Lowering the barrier to entry: De-mystifying, de-colonizing, and democratizing improvement science in service of equity.
Starting from the premise that a focus on equity is feeble without tools to make good on the vision and mission, and that improvement science is amoral without a focus on equity, this interactive workshop engages equity champions who want to employ techniques of improvement science, and improvers who want to be more explicitly focused on equity, and gives them ways of thinking about the overlap between their experiences and interests, so that they will have language and tools to inform their practice moving forward.
At conference in-person
After this session, attendees will:
View improvement science as an approach for working towards equity;
See themselves as BOTH improvement scientists and equity champions.
Our proposal fits in the strand of Improvement Science in Practice. And while it touches on several elements within that strand, it is centered squarely on:
• Share how continuous improvement practices are being applied to advance equity in education.
Improvement Science (IS) is a set of tools and methods to bring about improvement, and as such it is agnostic regarding the problems of practice that it tackles. But as Ibram Kendi has pointed it, there is no such thing as equity-neutral; a program, policy, or approach to improvement is either racist or anti-racist (Kendi, 2019); to fail to challenge the status quo is to support the status quo, and since the status quo in education, as in all other facets of American life, is inherently inequitable, to support the status quo is to perpetuate inequity.
Forgive us for pointing out that IS as a field has been late to the party when it comes to embracing equity as a central goal of the work of improvement. As a result, educators whose primary focus is improving equity have been suspicious and sometimes dismissive of IS (Safir & Dugan, 2021). And even those who realize that its strengths can be used for good do not necessarily embrace it as a primary tool for engineering equity; “you can’t PDSA your way to total system transformation” has become something of a mantra.
We do not necessarily agree that IS is impotent when it comes to system transformation. We concede that it hasn’t happened yet. Nonetheless, while we are waiting for the revolution, it couldn’t hurt to leverage Improvement Science to improve equity in our schools. At the same time, we know that there are many educators who have expertise and experience in improvement science who would like to be more centered on equity work, but find that that, too, is not always an easy community to enter.
Our proposal, therefore, features the activities we have developed for employing IS as a support for equity. We want educators with a background in equity to have experience with tools and ideas that demonstrate the utility of improvement science to further their aims. Likewise, we want educators with experience and expertise in improvement science to recognize that many of the fundamental principles of improvement science absolutely map to the principles of equity:
Be hard on systems, soft on people. The system is perfectly designed to produce the results it gets, therefore there is little point in blaming the educators, the students, or the families for outcomes that are created by the system in which they are embedded;
The experiences of the people at the “sharp end” of the system are not incidental to system outcomes. In IS this is sometimes referred to as UX, which seems a little cold to those of us who have worked with students and families who have been discounted by the system--nevertheless, the principle is the same;
Deficit thinking perpetuates inequity by reinforcing low expectations and catastrophizing. People in the system have more strengths than they are given credit for;
Pragmatics trump ideology. Do not be afraid to draw on other traditions and institutional logics--the magpie is a glamorous bird.
The work is both adaptive and technical. Have respect for the technical core, but do not expect that a solution that worked somewhere will work everywhere;
Expertise and power are not synonymous; Hierarchies in general are more dangerous than helpful;
Do not be afraid to look outside the system for answers. But do not assume that you will not find it inside the system, either.
In sum, we wish to highlight, in very practical terms, the overlap between equity and improvement science; and ultimately, we would like people to come to the conclusion that they are in fact the same thing.
The design of this session reflects our normal practice: to immerse participants very quickly in activities that give them a meaningful insight into an aspect of the work, that is hands-on in such a way that they will feel confident taking the activity back to their own domain, and that also provides a debriefing experience that will allow them to make meaning for themselves and their work. Participants can expect, therefore, to spend the majority of their time in the session engaging with a process or a tool, in groups, and very little time looking at a presentation or listening to us.