Teresa Lance came to her position as assistant superintendent for equity and innovation in School District U-46 in Elgin, Illinois, after leaving a superintendency where community leaders were unwilling to change the status quo. Joshua P. Starr describes how Lance's previous experiences led to her current role and what she learned along the way.

Gifted and talented services have a long and tainted history. Since their inception, they have not served a student population that mirrored the racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic diversity of the nation as a whole. But this need not be the case. Contemporary approaches to gifted education can advance the goals of equity and school integration. In…

Equity initiatives and critical race theory (CRT) have recently emerged as an urgent agenda for K-12 schools. Jung-ah Choi argues that CRT is a useful framework but that teaching CRT principles to young children may have deleterious effects. In particular, it could undermine two bedrock notions: educational equality and meritocracy. It is not…

In the wake of school shootings, attention invariably turns to how to make schools safer. But many of the strategies intended to secure schools against external threats yield unintended negative consequences for marginalized students, exacerbating racial and other inequalities. Meg Caven advocates for a definition of school safety that centers on…

Rudy Ruiz and Faith Connolly propose a new accountability measure that captures the percentage of students in a school that have a teacher of a similar ethno-racial background. The measure would hold school districts accountable for the percentage of students who have a teacher who looks like them. Adding this measure would bring attention to…

Participation in school sports has a variety of benefits for students. But not all students are able to participate in school athletics programs. In this column, Robert Kim explores the different levels of access suburban, urban, and rural students have to sports programs. And he considers whether students, regardless of where they live, have a…

Soon after Xavier Botana took over as superintendent of Maine's Portland Public Schools, he realized that, despite the district's professed commitment, efforts to promote equity were embedded in other programs rather than being its own goal. He knew that if he were going to make his vision for equity a reality, he would need to get the community's…

Schools across the country are grappling with vocal resistance to educational equity efforts, while disparities, including racial disproportionality in school discipline, persist. In this research-practice-partnership project, Adai A. Tefera, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, Ashlee Sjogren, and David Naff learned of the ways educators and leaders across…

As people with power in schools, teachers and administrators make instructional decisions that shape opportunities in classrooms for students to learn. Educators' words and actions, especially related to the treatment of students and their ideas, are foundational for creating equitable learning communities in our classrooms and schools. David…

School leaders juggle the often-inconsistent goals of maintaining support of middle- and upper-income families for public education and, at the same time, implementing policies to strengthen equity for low-income students. Author Iris C. Rotberg describes how these tradeoffs play out in different communities, the role of concentrated poverty and…

Parents and the public use accountability data to judge if schools are doing a good or a bad job educating their students. However, using the current data, schools perceived as "good" tend to be in better-resourced districts and enroll higher percentages of wealthy and white students. Schools perceived as "bad" tend to be in…

Not enough attention is paid to the instructional design decisions that define students' experiences. Lisa Dover Kingsley and Jennifer Perry Cheatham contend that while quality teaching is crucial, the structural decisions supporting meaningful engagement often go unexamined. Using innovations in North Kansas City, Missouri, as a throughline, they…

The COVID-19 pandemic led states and districts to take a break from grading students and pause standardized testing. As part of an ongoing series of articles on how schools might reconceptualize their work, William Penuel considers what kinds of assessment practices should be carried forward, as schools attempt to become more equitable. He…

Care and social-emotional supports are of concern for school district leaders who want to create a caring culture throughout their district. In their study of central office leaders, Kate Kennedy and Jeff Walls found that caring leadership is complex, that school district leaders practice care in collaboration with others, that partnerships with…

Career and technical education (also known as vocational education) has been in existence since at least the 19th century as a means of preparing students for employment. However, for much of the 20th century, it also has served to segregate students, even after such segregation was deemed illegal. Robert Kim describes the legal history of career…