Equity-centered school leaders

 An urban Ohio school district created a grow-your-own pipeline to nurture and train equity-focused principals.

The role of principal has changed over time, expanding beyond traditional management work to include transformative instructional and equity leadership (Grissom, Egalite, & Lindsay, 2021; Khalifa, 2018; Manna, 2015). To effectively lead today’s schools, especially in diverse urban communities, principals need specialized knowledge, skills, and dispositions. Equity-centered school leaders need to cultivate the knowledge, skills, and dispositions within themselves that will enable all students to have access to and benefit from high-quality education.

For 20 years, I have been working in Columbus City Schools (CCS), the largest and most diverse school district in Ohio, as an elementary teacher, principal, and more recently, district-level coach supporting school leaders. CCS serves approximately 46,600 students: 20% of our students are white, 15% are Latinx, and the majority are Black Americans and African migrants. About 95% of our students are eligible for free or reduced-price meals in schools. Our students and families have continually expressed how the effects of racism and poverty pose challenges for them as they navigate schools and society. Although public education is considered a vehicle for social mobility, for many poor and working-class Black students and families, the American Dream remains, in the words of Langston Hughes (1951), a “dream deferred.” If education is to be a gateway to success for all, then those of us leading schools must determine how to best meet the academic and personal needs of our country’s diverse learners.

My district’s grow-your-own principal pipeline prepares equity-centered school leaders. We use six critical dispositions that are significant to cultivating equity-centered leaders and integrate these dispositions into the recruitment, preparation, and induction of aspiring and novice school leaders in the district.

Envisioning the leaders we need

Schools persistently fail to educate many students of color (Love, 2019). As urban school leaders and educators, we struggle to address opportunity and achievement gaps that affect Black students, families, and communities (Ladson-Billings, 2006). Many principals work diligently to create inclusive schools and tackle the needs of underserved children and youth. Yet examples of sustained school transformation are limited, and many Black parents continue to perceive schools as unwelcoming spaces that do not have their children’s best interests at heart (Foubert, 2022).

To address the opportunity and achievement gaps across various student demographic groups, the CCS school board and district leadership have targeted equity as a priority in our educational policies, programs, and practices. CCS’s equity statement defines equity to mean:

that each student has access to the resources, opportunities, and supports they need to develop to their full academic and social-emotional potential. Additionally, it involves ensuring that all employees feel valued and can maximize their full potential as professionals. In order to achieve educational equity, we must make the necessary system changes (policies, processes, and practices) to reduce and eliminate outcome predictability for any CCS student or employee based on any social identity factors, including, but not limited to race, sex, gender identity/expression, socio-economic status, ability, and any intersections thereof.

Recognizing that improving leadership is an important lever in school reform (Gates, Board, & Master, 2019; Grissom, Egalite, & Lindsay, 2021; Leithwood et al., 2004), CCS began preliminary efforts in 2020 to create a grow-your-own principal pipeline to better prepare leaders for urban schools and help them to address inequities in student outcomes. The following year, the district entered into a formal partnership with the Wallace Foundation by garnering an Equity-Centered Principal Pipeline Initiative grant.

Certain notions about how principals lead through change underpin the collaboration between the district and the foundation. Our work recognizes that principals set the overall tone and culture of schools. They do so by advancing assets- and strengths-based orientations about and among students, schools, and communities; fostering genuine care and relationships; and helping create the formal and informal school conditions for student learning, motivation, and progress. As recruiters, trainers, and evaluators of teachers, they play a key role in teacher hiring, development, and retention in high-needs schools. And through data-informed deliberations and decisions, they strive to move away from the status quo and ineffective past practices and toward inclusion, innovation, and integrity.

The district’s initial school leadership pipeline work consisted of two strands:

1. To create and adopt leadership standards of professional practice.
2. To formulate a portrait of a CCS principal.

I served as chair of the district committee that was responsible for creating a portrait of a CCS principal. We were charged with envisioning the qualities of exemplary principals who would promote school conditions for student success in a rapidly changing and complex world.

To do so, we analyzed the Ohio Standards for Principals (Ohio Department of Education, 2018). The 10 standards are organized into four interconnected domains: leadership, learning, management, and culture. This final domain, culture, includes equity and cultural responsiveness as its central tenets, so we knew we needed to make this part of our portrait. We also used research, surveys, and discussions with students, parents, community members, teachers, and other building and district personnel to fill out the picture. In addition, I examined the growing body of research and professional literature on educational leadership and equity, focusing on practical guidelines and examples that benefit diverse students in urban schools (e.g., Khalifa, 2018; Tingle, Corrales, & Peters, 2019).

