Abstract
This case was written for practitioners and researchers to help educators engage in the important work of providing culturally responsive instructional supervision within the U.S. education system. Through the intersection of culturally responsive teaching and culturally responsive school leadership, formative feedback about instruction can focus on the role privileged sociocultural identities have on learning, teaching, as well as receiving and providing feedback about instructional practices. However, there are highly organized efforts in U.S. society to disrupt these efforts in education systems. Teachers, administrators, and faculty members in educational leadership preparation programs can use this case to examine how education is neither ahistorical nor apolitical, and the work yet to be accomplished to implement culturally responsive instructional practices within the schoolhouse.
Keywords
Case Narrative
The Yorktown Public School (YPS) district is a public school system that is classified by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) as Fringe Town. By definition, YPS is geographically outside of the nearest urban cluster, but within 10 miles of an urbanized area (NCES, 2023). Located in a Northern state, Yorktown has experienced rapidly shifting demographics over the past 25 years. The city it is located next to—once a victim of globalization and the mass exodus of manufacturing that left for cheaper labor outside of North America—has seen a cultural and population resurgence in the last two decades. As this has occurred, first, second, and third ring communities have expanded, racial and ethnic communities have shifted, and municipalities have built new schools to support migration to the area.
With the expansion of the metro population further out of the urban core, Yorktown has experienced plenty of changes that have produced challenges for YPS staff. The school district population grew from 1,600 in 2000 to 2,400 in 2020—resulting in almost 60 new students per grade on average. This put an enormous strain on the facilities, which YPS district officials used to leverage additional state funding for the building of a new, three-building campus in 2014 that houses the entire K-12 population. What resulted were new elementary, middle school, and high school buildings supported by various principals and assistant principals (APs). In these buildings, there is an elementary principal and AP, a middle school principal and AP, and a high school principal and two APs, all supported by an assistant superintendent and a superintendent.
However, it was not the increase in the number of students that put the most strain on YPS faculty and staff, but rather it was the lived experiences of students, as well as some of their sociocultural identities, that seemed to challenge the YPS system the most. With the resurgence of the city, gentrification and higher housing costs began to cause migration throughout the metro area. African immigrants from Somali and Ethiopia who moved to the city in the early 2000s were now beginning to move out to the suburbs and beyond, including Yorktown. In addition, refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan had been resettled in a nearby suburb around 2010 by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement, and in the last decade, Yorktown experienced a large increase in Muslim students as these citizens began to migrate to different communities. By 2015 a mosque was built in Yorktown, and it became the first non-Christian house of worship to be documented in municipal records. And, while not located in Yorktown, a chicken factory farm the next town over helped drawn in labor from across the region. The influx of these new jobs were filled by many migrant Hispanic workers, some of whom had settled in Yorktown. With these demographic shifts, YPS went from being over 95% White to being closer to 82% White, meaning that over 430 of the roughly 2,400 students were racialized as a Person of Color.
With these shifting demographics, YPS teachers began to communicate some of their instructional challenges with building and district leaders, which seemed magnified after the COVID shutdown and virtual learning challenges of 2019 and 2020. Students seemed uninterested, disengaged, and distracted from the instructional practices that had worked for many teachers for 20 or even 30 years. Parents were sometimes hard to communicate with because of language barriers or difficulty getting them on the phone when they were not at work. Many teachers seemed to think that students simply weren’t trying in class. And, increasingly, kids weren’t taking part in extracurricular activities. Sure, there had always been the kids living in poverty who struggled with school—who were not so affectionately referred to as “poor White trash” by some in the teachers’ lounge—but now teachers were beginning to more openly attribute student struggles based on their various identities. “Students should be fluent in English,” or “We have attendance issues on religious holidays not reflected in the school calendar,” or even “These students just need to get used to the Yorktown way,” could be heard from teachers passing in the halls. Occasionally these concerns would be raised to a building principal or AP or would be brought up at a faculty meeting, but these conversations always seemed to center the struggles of the teachers and not the cultural needs of the students.
Among the teachers, especially new teachers who were trying to get tenured, there was a growing narrative of “don’t rock the boat” as several more vocal teachers who had unearthed inequitable outcomes for marginalized YPS students were non-renewed after being labeled as “argumentative” and “difficult” with administrators. These inequitable outcomes included preliminary data that suggested lower academic achievement, higher rates of suspension, and lower rates of extracurricular participation for minoritized, marginalized, and otherized students. Related, there was a clear message in YPS that, above all else, the goal was to produce good test scores. For almost a decade, the previous superintendent had implemented prepackaged curricula, requiring teachers to follow prescriptive lesson plans where administrators were accused of engaging in “surveillance, not supervision.” The administrators, all of whom were racialized as White and all but two were male, lacked a general awareness of various sociocultural perspectives and certainly did not encourage teachers to think about the ways in which they might engage in more culturally responsive teaching.
The burgeoning undercurrent of YPS culture came to light when the local newspaper, the Yorktown Post, published an article detailing how several Muslim students felt teachers discriminated against them based on their religious beliefs. Details included teachers making negative comments to students who left class to pray in school because it would negatively affect their learning, as well as Muslim athletes at the high school who felt they were given little to no support from their coaches to observe the cultural and religious traditions of Ramadan during sports seasons. The parents of the Muslim students who spoke with the newspapers—many of whom were doctors and researchers at a nearby university—said they were leveraging their privilege by going public with the discrimination story after several failed attempts to work collaboratively with YPS administrators to address their concerns. However, many parents who identified as Christian openly questioned why this was necessary, creating cultural and religious divisions in the Yorktown community that became magnified over time.
