Why are gender and racial equity in schools important?
If you’ve been following us for a while, then you have followed us as we’ve expanded our content and focus to include school culture and climate. However, we still care very deeply about issues of race and gender and believe that these concerns are still part of our core mission. In fact, gender and racial inequities are closely related to school culture and climate. Below, we talk about some of the connections that we see.
Representation matters—it’s not just a catchphrase, but it’s also recognition of empirical evidence that diverse schools have lots of benefits for students, educators, and entire schools.
Unfortunately, however, schools still tend to be pretty segregated in terms of faculty and student demographics. Typically, Black students are more likely than White students to go to schools that are racially segregated or to attend schools where most students live in poverty. The attendant consequences can also be devastating: students of color are more likely than White students to be assigned school disciplinary consequences that involve school removal. They are also more likely to be assigned to special education services than their White peers and less likely to be assigned to gifted classes. However, the presence of teachers and administrators of color can change this reality. One study found that schools do assign higher proportions of Black students to gifted programs when there are Black teachers and administrators in the building. Similarly, another study found similar results with Latinx individuals. Specifically, Latinx students were less likely to be assigned to severe school discipline consequences when they were in schools with Latinx principals than when they were in schools with White principals. These and other studies suggest that school climates where there are more people of color in leadership and teaching positions might do a better job of creating context for trust among faculty, families, and students.
Race-based sorting is also a recognized problem among school faculty. Forty percent of all schools do not have a single faculty person of color. This means that, contrary to the results we reported above, many students of color do not see someone who looks like them as either a teacher or a principal. Additionally, because principals and superintendent positions are usually filled from pools of teachers and because teachers are overwhelmingly White, it can appear that qualified candidates of color are simply not in school leadership pipelines. This is simply not true. However, as we’ve discussed, academic optimism is made of three constructs: collective efficacy, trust, and academic emphasis (or press). In cases where the faculty is overwhelmingly light—and leaders perpetuate patterns of hiring or promoting only White faculty—that culture is likely not conducive to conditions where faculty have confidence in the collective skill of the group nor where faculty are likely to trust one another enough to organize their work around the academic goals of the school.
Finally, gender inequities also deprive schools of high-quality leaders who can orient school cultures around the academic goals of a school. In particular, women’s leadership tends to be associated with techniques that drive school improvement such as collaboration, relationship-building, and mentoring up-and-coming leaders. However, women are generally promoted to assistant principal positions later than their less-experienced male peers and, when they are promoted from AP to principal, they are routed to elementary and middle school positions. These positions can make them perceived as less qualified, tough, or ready for district- and state-level leadership positions (although evidence suggests those perceptions are flat-out wrong). Once again, perpetuating patterns of inequity in organizations detracts from the key mission: student learning.
Taken together, these and other studies show that equity is not a problem that is separate from school culture—it is, in fact, a problem of school culture. Faculty diversity benefits students, educators, and whole schools. When that diversity is absent, a school misses the valuable contributions of diverse educators and may also dedicate valuable financial and human resources to things like restoring trust, establishing feelings of efficacy, and centering the school’s academic mission.