Practical Leadership Tools for Equitable and Excellent Schools

Educational Equity Profiles:
Practical Leadership Tools for Equitable and Excellent Schools
(DRAFT for COMMENT, August 2002)
Linda Skrla
Educational Administration and Human Resource Development Department
Texas A&M University
Juanita Garcia
Department of Educational Administration
The University of Texas at Austin
James Joseph Scheurich
Department of Educational Administration
The University of Texas at Austin
Glenn Nolly
Austin Independent School District
Austin, Texas
Paper presented at the convention of the National Council of Professors of Educational Administration, Burlington,
VT. Comments should be addressed to the first author at: EAHR Department, 4226 TAMU, Texas A&M
University, College Station, TX 77843-4226. Email: lskrla@tamu.edu
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Educational Equity Profiles:
Practical Leadership Tools for Equitable and Excellent Schools
For a long time, schools assumed that whether or not their students learned, business as usual would
continue forever. If that assumption has not yet changed, it will soon. (U.S. Department of Education,
2002a, p. 8)
Introduction
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001(NCLB) was signed into law on January 8, 2002, putting into motion
what has been described as the most sweeping reform of U.S. federal education policy since the 1960s. At the
center of this legislation is a potentially revolutionary premise—the explicit, direct commitment of the federal
government that the achievement gaps that have long existed between the school performance white and middle-
and upper-income children and that of children of color and children from low income homes are unacceptable and
must be eliminated. Given the terrible racial history of this country and the deeply-rooted inequality and injustice in
its educational system, there is, of course, strong suspicion among many—scholars, policymakers, community
activists, and practitioners alike—that this revolutionary potential may be symbolic at best or a sham at worst.
Nonetheless, this legislation has become law, and its implementation provisions will hold schools, districts, and
states accountable for reducing the race and class differences in the academic success of their students.
As we have learned from studies of implementation of earlier generations of accountability policy, equally
strong potential exists for both positive and negative effects on educational equity (Keating, 2000). Furthermore, the
key to positively appropriating the equity potential of such policy mandates often lies in the specific responses of
school leaders and the particular uses to which they put the data derived from accountability systems (Donmoyer &
Garcia Wagstaff, 1990; Hall, 2002; Nolly, 1997; Skrla & Scheurich, 2001). The purpose of this paper is to increase
the likelihood of such equity-positive leadership responses within the context of increasingly high stakes
accountability by proposing a new tool for school leaders to use in their equity-focused work: an educational equity
profile. 1 We begin with a brief discussion of the current accountability context in which this equity tool is designed
to operate. This is followed by a history of the concept of equity auditing, from which the idea of educational equity
profiles is derived. We then outline the components of our prototype profile, discuss the next steps for our project,
and make some concluding comments.
Equity and Accountability 2002
The mechanisms by which the NCLB Act proposes to accomplish the closing of historic achievement gaps
rely heavily on increased accountability:
The NCLB Act will strengthen Title I accountability by requiring States to implement statewide
accountability systems covering all public schools and students. These systems must be based on
challenging State standards in reading and mathematics, annual testing for all students in grades 3-8, and
annual statewide progress objectives ensuring that all groups of students reach proficiency within 12 years.
Assessment results and State progress objectives must be broken out by poverty, race, ethnicity, disability,
and limited English proficiency to ensure that no group is left behind. School districts and schools that fail
to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) toward statewide proficiency goals will, over time, be subject to
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improvement, corrective action, and restructuring measures aimed at getting them back on course to meet
State standards. (U.S. Department of Education, 2002b, 4)
As described in the NCLB Act executive summary quoted above, the required development of state standards, annual
testing, disaggregation of data, and adequate yearly progress will force all states to follow the same path that states
such as Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, and other states have been following for the past ten years. These are
among the states most often cited as exemplars of progress in closing historic achievement gaps, though such
progress has been strongly contested by some scholars and educators (e.g., Anderson, 2001; Haney, 2001; Klein,
2001; Trueba, 2001; Valencia, Valenzuela, Sloan, & Foley, 2001). In spite of such contestation of the progress in
these states, however, the U.S Department of Education’s goal in requiring all states to follow similar paths is clear:
to use accountability policy that is directly based on race and class disaggregation and on a constant decrease in the
related achievement gaps as a vehicle to increase educational equity.