Within the next weeks and months, other examples of perceived discrimination experienced by parents and students came to the forefront of the community’s awareness. A group of high school students racialized as Black stated they believed they were treated differently than students racialized as White. A group of five tenured teachers who had waited for years for the school system to acknowledge and address inequitable educational outcomes of students spoke out at the next school board meeting, resulting in the chair of the school board breaking parliamentary procedure by trying to silence their 3 min of guaranteed public comments before the superintendent, Dr. Greta Welch, asked to let the teachers finish. Both of the incidents were covered by the Yorktown Post, and a reporter for the local NPR station had reached out to Dr. Welch for comment about the “string of racialized incidents” at YPS. Increasingly, comments in the Yorktown Post articles questioned if the Black students’ experiences were valid and—after all, as Yorktown citizens commented—the United States had elected a Black president, and the role of schools was to teach, not address social issues. Greta, who had only been a superintendent since the start of the 2022 school year, had <2 years under her belt in YPS, and had only worked in racially diverse settings, realized she had a problem on her hands. And she had to do something about it quickly.
Equity Audits as a Tool for Cultural Responsiveness
In her prior work in urban districts, Dr. Greta Welch had a variety of experiences engaging in culturally responsive training and practices. As a principal and then as an Assistant Superintendent in another district, Greta had witnessed, and been part of, professional development sessions that targeted the development of culturally responsive teaching through Geneva Gay’s (2018) framework, as well as the development of culturally responsive school leadership through Muhammad Khalifa’s (2020) framework. In these experiences, Greta’s school systems supported populations where 80 to 85% of students were racialized as a Person of Color. Racialized as a White woman herself, Dr. Welch quickly learned how to acknowledge her privileged racial identity and to work with teachers and fellow administrators to reimagine policies and practices that led to more equitable outcomes for all students and families.
In her pursuit of culturally responsive educational practices, Greta learned about the need to acknowledge how other privileged sociocultural identities, in addition to race, influence the ways in which education systems address inequitable outcomes or allow them to exist. She learned through various trainings, as well as through the examination of her own identities, school, and school district, that inequities within education systems are reified along sociocultural identities such as ethnicity, language, birth sex, class, ability, orientation/identity, and other lived experiences. Prior to coming to Yorktown, Dr. Welch had engaged in this work because she had to be an effective leader and to be culturally responsive to the students and parents she served. With the shifting demographics in YPS, she thought surely teachers and administrators would see the importance of engaging in this work as well.
One of the most direct ways to evaluate educational outcomes and pinpoint beginning opportunities for culturally responsive work is to engage in an equity audit of a school system. Greta knew this from reading Khalifa (2020) but she also knew that the field of equity audits had a long and rich history that could be used in various ways to examine opportunity gaps perpetuated by sociocultural gaps in school systems (Skrla et al., 2004). To help YPS engage in this process, Dr. Welch decided to conduct an equity audit using the school information system (SIS) data that Yorktown and every other school in the United States collects, houses, and maintains. As an instructional leader, she knew that exploring discrepancies in student achievement data through an equity audit would help to start the conversation with teachers and administrators—particularly in a district like YPS—who seemed to value student achievement above all else. Doing so could help educators be more critical about addressing the connection between curriculum and instruction that privileges Eurocentric ways of knowing. With this approach, Dr. Welch sought to not only recognize the ways in which school systems systematically oppress minoritized, marginalized, and otherized students but to also address the implementation of culturally responsive practices.
Greta tasked the information technology (IT) department, which was only two people due to the size of the district, with the task to harvest all the math and language arts achievement data from the past year for state-tested grades, which for the state YPS is in includes Grade 4, Grade 6, and Grade 8, as well attendance, suspension, advanced placement and gifted and talented enrollment, and participation in extracurricular activities data. She also asked the IT department to provide demographic information, such as race, birth sex, free and reduced lunch status, 504/IEP status, and English language learner (ELL) status. Although the IT department commented it would be hard to pull the data, Greta knew it could be done. She gave them a week to produce the data, and, to her relief, it made it to her within the deadline and with the information she requested.
With the data in hand, Dr. Welch relied on the training she had received in her EdD program. She had a professor who knew that the learning and application of basic statistics, such as independent t-tests, one-way ANOVAs, and factorial ANOVAs would be more contextual when examining data pulled directly from schools. Prior to analysis, she made sure that all groups had a minimum of 30 students in each category, which they did, making it statistically viable for her to look for discrepancies in the data across these groups. In addition, by taking a sample of her district from Grade 4, Grade 6, and Grade 8, she would be able to use inferential statistics to make inferences about achievement throughout YPS and look for levels of significance. For example, if there was a statistically significant difference between boys and girls in language arts achievement (p < .05), Dr. Welch would know there was a <5% possibility that this difference would be due to chance. As such, she knew she could use the training from her EdD program to apply an equity-oriented lens to quantitative analyses, and she was committed to doing this now at YPS.
In addition, Greta wanted to utilize aspects of community-based equity audits (Green, 2017) in her review of YPS. She knew that given some of the community comments, she was going to need to work on disrupting deficit-oriented perspectives of the community and the educators who worked for YPS. After she analyzed and reviewed the SIS data, her hope was to learn from the marginalized experiences of students and parents and to develop a community-based group of Yorktown stakeholders that could help inform more asset-based approaches to education (Green, 2017).