Nurturing critical dispositions

After our examination of state standards, stakeholder expectations, and professional literature, we found that we were missing a clear articulation of specific dispositions that principals need in order to lead for meaningful and systemic change. Dispositions refer to a collection of beliefs, attitudes, values, and commitments that influence how one thinks, feels, acts, and behaves (Fives & Gill, 2015). Equity-centered leaders share dispositions that enable them to examine not just the “how” but also the “why” of leadership practice. In other words, they are attentive to the intentions, outcomes, and implications of the routine work, things that generally go unexamined. When these dispositions are absent, it is less likely that principals will act in equity-centered ways.

In helping to cultivate equity-centered leaders in CCS, I adapted the leadership dispositions outlined by the New York Leadership Academy (2020). These critical dispositions consist of:

Engaging in ongoing self-reflection: Equity-centered leaders value ongoing exploration of how their assumptions, bias, values, power, privilege, and identity affect their views, interactions, decisions, and actions and consequently shape school culture and operations (Gooden et al., 2023).

Confronting inequity: Equity-centered leaders believe in challenging bias and behaviors that are discriminatory or culturally insensitive; that limit access or opportunities, especially for minoritized students and staff; that neglect the role of race in inequity; or that promote deficit thinking or low expectations (Love, 2019)

Modeling equity: Equity-centered leaders commit to behaving, acting, and making decisions in professional and personal ways that are grounded in the principles and practices of equity, for example, by promoting mutually beneficial and reciprocal partnerships with parents or guardians of color (Foubert, 2022).

Building the capacity of others: Equity-centered leaders encourage a commitment to equity in all school personnel; foster courageous conversations within the school; and work toward having a diverse staff through the intentional recruitment, retention, and promotion of teachers of color (Sleeter, Neal, & Kumashiro, 2014).

Creating equity-centered environments: Equity-centered leaders believe in nurturing cultural competence among their school staff, creating inclusive and culturally appropriate school spaces, and encouraging the use of culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017).

Developing systems of equity: Equity-centered leaders commit to examining and fostering school policies, programs, and practices that are grounded in principles of equity, for instance, by prioritizing the academic and socioemotional needs of minoritized students and using institutional resources accordingly (Radd et al., 2021).

These critical dispositions enable principals to prioritize equity and to think and act in ways that intentionally identify, disrupt, and resolve educational and social injustices. They are important to cultivate and sustain, especially when research indicates that many principals resist equity work, particularly race-based equity work. Resistance arises because of general discomfort, staff or community resistance, systemic limitations, concerns about politics, or internal beliefs that are antithetical to the tenets of equity (Gorski, 2019; Whitaker, 2022). Because dispositions are generally considered precursors to actions, explicitly articulating and promoting change in dispositions is important to reduce resistance and nurture equity-centered leaders.

A three-stage pipeline

For the past three years, CCS has intentionally integrated these critical dispositions into our grow-your-own pipeline for school principals. This pipeline can be divided into three main pathways, each of which represents a stage in a leader’s growth and involves different types of support: emerging leaders, leadership interns, and induction of principals and assistant principals (Gates, Baird, & Master, 2019; Manna, 2015).

Emerging leaders

The pathway for emerging leaders encourages CCS teachers with interest in becoming school leaders to participate in a yearlong series of leadership workshops. To apply for this pathway, teachers respond to case study questions related to inequities in classrooms and schools. Those who are selected as emerging leaders engage in monthly sessions that deepen their knowledge of various leadership styles and dispositions; of the school district as an institutional system; and of the diverse students, teachers, and staff that they would lead and work with. They also take various self-inventories to better understand their own values and beliefs, how their personal backgrounds shape their educational and professional positions, and their leadership strengths and areas for development.

While continuing in their current role as teachers, participants in the emerging leaders pathway examine their own leadership potential and trajectory, but are not guaranteed advancement to any school leadership position. I developed and now oversee this pathway, and a total of 105 teachers participated in the past three years. Of these, 30 have been selected to enter the second pathway as leadership interns.

Leadership interns

The leadership interns pathway prepares teachers to transition as eventual school principals or assistant principals. CCS teachers interested in this pathway must have at least five years of full-time teaching experience and be recommended by their current principal. They must undergo formal interviews with a team of principals and complete a performance task write-up on a school case study. Teachers can enter the program as interns without being emerging leaders first.

Leadership interns complete a residency under the mentorship of effective veteran principals for one to two years. During that time, they have a variety of duties that enable them to gradually experience and comprehend a school leader’s scope and sequence of work. The cohorts of interns explore solution options, decisions, results, and implications in monthly sessions focused on case studies of district and school issues and dilemmas. Furthermore, each intern must identify and pursue a data-based equity issue that culminates in a yearlong capstone event. Although the CCS leadership intern pathway has been in place since the early 1980s, it is now more intentional in its cultivation of equity-centered leaders and critical dispositions through interview questions, performance tasks, and case studies in the professional learning sessions.