As we have argued in other places, the debate about the educational equity effects of such accountability
policy has tended to be polarized between two camps with each claiming that the effects of accountability policy on
education equity are either all good or all bad (Skrla, 2001a; Scheurich, Skrla, & Johnson, 2000). As we have also
repeatedly argued, the relationships between accountability and equity are, in our view, extremely complex and
dynamic (changing each year due to annual changes in state policies), and the relationship has varied depending on
each state’s particular accountability policy system. Consequently, this state-by-state dynamic complexity requires
careful and respectful debate, including consideration of data indicating opposite effects, and an openness to
different points of view (see, for example Scheurich & Skrla, 2001; Skrla, Scheurich, Johnson, & Koschoreck,
2002a, 2002b).
Over the past several years, we have participated in several of these accountability debates in person in
settings such as the annual conventions of the University Council of Educational Administration and the American
Educational Research Association and in print in journals such as Phi Delta Kappan, Education and Urban Society,
International Journal of Leadership in Education, and Educational Researcher. In these venues, we’ve been very
clear about our support for some aspects of accountability policy because of the positive effects of these aspects on
educational equity in several areas, including:
• Providing a common set of expectations for student achievement for all student groups that is not based on
deficit assumptions;
• Focusing attention on achievement gaps;
• Providing publicly available data for use by civic and community activists;
• Forcing district and school leaders to assume responsibility for educating equitably all students; and
• Initiating school improvement through adoption of productive practices such as curriculum alignment, high
quality staff development, multicultural curricula, and culturally relevant pedagogy, among others.
From numerous exchanges with our critics (see Anderson, 2001; Haney, 2001; Klein, 2001; Sclafani, 2001; Trueba,
2001; Valencia et al., 2001) and from our own research, however, we’ve also gained a more nuanced understanding
of and appreciation for the fact that accountability policy alone is not enough to support the broad-scale
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improvement of educational practices that will be required to close historic achievement gaps in every school in
every district across the U.S.
For example, as Walt Haney (2001) has compellingly argued, reducing school dropout rates is as critically
important to achieving educational equity as is increasing student achievement. Additionally, as Valencia et al.
(2001) pointed out, teacher quality is a highly significant factor that determines the equitability of schooling that
children receive. Also, Larry Parker (2001) has argued that issues of overrepresentation of children of color in
special education and differential educational progress between African American boys and girls are critical issues
that influence the degree of equity in schooling.
Our view of the relationship between accountability and educational equity, then, has evolved. While, to
us, accountability remains an extremely powerful and important force in the struggle for education equity, it is but
one part of a larger system of schooling practices characterized by equity and inequity that is expressed in multiple
dimensions. Thus, in order to close achievement gaps and educate equitably all children, systemic equity will be
required. Scott (2001) provided a useful definition of systemic equity:
Systemic equity is defined as the transformed ways in which systems and individuals habitually operate to
ensure that every learner—in whatever learning environment that learner is found—has the greatest
opportunity to learn enhanced by the resources and supports necessary to achieve competence, excellence,
independence, responsibility, and self-sufficiency for school and for life. (6)
The accomplishment of such systemic equity will require the development of new tools for educators to use to
assess not only achievement gaps but resource and opportunity gaps as well.
School leaders and others must have access to tools to use in developing more comprehensive
understanding of equity and inequity relationships in their current systems to guide future planning, implementation,
and evaluation. Consequently, we are proposing a model for such a tool—an educational equity profile—that has its
roots in U.S. educational and civil rights history, but which has been designed and streamlined to be of maximum
utility in the current climate of high stakes accountability and ready availability of data.
Historical Background of Educational Equity Profiles
The idea of using an educational equity profile as a leadership tool to guide schools in working toward
equity and excellence is based on the concept of equity auditing, a more elaborate process that has history in at least
three areas of research literature: civil rights, curriculum auditing, and state accountability. The terminology equity
audit (also known as a representivity audit) has a deep history in civil rights enforcement in the U.S. and other
nations (for example, Scotland, Great Britain, and Australia) in a variety of arenas including, but not limited to,
education. For example, corporations and governmental entities commonly conduct (or are subject to) employment
equity audits, health equity audits, pay equity audits, gender equity audits, and technology equity audits, among
others.