The findings were both expected and surprising to Greta. Using an independent t-test, the data showed there were no significant differences in math or language arts achievement for students receiving ELL services and those not receiving ELL services. However, when she conducted a factorial ANOVA, she discovered an interaction based on ethnicity—in other words students who were receiving ELL services and who identified as Hispanic were achieving at statistically significant lower levels. In some ways, this helped Dr. Welch make inferences about the concerns of some Muslim families—almost all students receiving ELL services in YPS were either Muslim or Hispanic students—but she would need to engage in interviews with Muslim families to know more about their experiences. However, it also meant that Hispanic students receiving ELL services were not receiving an equitable educational experience.
When looking at math and language arts achievement across NCES racial categories, Dr. Welch ran a one-way ANOVA and the data showed Hispanic students achieved at statistically significant lower levels in both math and language arts compared with students racialized as White, as well as compared with students racialized as Black. Students identified as multiracial scored lower in both math and language arts than students racialized as White and students racialized as Black at (p = .15), a level that was not significant but suggested YPS should be aware of and address this discrepancy. Students racialized as Black scored lower in language arts and in math than students racialized as White, but by such a negligible margin that the p value = 1. It wasn’t a good finding—but it meant that there wasn’t the discrimination students racialized as Black believed existed at least as it related to achievement outcomes. Again, to know more of their lived experiences, Greta would need to engage in conversations with the students and parents racialized as Black—and hear more about how they were minoritized in YPS classrooms or with YPS administrators to inform how to enact more asset-based approaches to instruction (Green, 2017).
What really opened Greta’s eyes was what the data showed regarding free and reduced lunch status, which is an approximation of socioeconomic status (SES), as well as 504/IEP status, which is an indicator of various abilities. Using a one-way ANOVA, she discovered that students who qualify for free lunch scored statistically significantly lower than students who qualified for full lunch and students who qualified for reduced lunch. Students eligible for free lunch were also absent and disciplined statistically significantly higher than students who qualified for full lunch or reduced lunch. The same was true for students who qualified for 504/IEP services. Using the same statistical analyses, Dr. Welch discovered that students who qualified for 504/IEP services achieved significantly lower than students who did not receive these services, and were absent and punished at significantly higher rates than students who did not receive services.
Greta sat back from her desk and began to think about the importance of instructional leadership in addressing these disparities. Several thoughts came to mind. Why weren’t administrators in YPS engaged in analyzing their academic and programmatic inequities already? Shouldn’t these basic inferential statistics be used to look for students who are experiencing marginalized outcomes? What was being done at the building level to better understand, conceptualize, and implement culturally responsive teaching? And, how could principals and APs engage in the development of their own leadership to provide culturally responsive instructional supervision to teachers in the name of fostering empathy for students who are minoritized, marginalized, and otherized? Clearly, Dr. Welch had work to do if she was going to address these inequities in YPS.
Implementing Culturally Responsive Instructional Supervision
At the next Administrative Team meeting, Greta shared the findings from the equity audit using the SIS data from YPS. She also gave everyone a copy of Culturally Responsive School Leadership by Muhammad Khalifa and told the administrators that they would need to have it read within the next month so they could begin to discuss, as the Administrative Team, how to become more culturally responsive with their leadership. However, it was Dr. Welch’s discussion of implementing culturally responsive instructional supervision that was really the focus of her agenda that day because she knew nothing would change the experiences in YPS until the instruction in each class considered the identities and lived experiences of all students.
First and foremost, Greta wanted her administrators to be instructional leaders, not just managers of prepackaged curricula. And, she wanted her administrators to become equity leaders through the feedback they provided when they conducted their teacher observations and classroom walkthroughs. Using the culturally responsive instructional supervision framework, she shared how she wanted principals and APs to consider the instruction students were receiving through the lens of various sociocultural identities, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, language, religion, birth sex, orientation/identity, ability, and other lived experiences.
For YPS students to feel like they were represented in the curriculum, this meant that teachers needed to be encouraged to alter lesson plans so that the marginalized experiences of students could be taken into account and addressed, and so that privileged sociocultural identities could be decentered. Dr. Welch understood from the research that one way to increase engagement and academic achievement for students racialized as a Person of Color, such as students who are racialized as Black or students who identified as Latinx, was to incorporate their culture and language into the curriculum and instruction. Objectives would be met, but teachers needed to be culturally responsive to the needs of students—not just middle-class students who were racialized as White. Teacher leaders and administrators had to be aware of the inequities that existed in the schools, and using the SIS data to inform the foundation of the equity audit, educators could begin to address the inequitable outcomes experienced by Hispanic students, students eligible for reduced lunch, and students eligible to receive 504/IEP services. This also meant that teachers would need the instructional leadership of administrators to develop their cultural competency—something that would have to start at the top of the district and trickle down at every level.
In implementing culturally responsive instructional supervision, YPS administrators could begin the process to reimagine the purpose of feedback about instruction. In Greta’s mind, this meant moving away from the punitive, prepackaged teacher evaluation models and prepacked curricula that reinforced the hierarchy of the principal as an overseer of summative feedback, and instead focus much more on building a team of educators who could provide formative feedback to teachers that encouraged the development of asset-based teaching and reflection of teaching to produce anti-oppressive learning (Mette et al., 2023). Gone were the days of feedback coming solely from principals and APs, where instead the focus would come from a team of intentionally representative teacher leaders with a variety of sociocultural identities and who had a commitment to culturally responsive teaching practices. Using this approach—where teacher leaders engage in providing feedback instead of supervising a study hall—would help expedite the implementation of culturally responsive instructional supervision practices by using the expertise of teachers who were connected and committed to the needs of students and families in YPS.
