School improvement plans (SIPs) have become a central feature of schooling. Educational leaders experience tension between balancing compliance with accountability demands and continuous improvement, and neither of these lenses is centered in the social justice necessary for closing opportunity gaps. We propose a new rubric for assessing the extent to which SIPs focus on policy compliance, students, organizations, or community. Assessing SIPs from four U.S. states reveals that schools view families and community stakeholders as external to the improvement planning process and that this issue is exacerbated for schools serving higher percentages of African American/Black students and higher percentages of economically disadvantaged students.