom servers (ALL LEVELS / POSITIONS IN THE EDUCATION SYSTEM) that reflect the make-up of the student body across race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. → ALSO making sure there is balance of representation and equity leaders in all of these positions to address power dynamics

• Break down the current $ spending on students: Transparency of dollars spent on educators v. transportation v. lunchroom food v. school-based healthcare providers, etc. (this has implications for where dollars get allocated to what part of the education system) 

• Housing (i.e., redlining) and place play a role in education outcomes (i.e., where students go to school) → measures that help to dismantle housing segregation (i.e., % of communities with limited/without zoning laws) for more education system integration

The listening session closed with final remarks from each speaker, reflecting on the conversations in which they participated.

As we all move towards collecting, sharing or discussing education on data, particularly as it pertains to first-generation, low-income, and underrepresented students, we must remember to balance our interpretations, recognize structural limitations and acknowledge individuals’ agency. Embracing asset-based perspectives can help us achieve all of these outcomes towards becoming the researchers and practitioners we need to be to make a difference in students’ lives. - Dr. Terry Vaughan, III

Join us for future WIN Measurment Update Listening Sessions by registering here. This meeting’s slides and recording are archived here.