Dr. Welch also shared that she believed by working collaboratively with the intentionally representative supervision team, administrators and teacher leaders could focus on providing sociocultural feedback that centered the experience of marginalized students to create more inclusive instruction (Mette et al., 2023). By collecting data about what was observed throughout each building, teachers from across the school could unpack various pedagogical approaches, how instruction was validating and affirming, and how teachers might consider empowering students to address societal inequities. In addition, Greta liked how culturally responsive instructional supervision focused on encouraging teachers to reflect individually and in small critical colleague groups to reimagine deficit-based teaching to become asset-based. In doing so, she believed that culturally responsive instructional supervision would begin to change the (sub)conscious instructional practices of classroom teachers in YPS.
Perhaps what intrigued Dr. Welch the most about the culturally responsive instructional supervision framework were the support structures that could help teachers develop their cultural proficiency. If, and when, a YPS administrator or teacher leader observed an instructional practice that lacked cultural proficiency, they could disrupt learning that valued privileged sociocultural identities by providing developmentally appropriate supervision to advance greater cultural competence through the application of the Developmental Supervision for Cultural Proficency Continuum (Mette et al., 2023). Using this approach, principals and APs could determine what is needed for individual teachers to grow and how to help prevent culturally destructive instructional practices from continuing to be used by providing direct feedback to teachers to increase cultural competence and provide developmental support structures to build the capacity to become more cultural competent over time. Through these formative feedback structures, principals using culturally responsive instructional supervision practices could support growth instead of the “surveillance” practices they had been accused of by teachers.
Greta left the meeting feeling good about what she had communicated. She had shared, with data from the equity audit, the inequitable outcomes of groups of students in the district, and she believed that the YSP administrators could implement culturally responsive instructional supervision practices. Sure, there were some concerns about the tensions between teachers trusting administrators who engaged in “surveillance, not supervision,” but with bringing teachers into the fold and empowering them the leverage their expertise as instructors, Greta was positive only good things could come out of the work. And, by moving away from strict adherence to prepacked curricula and prescriptive lesson plans that didn’t consider various sociocultural identities, Greta also believed that academic achievement would increase. After all, with the right supports, how hard would it be to develop the cultural competence of teachers and administrators?
Attempting to Deliver Equity—And the Role of Disinformation Perpetuating Privilege
About a month later, Dr. Welch was still feeling excited about her work to help YPS implement more culturally responsive instruction. She had begun to talk with the Administrative Team more about Khalifa’s Culturally Responsive School Leadership, and the administrators, at least on the surface, seemed comfortable talking about some privileged sociocultural identities—mainly about SES. Greta had also begun to work with some teacher leaders who she thought would be good members of the supervision teams in the schools to help conduct focus groups as the next phase of the equity audit. In these focus groups, Greta planned on asking these teacher leaders to listen to the concerns of students who identify as Black, students who identify as Muslim, and students who identify as Hispanic. She also hoped to support the facilitation of interviews with less visible sociocultural identities, including those eligible to receive free and reduced lunch and those eligible for 504/IEP services, to better understand how they were minoritized, marginalized, and otherized in YPS. In addition, she had hosted a few town hall meetings with parents who had voiced frustration with the school system and began to develop a community-based team to address inequities in YPS (Green, 2017), giving the parents an opportunity to hear from the leader at the top that no student in YPS, regardless of their various sociocultural identities, should feel like they are treated differently or that they don’t belong.
Dr. Welch was in her office around 4:00 PM when her office associate knocked on her door and said she had a visitor. Steve, one of the YPS APs who was racialized as White, came in and had a strange look on his face that Greta couldn’t quite discern. After exchanging a few pleasantries, Greta asked how she could help Steve. What Steve shared flabbergasted Greta. Apparently, Derek Crossman, the Assistant Superintendent who was also racialized as White, was actively working against efforts to implement more culturally responsive instruction in the district. Specifically, when Derek was conducting her walkthroughs of buildings with administrators, he was telling them that altering lessons to be more culturally responsive would lead to less student achievement. He was also telling administrators that with the learning loss that occurred due to COVID, YPS simply could not afford to “experiment” with “less rigorous” instructional practices. As such, Derek was telling principals and APs to stick with the top-down approach to instructional leadership that had been used in YPS for the last decade, and to pause the development of the implementation of the intentionally representative supervision team because it might introduce “voices of dissent” that the district had worked so hard to suppress to focus on “rigorous instruction.” Some of the administrators, like Steve, had reached out to each other and shared their concerns, but others were clearly on the side of Derek and were becoming increasingly vocal about how culturally responsive instructional supervision would upset their system of management.
Inside, Greta was fuming. She did her best to maintain a calm exterior image, and when Steve was done sharing, Greta thanked Steve and asked to keep this conversation between the two of them. Once she knew Steve had left the building, she immediately asked her office associate to call Derek and ask him to come to her office.
When Derek arrived, Greta shared what she had heard, maintaining confidentiality but detailing his defiance by actively telling administrators to not follow her directions and leadership. To Greta’s surprise, Assistant Superintendent Crossman was remarkably calm, and actually seemed emboldened by the conversation. He shared that he felt he had a moral responsibility to protect students, many of whose families had lived in Yorktown for centuries, and to not make them feel guilty for having a privileged identity or to “water down” the instruction they were being given when they deserved high-quality learning opportunities. He then added that the most equitable thing he could do as an instructional leader was to ensure that all students receive a rigorous education—one that focused on the things students had in common and not ones that made them aware of their differences between one another.
