Opportunities and Common Pitfalls of Postsecondary Foundations Striving to Drive Educational Equity

The author analyzes the evolution of nine postsecondary foundations’ theories of change and their impact on minoritized communities.

Introduction

In 2020, the philanthropy sector saw a surge of public commitments to antiracism, in support of the Movement for Black Lives. In the years after, a political backlash urged institutional leaders to reconsider those commitments. The author of this article explores how nine postsecondary foundations have evolved their theories of change on educational equity over time and how this affects minoritized communities. Racialized Change Work (RCW) is a purposeful action that specifically focuses on changing norms and processes that reproduce racial inequalities. The author highlights one foundation, Lumina, as an example of how foundations can drive RCW by 1) setting public, measurable, and absolute goals and 2) focusing on addressing power structures, not minoritized communities themselves.

Heather N. McCambly is an Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations, Organizations, and Policy at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. McCambly’s current research focuses on the role of philanthropy in US postsecondary education.

Methods and Findings

McCambly analyzes the grantmaking descriptions, grantmaking activity, annual reports, mission statements, and press releases of nine foundations using an archival dataset from 2000 to 2019. Through this archival analysis that connects foundations’ theories of change, funding practices, and ultimately their effect on educational equity, McCambly explores the pitfalls many foundations faced when first defining the drivers of educational inequities. Additionally, the author provides an example of how one foundation is actively pursuing RCW. 

The author highlights how foundations’ initial theories of change in the 1990s to mid-2010s were ‘race-evasive’ or did not explicitly refer to racism as a driver of inequality in higher education. This led to interventions that only focused on educational access rather than success. Later, when foundations first started to address educational inequities due to race and class, they often employed deficit thinking that placed blame on low-income students and populations rather than educational institutions. These foundations tended to depict minoritized students as roadblocks to meeting national and statewide educational outcome goals rather than centering on the failure of institutions. These frames led to the funding of deficit-focused interventions that failed to address racial inequities.

The first foundation to break away from these pitfalls was Lumina. McCambly presents two primary ways that Lumina changed its approach to educational equity, which led to an increase in the foundation’s proportion of race-conscious funding and RCW.

• Setting public, absolute, and measurable targets: Lumina announced their Goal 2025, which committed to increasing “the percentage of Americans with high-quality, two- or four-year college degrees and credentials from 39% to 60% by 2025, an increase of 23 million graduates.” McCambly argues that this public goal was an essential step in Lumina taking accountability and responsibility for creating quantifiable change.
• Naming racism and focusing on institutional change: Lumina’s goal directly acknowledges that “historical and current patterns of discrimination, segregation and racism continue to foster disparities […] and make it increasingly difficult to achieve the American dream. Native American, African American, and Latino students are disproportionately poor, have less access to quality education, and are underrepresented in positions of power.” Lumina’s explicit naming of racism and focus on the lack of representation in positions of power shifts the narrative to a need to address racial inequities and power structures rather than minoritized communities themselves.

Conclusions

Through analyzing the evolution of these theories across nine foundations and their ties to grantmaking activity, McCambly argues that theories of change have a crucial impact on the ability of postsecondary foundations to drive educational equity. The author concludes that foundations can avoid racialized deficit thinking and practices that can impede the educational outcomes of minoritized communities by 1) establishing public and measurable goals that hold the foundational accountable for the outcomes of minoritized students and 2) explicitly naming racism and a focus on institutional change rather than student-level change.

Tenant Organizing: The Power of Collective Action at the Intersection of Racial, Health, and Housing Equity

Introduction

Despite the significant role that power asymmetries play in driving health inequities, there is a dearth of research on the intersection of power, racism, and health equity. In this article, Michener argues that housing is a driver of racial health inequity and that tenants play a significant and overlooked role in combating health-threatening housing conditions. The author highlights two primary channels through which tenants nationwide have organized to improve housing and health equity: 1) direct action that places pressure on key stakeholders who have the power to improve housing conditions, and 2) local policy change to address housing conditions. In examining these channels, the author discusses the importance of understanding the role of power in health equity research and argues that centering tenants and their power as solutions to health equity challenges is necessary for institutional change.

