Education Week - October 23, 2019 - 19

"We're often a department that
the district created to fight
itself," says Tiffany B. Young,
equity and diversity director for
Nevada's Washoe County school
district. "We're not the staff that
sits in a room that says, 'oh yeah,

Rachel Jessen for Education Week

Tiffany Brown Anderson/Redux Pictures

that's fine.' "

"Give us the space to do the
work," says Dena Keeling,
the chief equity officer for
the Orange County school
district in North Carolina.
"It's not going to happen
tomorrow. These are
mindsets that I have to
break down."

Creating a position means there's
concentrated attention, Honig said.
"That can set a powerful message,
and also leverage important work
throughout the central office."
The risk, she said, is other central
office staff can believe equity concerns are someone else's job, and not
their own.
"But I think the design of some of
these positions takes that downside
into account," she said, by making it
clear that the equity officer is in place
to support everyone's work, not just
handle it alone.
One of the most challenging aspects of the position, chief equity
officers say, is defining just what the
work should be.
Keeling, who's only held her job
since July, said one of her first priorities is guiding the equity task force
through the painstaking work of

transforming its big-picture goals
into achievable interim steps.
She also is asking the community to
give her some time.
"Give us the space to do the work.
It's not going to happen tomorrow.
These are mindsets that I have to
break down," she said.
A focus on student equity is not limited to traditional districts. In June,
Benny Vásquez was hired as the first
equity director for KIPP schools, a
nationwide charter network of more
than 100,000 students, 95 percent of
whom are black or Hispanic.
Individual KIPP schools and regional networks have focused on equity for some time, Vásquez said. His
hiring is "an opportunity to give a systemic approach to the work, and an
opportunity for us to get clear about
what our vision is." KIPP is using surveys of parents and students to guide
that vision, he said.
Ledezma, in Portland, is working
on the creation of a racial equity and
social justice advisory team, made
up of representatives from district
schools and departments. That team
will take the district's existing equity
policy and build in more measures of
accountability, said Ledezma.

Coming from a research and accountability background, Moore said
equity officers have to be able to present both positive stories and positive
numbers to convince the community-and district leadership-that
work to root out inequities is really
happening.
"There's a tendency to not want to
use quantitative research because it
has been a way to silence groups,"
Moore said. In other words, a group's
feelings about a school or situation
can get overlooked or downplayed
because it's difficult to measure.
"I get [the concern], but I'm trying
to approach research and evaluation
in a different way," he said, where
both quantitative measures and experiences matter.
"You have to have both, because
you have to monitor the work. Some
people want to see stories based on
numbers. Some people want to see
that the story has changed, that the
narrative has changed."
Researchers have started to put
some hard numbers around the effectiveness of policies aimed at educational equity.
In Oakland, a program of regularly
scheduled classes that are exclusively
for black, male students, taught by
black, male teachers who focus on
"social-emotional training, AfricanAmerican history, culturally relevant
pedagogy, and academic supports,"
was found to boost the on-time graduation rate among black males by 3
percentage points.
Rates for black girls also rose,
though not as much.
As chief equity officers grapple with
these weighty tasks of measuring suc-

cess and developing a framework to
do this work, they're also trying to
formalize opportunities to network
with and support one another.
Right now, there is no organization
of chief equity officers, though they do
connect through other school leadership organizations or by visiting districts making strong equity efforts.
"I would love for the philanthropic
community to get a cohort of us together," said Chatmon.
Marshall said he, too, would love
to connect with his peers beyond his
Kentucky district.
"Some of the things that a chief equity officer needs is the affirmation
that you're doing the right work," he
said. "They are tackling racial inequity and gender inequity and going
up against a system that was not designed to even think about this."
There's also a recognition among
these leaders that their work may
never really end.
"This work is a journey, a journey
to a destination that we'll probably
never reach," Vásquez said.
"There's always going to be some
obstacles. But when I walk through
the door and I see our beautiful
babies happy and smiling and joyful and learning ... when I see those
things happening, I think, wow, we're
getting there."
Coverage of leadership, summer
learning, social and emotional
learning, arts learning, and afterschool
is supported in part by a grant from
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wallacefoundation.org. Education Week
retains sole editorial control over the
content of this coverage.

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Measuring Impact
Another challenge for equity officers: defining and quantifying success, especially when talking about
differences in achievement between
students of different races and ethnicities that have been entrenched
for years, if not decades.
"It's messy," Young acknowledged, but the Washoe County official said she has, over time, been
able to build ties with the district's
"awesome" data and accountability
department.
"It took me five or six years to get
there," Young said, but the district
now reports data through an "equity
lens." For example, when school
staff look at enrollment in high-level
academic programs or suspensions,
they do so with an eye to whether
certain groups are under- or overrepresented.
Keeling sees part of her position as
getting people to look beyond numbers as a sole measure of success.
"Voice and story and experience and qualitative [measures] are
equally as important," she said. "I
want the kids to be able to say, 'My
experience has changed for the better.' And I don't want it to be just for
the kids and the parents of color."

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Education Week - October 23, 2019

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