Flabbergasted, Greta tried to remind Derek that culturally responsive instructional supervision allows instructional leaders to support teachers in differentiating instruction to meet the needs of students based on their various sociocultural identities, that it demands rigorous instruction that values higher-order thinking, and that it focuses on asset-based pedagogies instead of deficit-oriented ones. Nothing about culturally responsive instructional supervision says educators should feel bad about their privileged sociocultural identities—but it does require educators to acknowledge them so that all students have equitable outcomes. Using data from the recent equity audit, Greta tried to remind Derek that students who identified as Hispanic, students identified as eligible for free and reduced lunch, and students eligible for 504/IEP services, all had statistically significantly lower outcomes and participation in extracurricular activities than their counterparts. Surely the use of data could persuade even someone like Derek to accept the need to focus on equitable outcomes for all students in YPS.
In a calm and somewhat eerie response, Derek stated: Greta, I am a God-fearing man who will not be told I do not deserve to be here. My parents grew up dirt-poor and came from nothing, and the only thing they could provide me with was the promise of a better life through education. I have my faith, and I have pulled myself up by my bootstraps. The moral fabric of this country is being torn apart by the seams! I mean, just listen to the information online that is out there, Greta. You can listen to Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson or Julia Evola—and they all say we must get back in touch with our faith as a foundation for the greatness of this country. We have students who graduate from high school reading on sixth grade level and many who are so disruptive in the classroom that others can’t learn. Some of our graduates can’t even hold a job at the local gas station so they decide to go on welfare and add to the debt that all the liberals believe that will just pay for itself. And the idea that we need to adjust our calendar or schedule to accommodate other people’s beliefs, I mean where does it stop? No—NO—I will not just sit by and allow this to happen. My family has been here too long, and I cared too much about my community to be told by some outsider like yourself that your cultural responsiveness somehow has the answers to the problems of our country.
The diatribe completely took Greta by surprise. Collecting herself as quickly as she could, she told Derek to go home for the day, and that she would contact him in the morning about whether he should come into work that day. She then immediately put a call in with the school district’s attorney it has on retainer and left a message asking for advice about her legal options for addressing Derek’s behavior. More than anything, Dr. Welch found herself wondering how she could be in such a political mess for simply doing what is best for children and trying to ensure that all students—not just those from privileged sociocultural backgrounds—could experience equitable outcomes in YPS.
Teaching Notes: Disinformation Perpetuating Privilege in the United States and the Role That Culturally Responsive Instructional Supervision Might Play Ensuring Equitable Outcomes
There is no shortage of literature detailing the role of privilege in U.S. society, specifically the influence that privileged sociocultural identities have on the perpetuation of opportunity gaps within U.S. education systems (Darling-Hammond, 2007; Dixson & Rousseau, 2005; Grogan, 1999; Khalifa et al., 2016; Radd et al., 2021). To produce equitable outcomes for all students, educational leaders must recognize how sociocultural identities influence the construction of U.S. society (Gooden & Dantley, 2012; Milner, 2007), including but not limited to privilege based on race, religion, birth sex, SES, orientation/identity, ability, and other lived experiences. In both theory and in practice, this can lead to political and cultural polarization where groups of people, based on their privileged sociocultural identities, actively work to prevent the discussion of minoritized, marginalized, and otherized identities. Real-world examples include anti-gay legislation (Diaz, 2022), anti-critical race theory (CRT) legislation (Waxman, 2023), anti-trans legislation (Funakoshi & Raychaudhuri, 2023), and xenophobic education beliefs (Samari et al., 2021). Astutely, Khalifa (2020) notes, “educational leaders and teachers will either reproduce oppression, or they will contest it” (p. 19). This has certainly been true in the United States as politicians and local communities attempt to suppress conversations about inequities experienced by students who are further minoritized, marginalized, and otherized in U.S. education systems (Cormier et al., in press).
In the case of Yorktown, there is the mobilization of efforts to address inequitable outcomes experienced by minoritized students, particularly through Dr. Welch’s equity audit and the decision that follows to implement culturally responsive instructional supervision practices. However, there are also coordinated efforts to protect the privileged sociocultural identities of educators. Specifically, Derek Crossman and conspiring principals do not want to experience discomfort acknowledging their privilege, certainly based on racialized identity but also based on religious ideologies, beliefs about class, and various abilities. In addition to the unwillingness to engage with discomfort, privilege, and systemic oppression, educators must also consider the role privileged identities have on educational leaders who believe they are doing equity work by emphasizing sameness and assimilation (Burke et al., 2023; Irby et al., 2019).
Disinformation Perpetuating Privilege in the United States
As U.S. society continues to evolve into the 21st century, particularly as the U.S. society attempts to welcome to varying degrees of success less privileged sociocultural identities, some philosophers and sociologists have reengaged with the idea of pluralism. In his seminal piece, Dahl (1978) argues that as societies continue to become more heterogeneous, marginalized groups engage in the struggle for autonomy and freedoms, and during this struggle hegemonic systems either allow the autonomy and freedoms of marginalized groups to exist, or the dominant group(s) will prevent the deconstruction of privilege. Historically, arguments against pluralism in the United States have been pro-Christian, pro-capitalist, anti-socialist and have used aggressive media campaigns that hyperactively work to combat threats to white Christian ideology and capitalism more broadly (Connolly, 2005). Increasingly, there has been a critique of state-sanctioned ideology that identifies capitalism as a tool to reinforce white supremacy and white Christian nationalist ideologies that positions capitalism as anti-Black and use violent policies to ensure wealth is consolidated based on racialized identities (Burden-Stelly, 2023). These ideologies also reinforce Islamophobia, which is present in U.S. society and other societies throughout the globe.