Jamila Michener is an Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University. Her work focuses on unpacking the political causes and impacts of racial inequities, and her most recent book, Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism and Unequal Politics, explores how having Medicaid affects political participation.

Methods and Findings

The author conducted 79 semi-structured interviews with tenants nationwide over four years. Interviewees were asked to share their housing experiences, and the majority discussed the negative consequences of inequitable housing policies on their health. The interviews with tenant organization members, which comprised the majority of those interviewed, shed light on how these organizations have built and wielded power to fight against the political, economic, and racial systems that produce health-threatening housing conditions.

On the intersection of race, housing, and health equity

Michener discusses how health-threatening housing conditions disproportionately affect racially marginalized communities and argues that collective power is needed to address these conditions. Firstly, the author establishes the link between race and housing inequality. Michener references decades of research to highlight how substandard housing conditions can result in respiratory illnesses and other severe health risks. The author argues that these conditions disproportionately affect racially marginalized communities due to the role of structural racism, which manifests as policies and practices that normalize decayed housing and limit the supply of affordable housing for racially marginalized communities. Key mechanisms of structural racism in this case include discriminatory financial lending practices and underfunded public housing programs.

Michener posits that racially marginalized communities require collective power to confront these systemic barriers. Collective power can enable tenants “to identify the systemic failures underlying their individual problems and to strategically channel their collective energies through concerted social and political action.” The interviewed tenants wielded their collective power through two main mechanisms: 1) organizing to pressure key stakeholders such as landlords, property management companies, and government officials, and 2) driving local policy change to improve housing conditions.

Organizing to pressure critical stakeholders

In interviews, tenants shared examples of how they pressured landlords, government officials, and other stakeholders through protests, rallies, and rent strikes. For instance, in Texas, rent strikes were used to pressure the management company of an apartment complex without running water.

Lessons learned when organizers apply pressure:

• Many tenants viewed the ability to pressure institutions through collective power as particularly important in the context of racism.  Tenants convey how they see their own struggles with housing conditions connected to historically racist laws and policies. 
• Effectively applying pressure requires understanding the political context. In the example of the water shortage in an apartment complex in Texas, an interviewee highlights how the tenant organization deprioritized putting pressure on elected officials, given that management companies had more immediate ability to address the water shortage.
• Events like protests and rallies can create opportunities to negotiate with elected officials for more direct policy change.  For example, one tenant organization in the Deep South successfully changed eviction policies through sustained protests and negotiations with elected officials at City Hall.

Organizing to drive local policy change

Michener focuses on the example of two tenant organizers, Joe and Jocelyn, from a Southern city to highlight the potential for organizing to drive local policy change. 80-90% of the members of this tenant union were Black, and the primary objective of this organizing effort was to remove an extractive property management company that contractually oversaw the city’s public housing properties.

Lessons learned when organizers drive policy change:

• The tenant organizers were particularly successful in this example because they sought to understand the role of race in the city’s power structures. The organizers identified that the elected official was unlikely to take action to break the contract with the management company because these city officials were largely insulated from the harm that was disproportionately affecting Black women in the city. Recognizing this power structure enabled the tenant organization to develop an effective negotiation strategy that brought together tenants, union members, the city council, and the management company and focused on public testimonies.
• The tenant organizers engaged in strategic institutional negotiations centered around tenant testimonies and highlighted the imbalanced power dynamic between the management company and tenants. After organizing hundreds of the city’s tenants, the union met with the city council through a committee hearing. Tenants shared their experiences with housing related health risks, and the management company’s egregious public dismissal of their responses led to the cancellation of their contract.

Conclusions

The author argues that organizing and driving local policy change can potentially improve the health equity of racially marginalized populations. Through examples from tenant organizers, Michener highlights how collective action requires understanding the racial and political contexts of the most affected. Furthermore, driving local policy change requires understanding the city’s power structure and corresponding power dynamics. 

