Equity 101 The Equity Framework

Equity is key to eliminating achievement gaps This first volume of a four-book series outlines a simple, yet powerful approach to creating the expectations, rigor, relevancy, and relationships necessary for any child to succeed. Equity 101 describes school systems that have changed their climate, culture, and practices to foster high levels of achievement. Best-selling author Curtis Linton introduces the three essential characteristics of equity: Clear expectations for closing the achievement gap Commitment to rigorous curriculum Relationships that promote learning Readers will have access to online videos that are keyed to central concepts of the series.

Learn to increase educators' cultural competency, overcome institutionalized factors that limit achievement, and implement equitable practices—with real-life success stories, exercises, and dedicated online resources.

Based on the common characteristics observed in highly successful diverse schools, Equity 101 guides educational leaders in creating an environment where excellence is the norm.

Help a culture of equity grow and thrive in your school! This second book in the groundbreaking Equity 101 series takes on the cultures we come from and the culture we foster in our schools. When diversity is the norm, how do we create an equitable culture where everyone succeeds? Your path starts with increasing educators’ cultural competency, overcoming institutionalized factors that limit achievement, and implementing equitable practices that ensure individualized support for all students. Resources include: Real-life success stories to use as models Chapter-specific implementation exercises that take you from ideas to action A dedicated online community for professional support

This document is designed to be used as a menu of tools to integrate racial equity into your existing practices. The tools in this document are organized by Government Alliance on Race and Equity's "Normalize, Organize, Operationalize" framework from GARE and Race Forward's "Actions to Advance Racial Equity". We recognize that change can take time, and often needs to be incremental. We also recognize that we need to operate with a sense of urgency and start somewhere. Each tool in this document can be applied to ongoing work in government agencies; we all need to self-reflect, cultivate our workforce, develop communication skills, improve quality of services, and hire or engage with HR. If we cannot apply a racial equity lens in these everyday activities, when do we start prioritizing racial equity? This work starts here, and it starts now.

Educators must both respond to the impact of trauma, and prevent trauma at school. Trauma-informed initiatives tend to focus on the challenging behaviors of students and ascribe them to circumstances that students are facing outside of school. This approach ignores the reality that inequity itself causes trauma, and that schools often heighten inequities when implementing trauma-informed practices that are not based in educational equity. In this fresh look at trauma-informed practice, Alex Shevrin Venet urges educators to shift equity to the center as they consider policies and professional development. Using a framework of six principles for equity-centered trauma-informed education, Venet offers practical action steps that teachers and school leaders can take from any starting point, using the resources and influence at their disposal to make shifts in practice, pedagogy, and policy. Overthrowing inequitable systems is a process, not an overnight change. But transformation is possible when educators work together, and teachers can do more than they realize from within their own classrooms.

Radically reimagine our ways of being, learning, and doing Education can be transformed if we eradicate our fixation on big data like standardized test scores as the supreme measure of equity and learning. Instead of the focus being on "fixing" and "filling" academic gaps, we must envision and rebuild the system from the student up—with classrooms, schools and systems built around students’ brilliance, cultural wealth, and intellectual potential. Street data reminds us that what is measurable is not the same as what is valuable and that data can be humanizing, liberatory and healing. By breaking down street data fundamentals: what it is, how to gather it, and how it can complement other forms of data to guide a school or district’s equity journey, Safir and Dugan offer an actionable framework for school transformation. Written for educators and policymakers, this book · Offers fresh ideas and innovative tools to apply immediately · Provides an asset-based model to help educators look for what’s right in our students and communities instead of seeking what’s wrong · Explores a different application of data, from its capacity to help us diagnose root causes of inequity, to its potential to transform learning, and its power to reshape adult culture Now is the time to take an antiracist stance, interrogate our assumptions about knowledge, measurement, and what really matters when it comes to educating young people.

In Cultivating Genius, Dr. Gholdy E. Muhammad presents a four-layered equity framework--one that is grounded in history and restores excellence in literacy education. This framework, which she names, Historically Responsive Literacy, was derived from the study of literacy development within 19th-century Black literacy societies. The framework is essential and universal for all students, especially youth of color, who traditionally have been marginalized in learning standards, school policies, and classroom practices. The equity framework will help educators teach and lead toward the following learning goals or pursuits: Identity Development--Helping youth to make sense of themselves and others Skill Development-- Developing proficiencies across the academic disciplines Intellectual Development--Gaining knowledge and becoming smarter Criticality--Learning and developing the ability to read texts (including print and social contexts) to understand power, equity, and anti-oppression When these four learning pursuits are taught together--through the Historically Responsive Literacy Framework, all students receive profound opportunities for personal, intellectual, and academic success. Muhammad provides probing, self-reflective questions for teachers, leaders, and teacher educators as well as sample culturally and historically responsive sample plans and text sets across grades and content areas. In this book, Muhammad presents practical approaches to cultivate the genius in students and within teachers.