As seen in the Yorktown case, pluralism in the United States can create conditions where people with privileged sociocultural identities feel oppressed themselves, whereby they create false narratives, interpretations, and justifications about their identities (Vandevelde, 2005). For educators, this can be expressed through the faulty belief that either students struggle in school because of their identities and lived experiences, or that the privileged sociocultural identities educators benefit from make them the target of persecution and prejudice when attempting to address inequities in school systems. This is observed in YPS, as well as throughout the United States, where educators express deficit-oriented beliefs that students struggle with achievement due to racial identity, experiencing poverty, speaking multiple languages, or that varying abilities predetermine academic outcomes. In addition, educators can lack a desire to discuss how school systems are inherently built and maintained for the privileged, and can become defensive when discussing inequities that are unearthed during equity audits or implementing frameworks like culturally responsive instructional supervision. Increasingly, these beliefs are expressed in political arenas that actively attack CRT or culturally responsive practices in an effort to maintain privilege and comfort, which tend to disproportionately be expressed in places spatialized as rural and conservative in nature (Weigel, 2020). And, the role of religion influencing political ideology has a large impact on U.S. citizens (Pew Research Center, 2023).
To create dialogue between groups of people with different belief structures, theorists like Habermas (2008) suggest that reason and faith can coexist in public spheres and be tolerant of one another. Increasingly, there is an attempt to suggest that the United States is now in a post-secular era and that religion—specifically Christian doctrine—should play a role in what is taught in school and whose identity is centered in curriculum and instruction (Lewin, 2017). However, disinformation efforts like post-secularism plagues U.S. society, creating online conspiracy theories that serve to threaten our democracy through divisive content (Kużelewska & Tomaszuk, 2022). Using narratives that reinforce white supremacy, Christian nationalism, anti-Black and anti-gay/anti-trans rhetoric (among other things), “interpreters accept the falsification of what they do and thereby commit themselves to the perfecting of their interpretation” (Vandevelde, 2005, p. 518). Love (2023) details the commitment to which some far-right groups remain devoted to spreading disinformation about Sandy Hook, widespread election fraud, and lies that fueled the attempted insurrection on the U.S. capital after the 2020 election.
In the Yorktown case, this is witnessed with Derek Crossman’s commitment to perpetuating beliefs and ideologies that suggest there is one way of knowing and one way of being in the United States, reinforcing a traditional narrative about pro-Christian nationalism, and pro-capitalist beliefs, that is intertwined with white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and Islamophobia. In addition, Derek and several principals suggest that engaging in efforts to address inequities actually leads to decreased educational outcomes—an argument that attempts to recenter whiteness and other privileged sociocultural identities, including white Christian nationalism and classism. Although the idea of nationalism is not new, and certainly not isolated to the United States, as a concept nationalism does not increase self-consciousness among citizens of a country, but rather attempts to reinforce what people imagine a nationalist identity to be (Anderson, 1991). As such, nationalism becomes conflated with political ideology as a sociocultural identity. This is certainly true in YPS, as well as many other U.S. communities, where educators with privileged sociocultural identities continue to struggle to understand how culturally responsive practices can lead to more equitable experiences—not just those who are racialized as White, middle to upper class, or who benefit from an ableist society. As seen in the YPS case, white supremacy emboldens Assistant Superintendent Crossman to openly reify anti-Black and Islamophobic beliefs that serve as resistance to enacting equity-oriented educational leadership from within a school district.
The Role of Culturally Responsive Instructional Supervision Ensuring Equitable Outcomes
Built largely on the intersection of the framework of culturally responsive teaching (Gay, 2018) and culturally responsive school leadership (Khalifa, 2020), culturally responsive instructional supervision rejects the notion that education is ahistorical or apolitical (Brooks & Watson, 2019) and leverages the anti-oppressive pedagogical practices to close sociocultural gaps that are observed throughout the U.S. education system (Cormier et al., in press). At the core of culturally responsive instructional supervision is the belief that instructional leaders are equity leaders, and as such instructional leaders must be able to provide formative feedback to teachers about how teaching and learning can be used in the schoolhouse to empower students to address societal inequities (Mette et al., 2023). Culturally responsive instructional supervision borrows from the traditions of culturally responsive teaching and culturally responsive school leadership, as well as employs a variety of methodologies, including but not limited to self-study (Haberlin, 2019), peer-led observation tools (Zepeda, 2014), equity audits (Banwo et al., in press; Khalifa, 2020), the Cultural Proficiency Continuum Q-Sort (Cormier, 2020), and others. Although it acknowledges the important traditions of seminal scholars and frameworks (e.g., Cogan, 1973; Goldhammer, 1969), culturally responsive instructional supervision rebukes the idea that supervision feedback is inherently “clinical” or “objective,” or that supervision should be devoid of acknowledging positionality, as many supervision texts claim (Guerra et al., 2022). As seen in the YPS case, culturally responsive instructional supervision can be used to address pedagogical inequities, become increasingly aware of those inequities, and address them through equity-oriented practices.
The development of critical consciousness among culturally responsive instructional supervisors (Freire, 1970; Waite, 2021a, 2021b) informs praxis to increase awareness of how inequitable outcomes in the United States are reified in the public school system. To accomplish this, culturally responsive instructional supervision tends to critique traditional supervision frameworks that historically have embodied whiteness and promoted color-blind ideologies that fail to acknowledge the inequitable and racialized lived experiences in U.S. society (Baker et al., in press; Cotman et al., 2023). Instead, culturally responsive instructional supervision leverages the knowledge held in Indigenous frameworks (Mackey, 2017), Black feminism (Watson & McClellan, 2020), guerrilla pedagogies (Álvarez, 2023; Lavin, 2004), and Community Learning Exchange principles (Militello et al., 2017). Through these frameworks, culturally responsive instructional supervision problematizes hegemonic epistemologies that have historically influenced instructional supervision paradigms, all with an attempt to empower instructional leaders with reimagined feedback structures that value democratic outcomes and equity-oriented approaches to instructional practices. In doing so, culturally responsive instructional supervision attempts to decenter whiteness by acknowledging the role that white supremacy has on the modern, racialized U.S. society. Using this approach, practitioners can use a formative feedback tool that allows educators to consider how white Christian nationalism remains a bedrock for reinforcing white supremacy and xenophobic ideologies that permeate the U.S. society. In addition, it asks instructional leaders to consider how the political and moral beliefs that supported the enslavement of people racialized as Black continue to be perpetuated through anti-Black sentiment throughout the United States (Arnold, 2018).