The author suggests that further research should focus on better understanding the ways in which power operates at the intersection of race, health, and housing equity. This study argues that health equity researchers should move towards a theory of change that highlights the political agency of racially marginalized communities. These organizing efforts underscore the potential for tenant and other forms of organizing to drive sustained institutional change in health.

Leadership for Institutional Change: How Educational Leaders Can Support Undocumented and Unaccompanied Students

Introduction

Many undocumented and documented youth, especially those from low socioeconomic backgrounds, face significant barriers to educational opportunities due in part to racism and other intersecting systems of oppression. In this article, the authors conduct a literature review on educational practices for immigrant youth. Both authors work in the Urbana School District 116 (USD116) and analyze the district’s institutional change efforts as a case study. They argue that school leadership must challenge the role schools have played in the past as “vehicles of assimilation to the majoritarian, white middle class standard of schools.”

Based on the case study, the authors describe a race-conscious approach to school leadership across four areas of analysis:

1. academic programming that is offered in multiple relevant languages and trainings that prepare educators for integrated language programs, 
2. free social and political student support services through partnerships with local organizations, 
3. support with transitioning to postsecondary schooling, and 
4. robust leadership opportunities for undocumented and unaccompanied minor students.

Joseph T. Wiemelt is the Director of Equity & Secondary Bilingual Programs for USD116 and a Lecturer in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Wiemelt’s research includes bilingual education. Lucia Maldonado is the Latino Family Liaison for USD116. Maldonado’s work focuses on creating support systems for immigrant students.

Methods and Findings

Using the framework of Latinx Critical Race Theory (LatCrit), the authors analyze previous educational literature regarding the challenges and opportunities of educational equity for immigrant students. LatCrit builds on the framework of Critical Race Theory but specifically focuses on the “issues related to the resistance, oppression, and challenges faced by Latin@s” and emphasizes the role of “language, culture, and nation” as they relate to race. Although the authors advocate for LatCrit as an effective framework to better understand how language and xenophobia intersect with the educational challenges faced by immigrant students, they emphasize that immigrant groups have unique experiences even if they come from similar geographies.

Key challenges with schools supporting immigrant students in educational literature: 

• School leadership that adopts a colorblind or race-neutral approach can force immigrant students to assimilate, ignoring the unique needs and strengths of these students.
• Academic programming does not consider the work schedules of immigrant parents coupled with fear of deportation or undocumented status.
• Monolingual teachers are undertrained and unprepared to provide the linguistic and social emotional support required for immigrant students.
• School programming places limited emphasis on postsecondary transitions for immigrant youth.

Case Study

In addition to an educational literature review, the authors examine the case study of USD116, a PK-Adult public school district in Illinois with 4,500 students. 15% of these students are immigrants, and 71% are low-income. The authors analyze the past 10 years of USD116’s institutional change efforts within four areas of analysis.

Key elements of a race-conscious approach based on areas of analysis:

• Academic programming should be culturally and linguistically designed to reflect school demographics. Dual-language immersion models can help students learn in their native languages while still learning English. To facilitate these programs, teachers should be bilingually trained. At USD116, teachers received training to better understand the potential traumas of immigrant students in order to support them more effectively. To ensure all employees were trained to work with immigrant students, USD116 hosted monthly sessions for employees to learn more about race and various systems of oppression.
• Partnerships with local immigration community agencies enabled USD116 to support immigrant students and their families with access to legal, medical, and other support services. By partnering with community organizations and hosting workshops, the school district was better able to connect families with critical resources that may have been inaccessible otherwise.
• Support with transitioning to postsecondary schools includes helping immigrant students understand financial aid options and connecting them with school options. USD116 partnered with the local community college to proactively introduce students to colleges and make the transition from high school easier.
• Student leadership opportunities that focus on helping students express themselves and learn from each other can facilitate student connections. For example, at Urbana High School in USD116, students documented their stories through podcasts. This strengths-based approach to programming can help students recognize their leadership potential.