In the U.S. educational arena, specifically, equity audits of school districts have been conducted by school
districts (either voluntarily or under pressure by civic activists or ordered by the U.S. Department of Education
Office of Civil Rights) as a way of determining the degree of compliance with a number of civil rights statutes that
prohibit discrimination in educational programs and activities receiving federal funding. These statutes include:
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Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (prohibiting race, color, and national origin discrimination); Title
IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (prohibiting sex discrimination); Section 504 of the
Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (prohibiting disability discrimination); Title II of the Americans with
Disabilities Act of 1990 (prohibiting disability discrimination by public entities); and the Age
Discrimination Act of 1975 (prohibiting age discrimination). (U.S. Department of Education, 1999, 1)
Equity audits of school districts focused on compliance with these federal civil rights acts have tended to be
exhaustive and have typically produced voluminous reports. Civil rights-based equity audits have been conducted in
recent years by educational consultants such as Harvard’s Robert Peterkin in school districts around the country
including Urbana, Illinois; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Harrison, Colorado; and Albuquerque, New Mexico.
In addition to their utility in the civil rights arena, equity audits have also been used in conjunction with
curriculum audits. William Poston (1992) and Jacqueline Mitchell, in collaboration with Poston (1992), described a
design for school equity audits that was an adaptation of one standard area in a design for more comprehensive
school curriculum audits developed by Fenwick English (1988). Drawing from and expanding on curriculum audit
Standard 3: “A School System Demonstrates Internal Connectivity and Rational Equity in its Program Development
and Implementation,” Poston proposed fifteen areas of analysis for use in equity audits. These areas included:
administrative and supervisory practices; course offerings and access; financial and funding resources; individual
difference considerations; materials and facilities; special program and services delivery; student management
practices; class size practices; demographic distribution; grouping practices and instruction; instructional time
utilization; promotion and retention practices; staff development and training; support services provision; and
teacher assignment and work load (p. 236). Poston and Mitchell published one report of the application of this
equity audit to case studies in three school district in 1992, but there has been no further published research on this
method since that time.
A third place area in which equity audits have been used is as part of state school reform and accountability
efforts. Over the past decade, several state departments of education have developed instruments to evaluate equity
levels in school districts in their state. These instruments have varied widely in design. Some, Kentucky’s for
example, have been based in part on the logic of curriculum audits (Kentucky Department of Education, 1999;
Steffy, 1993). Washington State’s Equity Self-Evaluation and Planning Documentation instrument was developed
in 1993 by a task force and is mainly data based (State of Washington, 1995). Since 1992, the State of Iowa has
conducted on site equity reviews of 13 to 14 school districts per year. These reviews are extensive and include
interviews as well as reviews of 15 categories of documents including such items as board policy books, master
schedules for teachers and students, and school improvement plans.
These three streams of history for the concept of equity audits converge to create a potentially useful site to
leverage educational equity in the present climate of federally mandated, high stakes educational reform. As states,
districts, and individual schools grapple with new requirements that they assess students, use disaggregated data, and
demonstrate progress in closing achievement gaps, there will be a great need for new tools for school leaders to use
to understand the results of the systems in place in their districts and campuses. Existing versions of equity audits
(whether based on civil rights, curriculum auditing, or state accountability) produce enormous amounts of data.
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While such detailed examination of macro- and micro- practices of schools and districts is highly useful in certain
circumstances, it also limits the utility of the results of such an audit. Few people in a district or school (and even
fewer parents or community members) will have the time, expertise, or motivation to read through a document 200
or 300 pages in length.
What we propose—educational equity profiles—are alternate, more focused descendents of equity audits,
that would supplement, rather than supplant, the longer, more detailed varieties currently in use. What is needed is a
way for school leaders and others to have data for their district displayed in a clear and understandable way that
reveals the levels of equity and inequity produced by their system of schooling. With ever increasing amounts of
data being generated by state accountability systems and local district research efforts, there is a large need for tools
that will reduce some of the complexity of these results without stripping them of their utility for planning and
evaluation.
Prototype of an Educational Equity Profile
In our work as professors and practitioners of educational administration, we interact constantly with
master’s and doctoral students, teachers, administrators, board members, community members, and policy makers.
In our discussions with these individuals and groups about issues of educational equity and accountability, we
commonly hear the comment that “everybody knows this”—meaning that the evidence of systemic inequity among
student groups in opportunity and achievement are well understood by the people working in and connected with
schools. Our experience is, in reality, just the opposite. Despite a decade or more of working within a context of
increasingly high stakes accountability that produces growing amounts of data about their schools, administrators
and teachers we work with, overwhelmingly, do not have an clear or accurate understanding of the degree of
inequity present in their own schools and school districts. Other researchers have also found that, in typical school
settings, teachers and administrators routinely avoid overt discussions of race as a factor in inequitable school
outcomes (Pollock, 2001). Furthermore, it is typical that when these educators are queried about why children of
color and children from low income homes do not do well in school, they cite factors external to schooling, blaming
factors such as the children’s homes, their neighborhoods, and even their genetics (McKenzie, 2001; Valencia,
1997).
