Incremental equity initiatives often just paper over the status quo. How can schools be bolder and more strategic? Educators Paul Gorski, Marceline DuBose, and Katy Swalwell share four steps to seismically shift thinking and action and make significant equity progress.

Trading Baby Steps for Big Equity Leaps

Paul Gorski

Marceline DuBose

Katy Swalwell

High School

Middle School

February 2022 Gorski header image

0222_Gorski_EONEREN :  iSTOCK-1291181797

Teacher diversity

Race

Student Voice

School climate and culture

School and district leadership

Equity

School Culture

Leadership

To fully support students, schools must attend to the trauma that occurs within their own institutional cultures. Equity advocate Paul Gorski describes three transformative commitments schools can make to maximize the potential of trauma-informed education.

How Trauma-Informed Are We, Really?

How Trauma-Informed Are We, Really? thumbnail

1020_14-19_00020663_p14_CSI

Whole Child

Supported (whole child)

Social-emotional learning

Safe (whole child)

Cultural competency

School leaders committed to bringing racial equity must ask why educators in schools who advocate fiercely for equity often feel isolated or face repercussions, while educators who are reluctant to make change for equity are rarely challenged. Gorski, who has decades of experience working for school-based equity, says most racial-equity efforts in schools are derailed by four "equity detours": pacing for privilege (the comfort of teachers threatened by equity issues is prioritized over progressing quickly); poverty of culture (racist actions and inequities connected to racism are talked about only as "cultural" issues); adopting a deficit Ideology; and celebrating diversity (a focus on celebrations that help white or privileged students learn about other cultures and races without confronting racism). To avoid these detours, Gorski recommends school leaders adopt and hew to five general principles of "equity literacy," which he discusses.

Avoiding Racial Equity Detours

Avoiding Racial Equity Detours thumbnail

0419_56-61_shutterstock_1200876208_left_DL

Culturally responsive teaching

Equity detours

If the authors have learned anything working with schools across the United States, they've learned this: When it comes to educational equity, the trouble is not a lack of multicultural programs or diversity initiatives in schools. Nor is it a lack of educators who appreciate and even champion diversity. The trouble lies in how so many diversity initiatives avoid or whitewash serious equity issues. At the heart of a curriculum that is meaningfully multicultural lie principles of equity and social justice–purposeful attention to issues like racism, homophobia, sexism, and economic inequality. "When we invest our multicultural energies in surface-level cultural exchanges, fantasies of colorblindness, or celebrations of whitewashed heroes while ignoring the actual inequities many of our students face in their own lives," they write, "we demonstrate an implicit complicity with those inequities." The authors suggest that schools use an equity literacy approach–that is, an approach to diversity or multiculturalism that relies more on teachers' understandings of equity and inequity and of justice and injustice than on their understanding of this or that culture. The idea is to place equity rather than culture at the center of the diversity conversation. The authors share five principles for developing curriculums that are meaningfully multicultural.

Paul Gorski

About

Expertise

Articles by Paul

Trading Baby Steps for Big Equity Leaps

How Trauma-Informed Are We, Really?

Avoiding Racial Equity Detours

Equity Literacy for All

Blogs by Paul

Equity literacy and virtual learning during Covid-19

Write for ASCD

To process a transaction with a Purchase Order please send to member@ascd.org