School superintendents are the stewards of their community’s values as represented by the election of their boards of education. Today, if you’re a school superintendent, you’re faced with a difficult choice when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion—or DEI—work. Depending on state legislation, local politics, and your board’s proclivities, you may have to choose whether to retreat on equity-based work or stand up for what’s right. Regardless of politics, all our students need to be engaged and supported in learning environments with high standards and high-quality curriculum.
The Trump administration’s strategy of sowing confusion and causing fear is being felt across the country. Some state legislatures are enacting anti-equity measures that reduce LGBTQ+ rights and dismantle DEI initiatives. Women and people of color are being removed from leadership positions in the federal government and the military; their histories are being scrubbed from public websites.
The administration has already gutted the U.S. Department of Education’s office for civil rights, which will significantly diminish civil rights enforcement in schools. It looks increasingly likely that the department itself could be abolished.
Right now, in schools, district offices, and boardrooms, district leaders are debating whether to refuse school entry to federal immigration agents and adjusting budgets in the face of anticipated cuts to programs that serve the most vulnerable students.
For the last two decades or so, many school systems and states have been engaged in equity work. Schools and districts have worked hard to increase achievement for traditionally underperforming students by revising policies, establishing equity offices, analyzing data, implementing professional learning, activating student and community voice, and making curriculum culturally relevant.
Unfortunately, despite the investments and efforts, we haven’t seen results fast enough. Current challenges have only added more urgency: There are still stark achievement gaps, too many students are disengaged, and the teaching profession has become increasingly unattractive. Schools’ uneven response to COVID-19 angered parents across many communities and threatened their confidence in education leaders.
All of this has created an opportunity for the anti-DEI crowd to lay these challenges at the feet of equity-based work.
It’s a very confusing time if you’re a school system leader: You must act within your local context to protect a vital public institution. But even if you have to call the work something different, I urge district leaders not to abandon the architecture of equity that has already been built. After all, the equity-based practices that so many of us have learned and implemented are simply good instruction.
All educators can and must continue the daily work of driving an equity agenda. Doing so entails a few core practices that can and should be enacted every day, regardless of what they’re called:
- Use real-time data to adjust instruction and intervene with students who are falling behind.
- Make sure every student knows they’re loved, valued, respected, and seen in every school, every day.
- Assign the best educators to work with the most vulnerable students.
- Organize the daily schedule to ensure there’s uninterrupted time for both core instruction and interventions.
- Guarantee a high-quality, standards-based curriculum for every child, with open access to high-level courses.
- Allocate additional resources to schools that have the highest concentrations of students struggling academically.
- Review discipline data to determine if there’s disproportionality among different demographic groups.
- Engage with community members and families to leverage their strengths and understand their needs.
- Provide mental health and social-emotional support to students.
I could go on, but you get the point. Call it what you will, but the daily work of improving student learning and achievement must not stop.
As a former schools superintendent who publicly drove explicit equity-based transformation efforts, I am infuriated over what is currently being said and done at the highest levels of our government to diminish work that has taken years to take root. And I’m disappointed and disheartened by corporate and higher education leaders who were quick to dismiss any hint of a DEI stance.
I wish state and national organizations were being more vocal in their support of equity-based work. But I’m not surprised. I’ve seen a lot of leaders still caught in the tractor beam of the status quo even as they paid lip service to equity. And I’ve seen bold leaders pay the price when they try to push too much too far.
In graduate education schools and leadership-development courses, we learned the lessons of Sun Tzu, including avoiding picking fights you can’t win. I admire superintendents who publicly stand against the forces that are trying to destroy public education and I’m grateful for all those beacons of courage who are publicly protecting their students from immigration agents, pledging to maintain culturally relevant curriculum, and refusing to strike equity policies from their books.
But superintendents are appointed politicians, not elected ones. If your community supports explicit equity work, wonderful. But if not, there’s a real risk that standing up against the vocal anti-DEI crowd could mean winning the battle but losing the war. Still, that doesn’t have to mean equity-based work needs to stop, even in DEI-unfriendly districts.
This work must continue, even if some equity-minded leaders’ outward stance has to change. Your core values of ensuring that those who need the most support get it shouldn’t be compromised. You may need to call the rose by another name, but there’s no excuse not to continue equity-based work.