Culturally responsive instructional supervision also requires teachers and instructional leaders to acknowledge their privileged sociocultural identities (Khalifa, 2020; Milner, 2007), including but not limited to race, ethnicity, birth sex, immigration status, SES, orientation/identity, ability, and other lived experiences. In doing so, educators can combat damaging messages and narratives that are reinforced with students who are minoritized, marginalized, and otherized. In practice and in policy, this includes, but is not limited to confronting ‘don’t say gay’ laws, circumventing anti-trans legislation, combating anti-CRT legislation, disrupting xenophobic immigration policies, and calling out capitalist and neoliberal political agendas that treat education as a business rather than a public good. In the YPS case, Superintendent Welch asks the Yorktown Administrative Team to acknowledge their privileged sociocultural identities and develop a critical consciousness that would allow them to better understand the lived experiences of students and the daily instruction they receive in YPS. However, in practice, this can prove to be difficult, not just acknowledging racial privilege, but also privilege based on class, birth sex, orientation/identity, ability, and other lived experiences.
Through the development of critical consciousness of (Freire, 1970; Waite, 2021a, 2021b), culturally responsive instructional supervision supports the delivery of formative feedback that focuses on addressing sociocultural gaps and how educators can create liberatory instructional practices to confront inequitable outcomes (Mette et al., 2023). In addition, by leveraging the expertise of educators throughout a school building, principals can develop an intentionally representative supervision team reflective of various sociocultural identities to expedite the development of cultural proficiency (Cormier & Pandey, 2021), something that is not reflected in traditional instructional supervision models (Baker et al., in press; Guerra et al., 2022). Not only does this flatten the traditional hierarchy of most instructional supervision models (i.e., the principal is the overseer of knowledge) but it also frees supervision from plantation practices and traditions that have been baked into education systems (Squire et al., 2018). Increasingly, researchers offer powerful critiques of supervision and the enactment of supervision as political tool used to standardize education that have traditionally centered whiteness in the supervision (and surveillance) process that mimics plantation ideology (Arnold & McMillian, in press).
Data collection methods can vary, but data should be collected to produce feedback cycles to teachers throughout the building, specifically focusing on the use of multidimensional learning, rigorous higher-order thinking opportunities, inclusive community learning, and liberating instruction that empowers students to address social inequities (Gay, 2018). In doing so, a representative team of instructional leaders can provide feedback about sociocultural perspectives that are needed to produce validating, affirming, and asset-based pedagogies. Throughout the country, as well as the case depicting YPS, educators are struggling to move away from prepackaged curricula that have come to dominate the U.S. education industry as a result of the accountability movement. In many places, including YPS, supervision has been replaced with a form of curricular surveillance that devalues the expertise of teachers and places unreasonable value on testing outcomes.
Just as importantly, culturally responsive instructional supervision empowers teachers to learn in various ways and in different communities. The goal is to empower teachers to increase self-awareness through individual reflection, learn with critical colleagues, learn with building-wide faculty, and learn from the community the school supports (Mette et al., 2023; Marshall & Khalifa, 2018). In doing so, teacher leaders and principals can engage in culturally responsive instructional supervision that creates a more inclusive society through the development of asset-based pedagogies with a clear commitment to issues of social justice.
Discussion Questions and Teaching Activities
Using the Yorktown case, as well as the culturally responsive instructional supervision framework explored in this article, consider the discussion questions and teaching activities below to further unpack the case about the political polarization in education environments. Current teacher leaders and administrators in buildings, as well as leadership preparation programs, can use the Yorktown case to examine the role sociocultural identities have on perpetuating privilege in the United States, as well as how culturally responsive instructional supervision might be used to create more equitable learning opportunities for students in the schoolhouse. Additional suggested readings are provided for educators who are interested in this framework.
Discussion Questions
Consider the ways in which Superintendent Welch went about attempting to address the inequities experienced by YPS students. Specifically, consider the ways in which she shared information from the equity audit using the SIS data, how she engaged with the Administrative Team, and how she introduced the idea of implementing culturally responsive instructional supervision. What did she do well? What could she have done differently? How did her actions further equity? What additional strategies might have been required based on the composition of the administrative team?
Engaging in equity work is always going to involve resistance from people in a district like Derek Crossman and/or members of the community. When engaging in this work, educators will need to be prepared to address and engage with resistance. What resistance might you expect to combat in your own school district, and how might you be more prepared to engage in this work?
How can educators with privileged sociocultural identities learn to become more aware of how their identities influence what they see as “acceptable” or “normal,” and how these identities can prevent awareness of inequities that are perpetuated in U.S. education systems? How might the use of equity audits, culturally responsive training, and inclusive instructional practices help U.S. education systems contribute to a more just U.S. society?
Reflect on the shifting demographics of the Yorktown community. How and in what ways might communities that are identified as Town or Rural by NCES locale codes be more prepared to welcome and support students who have a wide range of sociocultural identities? Why is it so important for educators to learn to engage in culturally responsive instructional practices for students with visible and less visible sociocultural identities that have historically been marginalized by U.S. society and U.S. school systems? What might this look like in the schoolhouse?
