Educators are pulled in different directions by competing demands. Here’s how busy educators can introduce equity conversations to their routines.

As the Equity, Disproportionality & Design Project crosses the halfway point of its grant, our team has been thinking hard about how to reach as many educators in California as we can. We want to give everyone opportunities to contribute to our mission of preventing disproportionality and promoting equity in schools.

If we all want to promote equity in our schools, then what’s stopping us? There are two things that come to mind: time and clarity of action.

One of the most interesting realizations I’ve come across about going from distance learning back to in-person learning came while interviewing Tanya Gonzalez, a teacher of the visually impaired, for our special Equity, Disproportionality & Design (ED&D) podcast episode on reopening schools.

As members of the Equity, Disproportionality, and Design (ED&D) community, we look for ways to talk about a special kind of fraction: a risk ratio score. That’s because risk ratio scores are the way we monitor inequality in schools.

Has school reopening been on your mind? Us too. We’re starting a new project: A special ED&D podcast episode focusing on the voices of educators reopening schools.

In February of 2020, just one month before we would begin stay-at-home orders to fight the spread of COVID-19, the Equity, Disproportionality & Design team gathered a group of community designers to build their idea for a parenting-facing data report.

With every passing year educators have more data available to them. But studies suggest that looking at data, on its own, isn’t enough. That’s because, as one study’s authors note, “Technology is never the agent of change—people are.” So how do agents of change in our schools learn to use the growing amount of data they have available to them so change can happen?

In this post, we’ll focus on these questions: What is the ED&D project? Is it a SELPA? An agency? Or something else? We’ll also explain where our project is situated in the larger California System of Support how we’re connected to other content experts in the state, and how we collaborate with SELPAs and school districts.

It’s been rewarding to see our design work groups building their projects. We can’t wait to share them, so we’ll be using this design workshop as a virtual show and tell. Involving our community in preventing disproportionality has been a goal from the start. That’s what makes it so exciting to use this workshop as space for those community voices to be heard in the project work.

Armed with empathy and community stories, our design teams gathered again on February 13, 2020. This time the focus of the design workshop was to begin prototyping five ED&D services:

At the start of the year, we got together with Jennifer Rodriguez, Communications Specialist at the San Diego County Office of Education, for a story about the ED&D Project’s mission to prevent disproportionality in our schools. The story was published in the February 2020 edition of Inspire. Thank you to Jennifer for helping us share our story!

When we started the Equity, Disproportionality, & Design project in February, we started a mission to give all students in California the chance to live up to their full academic and social potential. Since then, we’ve forged community partnerships that have inspired progress and hope for this mission.

Getting to see our administrators, teachers, parents, and community members start forming relationships around preventing disproportionality has been exciting and inspiring.