In order for teachers and administrators to work against such deficit assumptions about the educability of
the children in their schools, they must come to recognize the magnitude, the extent, and the systemic nature of the
inequities present in their current practices. We recognize the complexity of the task of getting mainly white
teachers and administrators to incorporate new perspectives into predominately deficit assumptions, as Sleeter
(1996) has pointed out in the context of teaching teachers about multicultural education:
Many educators conceptualize this task as helping [teachers] "unlearn" negative attitudes about race,
develop positive attitudes and a knowledge base about race and various racial groups, and learn
multicultural teaching strategies. . . .This the task is more complex than that. . . .They integrate information
about race provided in multicultural teacher education programs into the knowledge they already have,
much more than they reconstruct that knowledge. (p. 65)
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Because of the complexity and the difficulty of this type of task, practical and assessable tools can be highly useful.
Thus our prototype educational equity profile is intended to be used to promote discussion of and substantive
response to systemic patterns of inequity in schools and school districts. We suggest a manageable set of key
indicators that, together, will form a straightforward initial profile of educational equity levels in schools. After
considering the types of indicators available (from equity audits and from state accountability systems), we’ve come
up with a set of 12 indicators grouped into three categories for our prototype educational equity profile. These three
dimensions are teacher quality equity, programmatic equity, and achievement equity. These three areas of equity are
inextricably linked in our schools. They can even be conceptualized as additive, or productive of one another, as
illustrated in Figure 1 below.
Teacher
Quality Equity
Figure 1
+
Programmatic
Equity
=
Each of the three areas is described in more detail and examples are provided for each dimension in the following
section.
Teacher Quality Equity
There is growing consensus among researchers and practitioners that high quality teachers are key
determinants of students' opportunities to be academically successful (Ferguson, 1998; Darling-Hammond, 1999).
Determining what teacher quality is and how to measure it, of course, is a complicated issue. Tennessee, for
example, has chosen to define it as “value added”—the contribution each teacher makes to students’ standardized
test performance. This narrow definition has received considerable critique, and other states have not yet followed
this path. Other indicators that serve as proxies for evidence of teacher quality, such as experience and training, are
commonly used. There is ample evidence that access to quality teachers defined by such indicators is not typically
distributed on an equitable basis to all schools within a district, nor to all students within individual schools.
Students of color and students from low income homes, historically, have less experienced teachers, teachers with
less formal education and training, and more teachers teaching without certification and/or outside their area of
expertise (Ingersoll, 1999)
For a school district, then, evidence of teacher quality equity would result from an examination of the
distribution throughout the schools in the district of teacher quality. Four indicators for which data should be
available from state and local sources are:
• Teacher education (bachelor’s, master’s, & doctoral degrees)
• Teacher experience
• Teacher mobility
Achievement
Equity
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• Teachers without certification or assigned outside area of expertise
At the district level, then, the central question would be what is the degree to which these indicators are distributed
equitably among the campuses within the district. In other words, do the schools serving primarily low income
students have the same percentage of teachers holding master’s degrees or higher, the same percentage of
experienced teachers, the same teacher mobility rate, and the same percent of uncertified teachers and teachers
teaching outside their areas of expertise as do schools serving primarily children from middle- and upper-income
homes? Different districts will have relatively greater or lesser degrees of all of the these factors due to geography,
finances, and other factors—but this area of the educational equity profile asks to what extent are these resources
passed out equitably among the district’s schools. Mitchell and Poston (1992) suggested in their proposal for more
comprehensive equity audits that campuses that differed from district averages by more than 20% were indications
of inequity. We would suggest, depending on the size of the school district, that a higher standard—perhaps 10%
deviation from the district average—would be appropriate for this section of the educational equity profile.
