Racial Equity Commitments and Assimilationist Goals: The Challenges and Opportunities Present within Inherently Conflicted Policies

Abstract

Districts across the country are adopting equity-driven policies, yet district leaders' implementation remains understudied (Irby et al., 2022; Kruse et al., 2018; Mattheis, 2017). An emerging body of work examines the internal efforts of district leaders with explicit equity-driven positions who are charged with implementing district-level equity policies (e.g., Connolly et al., 2020; Irby et al., 2022; Ishimaru et al., 2022). This dissertation extends this research by using critical organization theory to characterize how race explicit and justice-centered policy language was navigated across levels of the district central office by district leaders who did not hold equity-specific titles. Justice and racial equity mean different things to different people and those differences matter for how equity work is enacted (e.g., Haverly et al., 2023; Shah, 2018). Therefore, the implementation of equity-driven policies across leaders in the district central office is an important area for research. In this critical qualitative case study, I examined the initial implementation of an urban school district’s strategic plan that intentionally centered racial equity. I first analyzed the policy to identify if and how it embedded access-based assimilationist commitments alongside justice centered ones, and then analyzed how tensions between those goals were enacted in practice. The School Board adopted a new district-wide science curriculum two months after the strategic plan adoption. This provided the opportunity to examine the School Board’s enactment of the strategic plan within the context of curriculum and instruction. It is important to examine School Board Directors’ leadership as they engaged in the process of policy-making and implementation as school boards have influence over other school and district leaders. In this study, I examined how the decisions made by the School Board in the name of their new strategic plan shaped the pressures faced by the district science team (DST) charged with implementing the new science curriculum. The data came from both publicly available artifacts including district policies, videos of school board meetings, and data collected from the first year of a research-practice partnership (RPP). The RPP brought both financial and professional support for the teacher professional development component of the curriculum adoption, and was designed to improve teachers’ science instructional practices in equitable ways that represented both access-based and transformative conceptions of equity. The data analyzed from the larger RPP includes audio recordings and transcripts of RPP meetings, field notes, and professional development artifacts. I found that while the district’s strategic plan included anti-racist framing and commitments to undo legacies of racism, those justice-centered commitments did not translate to their goals and measures for teaching and learning. Similarly, the School Board Directors’ framing was more justice-centered when they discussed broad goals for the district and their support for the strategic plan. Alternatively, their discourse became more access-focused when they discussed curriculum and instruction, particularly around the science curriculum adoption. During the curriculum adoption, the School Board placed pressure on the DST to demonstrate the success of the adoption through standardized test data. Furthermore, the Directors described the DST’s equity responsibilities in ways that aligned with the assimilationist components of the district’s strategic plan. The School Board’s framing around data and equity mattered for the curriculum adoption implementation. While the DST responded to the School Board’s pressure for data by using more expansive data sources to assess student learning, they resisted the university team’s more critical applications of equity during the first year of the science adoption. The DST was not under pressure to demonstrate how the curriculum’s implementation prioritized the more disruptive and justice-seeking vision of the district’s strategic plan, and that lack of pressure supported their resistance and limited the criticality of the teachers’ science professional development. District leaders are caught in the middle of multiple layers of education bureaucracy. My findings suggest that given the multiple paradoxes inherent in leading for racial equity within a nested and racist system, district leaders need to build their capacity to recognize tensions between anti-racist and assimilationist goals and to include metrics that capture anti-racist efforts alongside the assimilationist measures demanded by the macro and micro levels of their organizational environment. In a district that is already committed to advancing racial equity, access and inclusion can be backgrounded. Rather, leaders need support to foreground disruptive, justice-seeking commitments and decisions.