Conclusions

The institutional change efforts at USD116 provide key examples of how school leadership can more equitably support undocumented and unaccompanied minor students. Using a LatCrit framework, the authors discuss how colorblind or race neutral approaches to academic programming are inequitable for immigrant students. They instead advocate for several key efforts to drive institutional change, which include linguistically responsive academic programming, partnerships with local organizations to provide more comprehensive support services, postsecondary matriculation programming, and creation of more student leadership opportunities. These strategies are critical to driving educational equity for undocumented and unaccompanied minor students.

Challenging Racial Deficit Assumptions: School Leadership Actions to Drive Educational Equity

Introduction

Recent education research literature shows that a ‘new racism’ has emerged in elementary and secondary schools. This ‘new racism’ adopts a deficit mindset that blames students and parents of color for educational inequities instead of institutional barriers. Using Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a framework, the authors present the case study of a middle school in the Mountain Western region of the United States to underscore how school leadership decisions can drive institutional change in schools. They examine how racial deficit thinking can be challenged by: (1) identifying systemic equity challenges through internal equity audits, (2) initiating parental dialogues to counter majoritarian views that blame students of color and their families for academic outcomes, and (3) challenging existing school disciplinary measures that are rooted in the idea of whiteness as property.

Michelle N. Amiot is the Director of Research, Assessment and Evaluation at Salt Lake City School District and is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Utah. Jennifer Mayer-Glenn is the Special Assistant to the President for Campus-Community Partnerships at the University of Utah and previously served as the Director of Family School Collaboration at Salt Lake City School District. Laurence Parker is the chair of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Utah. Parker’s work focuses on diversity and equity in K-12 education.

Methods and Findings

While CRT is often used to highlight evidence of educational inequity, the authors argue that it is underutilized as a lens to explore how the policies and initiatives of school leaders impact racial equity. A traditional CRT framework includes six tenets, including the permanence of racism and other key facts. The authors focus in particular on the tenet of whiteness as property, which is rooted in the fundamental belief that “meritocracy in admissions and acceptance into […] elite colleges and universities was seen as a property right of whites”. This concept can manifest as the prioritization of white history in academic programming over that of minoritized groups and as a racial deficit mindset that normalizes the underperformance of students of color. 

The authors conduct a case study of a historically low-resourced middle school where two members of the research team worked as assistant principals. The  school was located within a high immigrant and refugee population area; 65% of the students identified as Latinx, and students spoke a diverse set of first languages. One of the main equity challenges identified was that the teachers had ingrained racial deficit thinking that “accepted beliefs of school failure regarding racially, culturally and linguistically diverse students.” A school equity audit revealed that many teachers believed that “individualized reasons for underachievement” were the cause of school failures. Examples of deficit-based reasons include lack of parental attention, inherently unmotivated students, and familial cultural devaluing of education. These beliefs in turn led to lower levels of academic programming and instruction for students of color. The authors discuss several key interventions school leadership took to combat racialized deficit thinking and create more equitable school practices for students of color.

Institutional change efforts conducted by the school leadership team to combat racial deficit assumptions:

• Internal equity audits: These audits focused on uncovering systemic inequities that had become normalized at the school. The audit results showed that the school’s policies focused more on the needs of staff instead of students, and teachers held racialized deficit beliefs about students and parents. These results were shared back in small group sessions with teachers. In these sessions, school leadership worked to dismantle the prevailing belief that the alternative of racial deficit views of blaming students of color was scrutinizing teachers. This effort catalyzed teachers’ acceptance of engaging with racial equity work at the school.  
• Parent dialogues: Increased communication with parents facilitated the sharing of counternarratives that challenged teachers’ racial deficit thinking. In the case study, parental  dialogue sessions were held multiple times a year and “served as a tool to disrupt the deficit storytelling and the majoritarian view about the school population and the surrounding community.” Parents, teachers, and school leaders were seen as partners in the effort to create more equitable schooling.
• Changes to school discipline practices: The equity audits revealed that school discipline measures served as another barrier to educational equity. The authors highlight how “whiteness as property and an overuse of punishment controls against students of color was part of the normalized standard operational procedures at the school.” Using a CRT framework, the school leadership collaborated with school resource officers to recognize the investment of their students in education rather than seeing them as a threat. School leaders also initiated sessions teaching staff and students about the role of racial profiling.