Discuss how the YPS case details the reliance of prepackaged curricula and teacher evaluation systems that contribute to a culture of “surveillance, not supervision.” How does the use and implementation of prepackaged curricula contribute to the deprofessionalization of teaching? Can prepackaged curricula be culturally responsive? How are prepackaged curricula used in your school district, and what are the ways in which it is (mis)used? What research might school leaders utilize as rationale for the development of culturally responsive instruction?
How can educational leaders and teachers be more prepared to engage in a politically charged climate that actively attempts to prevent the discussion of race, ethnicity, religion, class, birth sex, identity/orientation, ability, and other lived experiences? Reflect on the influence of nationalism in the United States and what is accepted as the norm in U.S. education systems, specifically how nationalism is intertwined with white supremacy, pro-Christian, and pro-capitalist ideologies. How can school leaders and teachers be more aware of these belief structures and how they inhibit the pursuit of equity for all children in the schoolhouse?
Teaching Activities
The Role of an Instructional Leader as an Equity Leader
Educators should gather information housed in their SIS to examine how various sociocultural identities influence achievement inequities and policy-driven inequities (Skrla et al., 2004). The data should include standardized achievement scores (math and language arts, as well as social studies and science if available), attendance data (absences and tardies), disciplinary data (in school suspensions and out of school suspensions), enrollment in accelerated classes (gifted and talented classes as well as advanced placement classes), and participation in extracurricular activities (athletics, performing arts, and clubs). In addition, educators should gather readily available demographic information, including but not limited to race, birth sex, free and reduced lunch status, 504/IEP status, ELL status, and others. If necessary, educators should ask for deidentified data to analyze data that they wouldn’t otherwise have access to but could use to help inform how to improve outcomes for students. Using an equity-oriented lens (Roegman et al., 2018), educators should examine academic and programmatic inequities among groups using independent t-tests, one-way ANOVAs, and factorial ANOVAs. To unpack these more deeply, educators should access portions of Statistics for People Who (Think They) Hate Statistics (Salkind & Frey, 2020) and Using Equity Audits to Create Equitable and Excellent Schools (Skrla et al., 2009). Using these resources, educators are encouraged to examine outcomes similar to the Yorktown case, specifically to understand how and in what ways students might experience marginalization based on race, birth sex, free and reduced lunch (as an approximation of class), and 504/IEP status.
Considering the Concept of Culturally Responsive Instructional Supervision
Educators should engage in a discussion about the traditions of instructional supervision, particularly how whiteness, as well as how ahistorical and apolitical ideologies, have prevented more critical perspectives from being implemented within the field of supervision. Educators facilitating this discussion should start by asking how and in what ways instructional supervision historically has reinforced privileged perspectives and how culturally responsive instructional supervision is different. Specifically, educators should discuss how culturally responsive instructional supervision practices can support the development of (a) anti-oppressive pedagogies, (b) using equity-audit data to identify inequitable academic outcomes of minoritized, marginalized, and otherized students, (c) critical consciousness to decenter whiteness and other privileged perspectives within instructional practices, (d) awareness of how privileged sociocultural identities influence the way feedback about instruction is provided, as well as how it is received, and (e) liberatory instructional practices to produce a more justice and equitable U.S. society. In this activity, educators are encouraged to read Instructional Supervision: Is It Culturally Responsive? A Textbook Analysis (Guerra et al., 2022), Culturally Responsive Instructional Supervision: A Further Analysis of a Leading Textbook (Cotman et al., 2023), and [Making a Difference: Instructional Leadership that Drives Self-reflection and Values the Expertise of Teachers] (Mette et al., 2023). Specifically, educators are encouraged to critique their own perceptions and experiences with instructional supervision and what is needed to apply more culturally responsive instructional supervision practices to help schools be more liberating and emancipatory.
Exploring the Dark Side of How Disinformation Perpetuates Privilege
Many school systems struggle to decenter privileged sociocultural perspectives as they attempt to enact culturally responsive practices. In the United States, privileged sociocultural perspectives are often reified through white Christian nationalist disinformation campaigns that weaken U.S. democracy, including perpetuating lies about Sandy Hook, the 2020 election, and the attempted insurrection on January 6, 2020. Facilitators should show to the YouTube video clip of Steve Turley discussing Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan upholding the cultural importance of the bible in U.S. society. In this clip, a wide variety of opinions are advocated for, including the development of a post-secular U.S. society, the decline of secular liberalism, the erosion of U.S. culture and laws due to failure to adhere to the bible, how cultural anthropologists point to one religion as an absolute necessity for societal health, and even how religion is necessary in Western civilization to help define gender. Alternatively, facilitators can have people access the Southern Poverty Law Center’s article Inside the Far-Right Podcast Ecosystem, Part 1: Building a Network of Hate. In this article (Squire & Gais, 2021), educators can learn how white nationalism and white supremacist ideologies have been used to grow support of far-right extremism that is racist, antisemitic, and used to cultivate hate. Conversations should explore how disinformation can be nuanced or explicit, as well as how they serve to maintain privileged sociocultural perspectives such as race, religion, and gender. For additional discussions, facilitators can lead a book discussion of Imagined Communities (Anderson, 1991) that explores the foundation of nationalism that exists in virtually every society in the world and how it is conflated with political identity as a sociocultural construct. Conversely, facilitators can explore Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States (Burden-Stelly, 2023) that explores nationalist ideologies about capitalism that are inherently anti-Black.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