For example, let’s take a district of 50,000 students. A district this size will have numerous elementary
schools. Suppose we look at three of the schools serving families with the lowest incomes and three serving
families with the highest incomes. If we look, then, at the distribution of teachers by teacher education level, are the
teachers at the high income schools significantly more educated than those at the low income schools? Is there more
mobility of teachers in the low income schools? Are there more teachers teaching outside their area of expertise or
without certification at the low income schools? Are the teachers at the high income schools generally more
experienced than those at the low income schools? What we have found, especially in larger districts, is that there is
considerable teacher quality inequity that is a taken for granted and thus never pointed out as a “cause” of the
achievement gaps in a district.
However, it is not enough to look at this just across districts. These same kind of patterns often exist within
schools. Are the Advanced Placement and Gifted and Talented classes at the higher grades taught by the more
educated, more experienced, more stable teachers, while the main classes or lower track classes or the lower grade
classes taught be the least educated, least experienced, more mobile teachers? Again, we have frequently found,
especially in larger schools, that there are these kind of taken for granted teacher assignments that no one points out
as a possible cause of achievement gaps.
Programmatic Equity
Equally as important as teacher quality is the quality of the instructional programs in which students are
placed (or removed from access to). Though educators would like to pretend otherwise, there are large variations of
quality among different placements and programs within schools and school districts (see, for example, Schoenfeld,
2002, for an excellent discussion of difference in quality of math programs). The potential indicators for the
educational equity profile in this category are numerous, but we’ve identified four key areas that research has
consistently shown to be significant sites of inequity. These four are:
• special education
• gifted and talented education
• bilingual education
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• student discipline
Over-assignment of students of color and students from low income homes to special education, especially the most
severe categories of disability, has long been recognized as an area of gross inequity within our school systems
(Artiles, 1998; MacMillan & Reschly, 1998). Additionally, high stakes accountability systems have placed more
pressure on educators to identify students for special education in order to exempt them from testing. This makes
special education an essential indicator in the programmatic equity category.
The problem of over-representation in special education is mirrored in reverse in programs for the
education of gifted and talented students (Ford & Harmon, 2001). Students of color and students from low-income
homes are grossly under-represented in the ranks of the students identified as gifted and talented. Rates of G/T
identification vary greatly among school districts, with some serving less than 5% of children in this category and
others serving upwards of 12%. Regardless of the rate, however, the indicator for the equity profile is whether all
student groups are represented in proportionate numbers.
Here is a typical example illustrated by Figure 2 below. These data are taken from an urban district with
which are familiar. The district has about 50,000 students with 4,650 in G/T courses districtwide or 9.3% of their
student population. About 73.0% of these students or 36,500 come from low-income families. However, there are
only 734 students from these low-income families in G/T courses in this district. This means that though 73% of the
districts students come from low income families, only 15.8% of G/T students come from low-income homes . As a
result, students from low-income families are considerably under-represented (about one-fifth of what would be
proportional) in G/T classes. This is an inequity pattern in this district.
All Students Students Not from Low-
Income Homes
Students in District 50,000 13,500 36,500
G/T Students 4,650 3,916 734
Figure 2
Students from Low-
Income Homes
A third indicator for the programmatic equity category is progress of students served through bilingual
education. As growing numbers of culturally and linguistically diverse students enroll in our schools, it becomes
ever more important to assess the quality of bilingual instruction they receive. Unfortunately, in the past bilingual
programs have all to often been language ghettos where students were segregated and neither became proficient in
English nor progressed academically in their first language (Moll, 1992). Texas has recently begun including on its
Academic Excellence Indicator System reports for each district the progress of English language learners on the
state test of reading proficiency in English. This indicator (or other, similar indicators in other states) would help
monitor whether on not students in bilingual students are being served appropriately as opposed to simply
warehoused.
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Though discipline may seem an odd fit with the other three categories, it seems clear that students who are
routinely and consistently caught up in the discipline system are removed from their regular classes and denied
access to the curriculum. For some students (particularly African American and Latino boys), the disciplinary
system in their school becomes their de facto instructional program since that is where they spend the majority of
their time.
Figure 3
Above is an example based on real data for the 2001-2002 school year from a 1,300 student high school.
African American males received discipline (all categories of from minor to severe have been combined) at a rate
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
that is nearly three times their proportional representation in the student population. For Hispanic males the rate is
more than four times their proportional representation. Clearly, this high school has an inequitable situation with
respect to discipline.