Conclusions

The authors advocate for CRT as a lens to challenge racial deficit thinking in schools and create pathways to educational equity. They present a case study of how one middle school in the U.S. was able to shift deficit thinking and create more equitable pathways for students of color. Key institutional change efforts include (1) conducting internal audit reviews to understand systemic inequities, (2) creating partnerships between parents, teachers, and students to challenge deficit beliefs, and (3) challenging assumptions that privilege whiteness in school disciplinary measures. Understanding and challenging racial deficit thinking is critical to introducing and sustaining racial equity change in education.

Combatting Inequities from Tracked Classrooms: The Possibilities of Detracking

Introduction

Grouping students in schools based on perception of their potential or academic ability, known as tracking, has been critiqued by educators for exacerbating educational inequities along race and class lines. Detracking attempts to remedy the negative effects of this widely-used practice in the U.S. by placing students in mixed-ability classes. In this article, the authors use their experience teaching and researching in detracked classrooms to illuminate the dilemmas and opportunities of detracking. They highlight a number of effective practices for detracked classrooms to reduce racial and socioeconomic disparities in educational outcomes.

Beth C. Rubin is a Professor of Education in the Department of Arts and Humanities at Teachers College, Columbia University. She has published several articles on detracking in publications such as the American Educational Research Journal, Curriculum Inquiry, and Teachers College Record. Pedro A. Noguera is the Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean of the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education. His work focuses on K-12 Education Policy. Noguera was previously a tenured professor and holder of endowed chairs at NYU, UCLA, Harvard, and UC Berkeley.

Methods and Findings

The authors conduct a literature review on school improvement and organizational leadership for equity. They also synthesize takeaways from their own hands-on experience in over 25 public middle schools and high schools to explore the challenges and possibilities of detracking as an effective educational reform to address classroom inequities.

Challenges with Detracking

The authors highlight the challenges with detracking as a response to the inequities reinforced by tracking. When not executed properly, detracking can create social and academic challenges. For example, if students do not have assigned seats, they may re-segregate themselves within their classroom and reinforce perceptions of weaker and stronger students along race and class lines. Academically, students can become either uninterested or overwhelmed in detracked classrooms if teachers target their instruction to the average level of the classroom instead of creating differentiated instructions based on the varying abilities of students.

Best Practices for Detracking

Despite some unsuccessful approaches to detracking, the authors argue that detracking has great potential when executed in accordance with best practices. They find that “when asked about detracking as opposed to tracking, students from all racial and socioeconomic backgrounds expressed the view that detracking seemed to be a more fair way to organize students for learning”.

Best practices include:

• Curriculum that values and encourages students to reflect on their own life experiences in the classroom.
• Seating charts that foster social relationships across students with varying socioeconomic statuses to combat narratives of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ students based on race and class.
• Personalized support for students who were previously in lower tracked classes to build their ability and their own perception of their potential.
• Support from leadership and training to teachers on how to teach detracked classes. Teachers should have spaces to share best practices with each other.
• Strong communication with parents and teachers regarding the goals of detracking to avoid backlash.

Conclusions

Overall, the authors advocate for the potential of detracking to support educational equity in schools. Best practices of implementing detracking include using curriculum that values the differing experiences of students and seating charts that combat classrooms from being re-tracked internally. They emphasize that detracking must be a part of a broader reform effort that centers the needs of under-resourced students and reallocates resources to these students. Further research should focus on what resources teachers need to be effective in mixed-ability classes and how educators can prepare students to be in detracked classrooms.

