If it’s just your schools you’re doing it wrong
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have witnessed the controversy over the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement in schools all over the country. There are layers of confusion among the headlines, none of which are worth your time. Confusion over what DEI work truly is, boils down to two root causes.
- Our lack of focus on DEI as an essential condition (sadly we’ve too often seen it as an initiative, and initiative that like others can be derailed or cancelled or defunded).
- Our lack of community education (let me say this clearly, if you aren’t proactively educating your community about the ‘why’ and ‘what’ behind DEI work someone else will retroactively educate them in spades).
DEI work in education is not new in any way, shape, or form. For at least ten years science has demonstrated a missing link between intentional work to create equitable systems of learning and just using words. Too often words like inclusion or equality make it into our work without doing the hard/real work to operationalize those words into habits of being. The hard/real work only comes when training, expectations, accountability, and outcomes align.
We have, for far too long, witnessed lagging outcomes for individuals who don’t fit into the majority profile. When we know we aren’t doing…