Achievement Equity
35
Achievement is perhaps the category that has received the most recent attention from researchers, policy
analysts, and the public, with discussions of test score gaps becoming commonplace and debates about causes and
solutions occurring in a wide variety of venues. The purpose of including achievement equity as a category in the
educational equity profile, thus, is to keep this focus on equity outcomes centered and to expand the traditional
attention on state achievement test results to include other evidence of student achievement including high school
completion, completion of college prep curriculum, and higher level assessments such as the SAT, ACT, and
Advanced Placement exams. As we’ve learned from our research with school districts that have made significant
progress toward equity, equitable achievement on relatively low level state assessments does not indicate true
achievement equity when large gaps remain on other, more challenging indicators of student performance. Thus, the
four indicators we propose for this category include:
• State achievement tests
• Dropout rate
14
12 12
Afr. Am. Male Afr. Am.
Female
• High school graduation tracks
• SAT/ACT/Advanced Placement
Example Small Town High School
Student Discipline
21
5 5
6
33 33
Hisp. Male Hisp. Female White Male White Female
% of Population % of Discipline Cases
17
7
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All 50 states now have some form of state achievement tests and soon will be required to publicly disseminate
performance results disaggregated by student race and income levels. Performance on these tests should be a basic
indicator included in the educational equity profile.
Beyond performance on state tests, however, lie other areas that need significant scrutiny for evidence of
levels of equity with school districts. Dropout rates (or, alternatively, school completion rates) are an indicator that
increasing is coming to the forefront of discussions of educational equity and accountability (see Haney, 2001).
Students of color (particularly males) and students from low income homes drop out of school before graduating in
grossly disproportionate numbers.
A third area for consideration in this category of the educational equity audit is high school graduation
tracks. All students who graduate do typically do not pursue equally rigorous curricula, with most states having
some form of a tiered system that offers basic, advanced, and/or college preparatory curricula. Again, the
percentage of students completing high school under each plan may vary widely from district to district, but the
central question addressed by this indicator is whether there is proportional representation of student groups in each
graduation track within each district.
The fourth indicator in the achievement equity group is performance on college admissions tests and/or
Advanced Placement Examinations. As with other indicators we’ve discussed, students of color and students from
low income homes typically score much lower on these advanced measures than do white students and students
from middle- and upper-income homes. Below are example data from a 78,000 student urban district for student
performance on Advanced Placement exams. The demographics of this district’s students are 16% African
American, 48% Hispanic, and 34% white. It is clear that many few students of color are taking these examinations
and that they are scoring at or above the criterion for college credit at lower rates than are white students.
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Figure 4
6
36
Example Urban District
Advanced Placement Exams
14
African American Hispanic White
% Students Tested % Scoring Equal or Above Criteria
Next Steps
We are in still in the preliminary stages of developing a workable model of this educational equity profile.
Over the course of the year, we will be putting these indicators together in an instrument that will have a user-
37
39
51
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friendly format along with suggestions for data sources, benchmarks from the literature for levels of equity, and
recommendations for sources of best practices to work for improvement in each area. We will also be piloting the
instrument with two school districts.
Conclusion
In this paper, we’ve proposed a prototype model for an educational equity profile, a tool for school leaders
and other educators to help them understand and address the systemic inequities in their organizations and practices
that lead to differential levels of student achievement that is distributed along race and social class lines. We see this
tool as a descendent of an important history of school equity audits and as a focused instrument that has the potential
to be highly useful in the U.S. educational climate of high stakes accountability. We’ve identified a dozen key
indicators grouped into three categories—teacher quality equity, programmatic equity, and achievement
equity—that, together, can portray an initial profile of the state of systemic equity (or inequity) within a school or
district.
This educational equity profile, of course, is only one tool, with potential for applicability in a particular
way in a much larger, long-term struggle. The fight for educational excellence and equity for literally all children
has been underway in U.S. schools for many years and will continue for many years yet to come. There are,
however, individual schools, districts, and states in which substantial progress has been made, and we have learned
much as researchers from our work in some of these schools and districts (Garcia Wagstaff, J.G., 2000; Nolly, 1997;
Skrla & Scheurich, 2001). It is on this successful practice that our proposal for educational equity profiles is based,
and we hope to contribute it as a tool for leaders and educators in other schools and other districts and other states to
pick up and use to advance the cause of equity in the public school system.
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1 This project is one of several, related projects funded by a grant by the Ford Foundation to Leaders for Social
Justice, a group of educational administration professors committed to advancing educational equity and social
justice within our field and within U.S. public schools. Catherine Marshall, Professor of Educational Leadership at
the University of North Carolina, is principal investigator.
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