Moving Beyond Changing Hearts and Minds in Education: How Theories of Change can Drive Action

Introduction

Recognition of educational inequities based on race, class, and gender by educators is growing in the United States. However, there is a lack of leadership capacity to meet these large reform goals. The authors of this article argue that efforts to improve educational equity in schools require an understanding of leadership as an ‘organizational practice’ that extends beyond any individual leader and includes collective action across different roles. In this comparative case study, the authors analyze why two school equity teams in the Pacific Northwest achieved limited organizational change. They discuss how these equity teams’ theories of changes assumed schools needed to first change the ‘minds and hearts’ of faculty and parents before implementing systemic change and how this approach limited their ability to achieve more equitable outcomes.

Ann M. Ishimaru is an associate professor of Educational Policy, Organizations and Leadership at the University of Washington College of Education. Dr. Ishimaru’s work focuses on P-12 educational organizations and leadership. Mollie K. Galloway is an associate professor and chair of Educational Leadership in the Graduate School of Education and Counseling at Lewis & Clark College. Her work focuses on K-12 equity and organizational leadership.

Methods and Findings

Over the course of an academic year, the authors interviewed members of two equity teams in the Pacific Northwest and analyzed their video-taped monthly team and planning meetings to understand how each team defined educational equity and developed solutions. Both schools, Kerry Middle School and Baker K-8 School, were selected based on already having a commitment to racial equity. In the first phase of analysis, each school equity team was analyzed separately before being compared to the other. The authors found that although Kerry Middle School’s equity team was larger, newer to school-wide equity work, and served a more racially diverse student body than Baker’s, both teams believed that changing peoples’ attitudes towards equity needed to take place before any school-wide structural reforms could be executed.

In the second phase of analysis, the authors explore why these two equity teams converged on similar theories of change despite these differences in team composition and contexts. Pulling from other organizational leadership studies on teacher teams, the authors categorized key moments from team meetings as problem-finding, problem-defining, or solution-proposing and mapped out the analytic arc of team discussions over time. They found that discussions from both teams about structural change were impeded by a ‘dominant institutional logic’ about how equity change occurs in schools and how organizations change more broadly.

Limitations of a ‘hearts and minds’ approach

Limitations of a theory of change that focuses on changing ‘hearts and minds’ before any school-wide action include:

• Perceiving discussions focused on race and equity as a comprehensive solution, which undermines other forms of reform and institutional change in the school. 
• Prioritizing the beliefs of white parents and teachers rather than the inequities faced by students and parents of color, which leads to slower change as change occurs at the rate aligned with the white parents’ and educators’ comfortability.
• Suggesting that educational equity reforms as a whole are ineffective because equity teams can focus disproportionately on changing minds versus taking action.

However, the authors emphasize that the findings do not completely diminish the importance of explicit talk about race and changing beliefs. They argue that equity work requires having difficult conversations but challenge the assumption that hearts and minds must be changed before structural change can be executed.

Possibilities for equity-focused educational change

The authors discuss three possible explanations for the two teams’ focus on changing mindsets before taking any action. Addressing and understanding these drivers can help support greater equity-focused educational change. Future research should focus on validating these explanations.

• Equity reform can be guided by a fear of backlash from white parents, which encourages a focus more on changing their mindsets over action.
• The equity teams may have limited exposure to alternative theories of change. In this absence, equity teams may default to ‘hearts and minds first’ theories. To address this challenge, the authors suggest that equity teams should have explicit conversations on theories of equity change and leverage existing research on equity-focused change within schools.
• Theories of change from equity teams can be built on assumptions that undermine the types of change that are possible from teachers.

Conclusions

Overall, the authors of this article discuss how focusing on changing mindsets before taking any action stifled the educational change efforts of two equity teams in Pacific Northwest schools. They underscore how fear of backlash from white parents, limited access to alternative theories of change, and assumptions about the abilities of teachers to drive change increase the likelihood of adopting  the “hearts and mind” theory of change. The authors suggest future research focus on examining change in schools over a longer time span and explore whether the findings in this article apply to schools in other contexts. These considerations are critical for educators and school leaders working to execute effective change for educational equity.