Equity-centered leaders share dispositions that enable them to examine not just the “how” but also the “why” of leadership practice.

I was a leadership intern for two years (2005-07), working under four different school principals while completing my master’s degree and principal’s license. To help align this pathway to the new critical dispositions, I have been involved in crafting the performance task prompts and
performance-based interview questions. In the past three years, a total of 60 teachers have been selected as leadership interns for the district, thereby strengthening our pipeline of leadership talent.

Induction into the principalship

The third pathway in the CCS pipeline for school leaders is the two-year induction of principals and assistant principals. The first year of induction focuses on administrative effectiveness, including operations, personnel and human resources, regulations and compliance, time management, and district deadlines. The second year emphasizes instructional effectiveness, including curriculum, pedagogy, student assessment, teacher feedback and evaluation, and school improvement. Induction also highlights district priorities and helps novice school leaders operationalize those priorities through school and classroom practices. For example, new leaders might receive development support on how to foster productive professional learning communities of teachers and staff to address student learning and outcomes.

The induction pathway consists of four cohorts that receive differentiated professional learning experiences. As a district-level leadership coach, I co-lead the induction for the second-year principals cohort with another coach, while four others are in charge of the induction for the first-year principals cohort, the first-year assistant principals cohort, and second-year assistant principals cohort.

As coaches, we integrate equity matters and critical dispositions in our monthly sessions by selecting relevant case studies on school and social disparities. We also invite equity-oriented educational leadership and transformation scholars to provide professional development workshops, and we help novice school leaders scaffold their tasks and responsibilities, while taking advantage of opportunities for innovation and inclusion. Since 2020, a total of 100 principals and assistant principals have been involved in the induction pathway. Approximately 90% of these came from our leadership interns. Approximately 50% had been emerging leaders.

Principals have a moral imperative to rethink how they see themselves and how they operationalize change in schools. Alongside teachers and parents, they can bolster students’ academic achievement, postsecondary school success, and life fulfillment.

Leadership interns who wish to be selected as principals or assistant principals and enter the induction pathway must complete an interview with a panel of principals and a performance task write-up on a school case study. Then they undergo another interview with an area superintendent and leadership coach who will determine if there is an appropriate match between the applicant and the school with a leadership vacancy. Various equity factors and critical dispositions are considered in the selection and placement of school leaders, including the focus and needs of the school, the student and community demographics, and the strengths and attributes of the school leader. For instance, a principal applicant with experience teaching English as a second language is likely to be placed in a school with a sizable immigrant and language-minority student population.

Leadership for change

Districts like CCS demonstrate their commitment to meaningful and sustainable educational and social transformation by cultivating equity-centered leaders with critical dispositions that will make a positive difference in the lives of the people we serve (Khalifa, 2018). Principals have a moral imperative to rethink how they see themselves and how they operationalize change in schools. Alongside teachers and parents, they can bolster students’ academic achievement, postsecondary school success, and life fulfillment.

The cultivation of equity-centered leaders with critical dispositions can take place in district- and university-based preparation programs for aspiring principals and through in-service professional development of practicing principals. Aspiring and practicing principals can take workshops and courses on diversity, equity, and inclusion, especially on race, racism, and anti-racism. These workshops and courses must include lessons on explicitly identifying and exploring one’s dispositions and how they affect one’s perspectives, engagements with others, decisions, and actions. School leaders also need to understand identity, power, privilege, and oppression and how they are intricately connected to implicit bias, interactions, and systemic structures. Hence, their analysis of schools and society must be at multiple levels: individual, interpersonal, and institutional. In addition, leaders should share resources that could advance their equity-centered leadership goals and actions, for instance, by convening sessions on cultural competency and courageous conversations with all school staff. Lastly, school leaders regularly practice self-reflection for continuous self-improvement, and districts need to encourage such practices as integral to the profession.

Principals are in the best position to initiate, encourage, facilitate, and sustain meaningful transformation at the school level. But they cannot do all this alone. Addressing inequity will require the collective wisdom, support, and actions of stakeholders at the school, district, and community levels. Admittedly, addressing educational and social disparities is not easy. It calls us to become courageous while experiencing discomfort. It requires us to intentionally move out of our comfort zones. However, if we are committed to the advancement and success of all students, we must consider the historical and ongoing education debt that we as a country owe to disadvantaged students and families. With an equity mindset grounded in critical dispositions, we can address the persistent challenges of dreams deferred.

References

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This article appears in the December 2023/January 2024 issue of Kappan, Vol. 105, No. 4, p. 20-25.