About the Office of Equity & Inclusion

Theory of Action

If our NPS Community works together to support social emotional learning and highly engaging instructional practices, then our students will experience an equitable learning environment designed for optimal student achievement.

Educational equity means ensuring just outcomes for each student, raising marginalized voices, and addressing the imbalance of power and privilege.*

*Adapted from Great Schools Partnership

Equity Defined

Equity: Educational equity means ensuring just outcomes for each student, raising marginalized voices, and addressing the imbalance of power and privilege.

Adapted from: Great Schools Partnership

Position Statement

We believe that the successes and experiences of staff, students, and families come from our individual and collective investment in systemic efforts. Those successes and experiences ought not be predictable by particular identity or cultural characteristics. We apply equity as a measure of effect in progress and outcome. Our metrics for equity include but are not limited to reducing disparities between racial, ethnic, and cultural groups.

Equity serves as an organizing principle in our efforts to structure learning and support. We focus on merging understandings of how power, access, and privilege shape experiences in our schools. In light of historic, predictable, and pervasive experiences of underrepresented racial and cultural groups in society and within NPS.

Because we believe this, we will:

• Design infrastructure that creates patterns of practice that reflect a culture that values equity;

• Hold space for conversation about who we are, who we aspire to be, and our placement relative to the aspiration to be an equitable school community;

• Collect and share information about our school communities efforts and journey toward increasingly meaningful inclusive community;

We believe that equity and inclusion can be felt in experience, seen in connections, and measured in performance. Our beliefs manifest as socially conscious and evidence based philosophies, policies, practices, structures, and systems.

The Work

• To prompt thinking about how specifically race but also considering other non-dominant identities, are impacting any work (disaggregating data to determine disparities and examine the nature of the disparities) to affect equity.

• To add diverse representation into conversation by bringing racially and culturally non-dominant perspectives to bear in conversations about the work of PLCs, Data Teams, and teaching and learning in general.

• To identify the ways in which a focus area under our equity work is functioning, or could function better to affect equity at your school. Capturing those insights to bring them up within the district data team process so that we can discuss implications for district wide work in that focus area.

Theories of Action Behind the Work

1) IF we align systems of practice to philosophies that support equity/antiracism to policy that eliminates inequities; THEN all stakeholders, specifically those from racially, ethnically, and culturally non-dominant groups will be able to access and utilize NPS resources and opportunities.

2) IF we have structures for collecting, analyzing data/information, and they function to identify and describe equity/inequity and generate reflection, strategy, and action; THEN we will establish programming that produces measurable shifts in gaps in access and inclusion.

3) IF we connect research based concepts of equity to standards based practices that are also culturally relevant, THEN we can stop practice that does not, sustain practice that does, and innovate new practices will that build educator efficacy and bolster student growth.