Shaping Culture to Reinforce Equality & Equity
By Etienne R. LeGrand
School districts across the country are talking with greater frequency about equity, which is different than equality. Equity is about leveling the playing field, the second is about fairness. Which one a school district pursues depends on whether it sees a connection between its students that are behind (most often low-income and black and Latino ones) and the resources they need to catch up, succeed and close persistent academic and opportunity gaps. What steps leaders take to make equity a key feature of its brand promise depends on whether the district’s culture adapts to reinforce this intention.
Roberto Padilla, superintendent at the Newburgh Enlarged City School District, decided to address inequity in his district. He wrote an article for the August issue of the School Administrator, a monthly magazine of the School Superintendents Association describing his efforts to make his district more equitable.
He described difficult conversations about the root causes of biases and inequities in his organization and the impact of those biases on daily interactions between employees and students. He offered seven key strategies for leading equity, such as identifying access points and drivers and leaning into your fears to take risks.
He offers as proof of the value of hard these conversations, increased graduation rates over a five year period from 67% to 79%. Notwithstanding progress on this metric, I was left wondering whether his strategies to make his district more equitable will stand the test of time and his departure at some future date. Beyond increased graduation rates, what additional results are possible?
His seven strategies for leading equity are important. But none of these replace making equity a core value of the school district – something all stakeholders believe is most important in the way the district’s employees and students work and learn together. Newburgh Enlarged City School District lists five core values in its strategic plan: nurturing, empowering, collaborative, student-centered and diverse. Did Padilla and his leadership team, including the school board, consider adding equity as one more? If not, why?
Educational equity and excellence are combined to make up the third of five pillars that define the district’s strategic plan. It’s noteworthy the tenants of what’s intended under this pillar excludes how resources are allocated. Equality (or leveling the playing field) typically requires spending more money to catch kids up who are behind, and an investment of this nature would illustrate how the district prioritizes its intention to improve equality.
Building a Strategic Plan to align with Core Values
A strategic plan is an important organizational document, a roadmap for how an organization intends to utilize and prioritize its human and financial resources. But it is incomplete and nothing more than words on paper, if it is untethered from the core of what the district is or hopes to be.
By aligning the district’s strategic plan with its values, it could add more synchronicity with a through line between what is believed to be most important and how the work is to be accomplished. Values have more meaning when they are more than words in a plan, when they come to life in the way employees, students and parents interact with each other, through the experience their interactions create and the decisions they make.
Further, defining values into guiding behaviors would go even further to establish shared “guard rails” for conduct and decision-making, that are essential for how everyone is expected to work together. The hard conversations Superintendent Padilla has begun with employees and stakeholders require a stronger foundation on which equity can be embedded, reinforced and measured and from which the district can be held accountable.
His next step is call out the district’s culture as a missing lever for transformation and to rally his troupes to define the culture, the secret sauce Newburgh needs to fulfill its purpose.