Education Week - May 17, 2023 - 6

Equity Audits in School Districts: An Explainer
The systemic examinations of data
are meant to show where gaps in
access and other inequities may exist
By Eesha Pendharkar
In late 2020, the Baldwinsville Central
School District in upstate New
York began gathering data on middle
school students' participation in accelerated
learning programs, which
aim to provide them with access to
Advanced Placement and other college-level
courses in high school, according
to Deputy Superintendent Joe
DeBarbieri.
In this process, district officials
found a significant underrepresentation
of students of color and those
with disabilities in these advanced
courses. Baldwinsville enrolls about
5,000 students, who are 87 percent
white, and has 806 students with disabilities,
making up 15 percent of its
enrollment.
" We started asking the question,
why is that the case? You know, when
they're exposed to the same types of
curriculum and experiences? What
are we doing wrong? " he said.
" So it forced us to ask why, and then
we started engaging in these equity
audits from both the building and the
district level. "
This led the district to conduct
so-called equity audits at the building
and district levels, examining
various aspects of schooling, including
reading and math scores,
extracurricular activities, athletics,
school suspensions, and chronic
absenteeism.
The district has since made these
data publicly available on its website,
although DeBarbieri noted
that addressing the issues uncovered
in the data presents significant
challenges.
" The easy part in my mind is pulling
the data and getting them into the format
where you can see the proportionality, "
DeBarbieri said. " The difficult
part then becomes, what are those next
steps to address the issues? "
Here's what equity audits are, why
they're important, and more.
What are equity audits?
Equity audits are systemic examinations
of data across schools and
a district to understand where gaps
to access and challenges to educational
equity exist. They can be conducted
at the district level, but also
within a school, a department, or
even a classroom. They often look
at student data on performance,
discipline, or attendance, or a combination
of those, and put them into
context of the district, school, or
classroom's demographics to see
which types of students are underand-overrepresented.
The
term equity audit first started
to be used about 25 years ago, but the
practice of evaluating data to analyze
where inequities lie is older than that,
according to George Theoharis, a
professor of educational leadership at
Syracuse University.
" One of the key features ... is this
idea of proportional representation,
and it's actually a pretty useful tool for
schools and districts, " Theoharis said.
For example, if 30 percent of a district's
enrollment is Black students, 30
percent of students suspended, 30 percent
of students in advanced classes,
and 30 percent of kids participating in
performing arts should be Black students,
according to Theoharis.
" That idea of proportional representation
is a lens to bring to your
equity audit to see 'OK, how are we
doing? Where are the gaps? Where are
we achieving sort of greater equity?' "
Why are they important?
The goal of an equity audit is to
make sure students are represented in
proportion to their enrollment across
various data points, three experts told
EdWeek.
A successful equity audit can be the
blueprint for systemic change in the
district, because educators at all levels
can better understand their role in
causing or contributing to disparities
the audit uncovers, several experts
told EdWeek.
In DeBarbieri's district, things are
slowly changing because of the plan
the district created based on the audit
data.
The district introduced more diverse
curricular resources so that
students could have options and pick
books that reflect their experiences. It
also changed the criteria for accelerated
middle school math and science
courses so more students could take
them without having to go through as
many prerequisites.
The district is also noticing a reduction
in discipline for students with disabilities
and students of color because
of restorative practices, which allowed
students to work with each other to resolve
disputes instead of disciplining
them.
" We have a responsibility and obligation
to advocate and to support all
students, " he said.
" Until you really start looking at the
data, and asking the questions, why
and how come and what can we do to
address these areas of inequity, we're
not doing enough. "
The district has since conducted the
audit again this year, and plans to analyze
the data annually.
Who conducts equity audits?
Equity audits can be used on different
levels by teachers, department
chairs, principals, and district
administrators. Educators enrolled
6 | EDUCATION WEEK | May 17, 2023 | www.edweek.org
in educational leadership graduate
programs are often taught to conduct
equity audits as part of their
coursework.
One such program is led by Irma Almager,
an associate professor of educational
psychology, leadership, and
counseling at Texas Tech University.
Almager's masters' students are
teachers and her doctoral students are
district leaders often on their way to
becoming superintendents. She currently
has about 200 students, learning
remotely, from districts across the
state.
All of them conduct equity audits of
their own classrooms, schools, or districts,
and come up with action plans
to address the discrepancies they find
as part of their leadership curriculum.
Teachers get authorization from the
district to use classroom-level data,
so these audits don't cost the district
any money.
" The biggest takeaway is the data
reveals the inequity, but it also reveals
to each one individually the
role that they've played in creating
the inequities in their spaces, "
Almager said about teachers conducting
equity audits of their classrooms.
" In
the self-examination of their
own biases, and why they make the
decisions that they make, many times
they find out that it's just the norm.
It's a practice in their district and it is
not even successful, but it's just something
everyone does. "
Districts can also commission outside
organizations to conduct data
analyses in specific areas, such as
special education.
What are the equity audits results?
The results of equity audits depend
on what kind of analyses
districts are doing-whether it's
quantitative date on attendance,
performance, and discipline, or
more qualitative data, such as results
of student surveys. But overall,
many district and school leaders
discover some degree of well-known
inequities, said Dusty Palmer, an assistant
professor in educational psychology,
leadership, and counseling
at Texas Tech University who runs a
program similar to Almager's.
Principals and district leaders in
Texas find Black students are overrepresented
in discipline data and
often have lower attendance rates
compared to other students. Special
education students can either be
vastly over or underrepresented in
discipline, he said.
" Knowing this, we're going to go in
there and advocate for the minority
students that are disciplined, " Palmer
said.
" This is where you see a lot of our
principal residents take on either attendance
or discipline within their
campus to either increase the attendance
of the ones that are not coming
to school, or reducing the discipline
referrals. "
Experts and district leaders agree
that the problem lies with thinking
students are to blame for discipline,
attendance, or inadequate academic
performance, and often, the results
of equity audits shift educators'
mindsets to realizing and accepting
that they could be working differently
to bridge some of the gaps the
audits find.
" So the findings, they correlate with
nationwide findings, but we take it to
that next step, " Palmer said.
" Now they're really starting to talk
about thinking and changing the
knowledge, skills, and mindsets of
the teachers so that the student performance
will be impacted. "
Are equity audits controversial?
Since 2020, the term " equity "
has become controversial in some
parts of the country. In an EdWeek
Research Center survey from 2022,
Students at Sutton Middle
School in Atlanta compare
and contrast songs
representing different eras
in history during an
International Baccalaureate
immersion day on Feb. 14, 2020.
13 percent of teachers, district, and
school leaders said that the word
had been weaponized or was controversial.
That's
in part because of the link
between equity and critical race
theory, an academic concept whose
core idea is that racism is embedded
within laws, policies, and large systems.
The backlash to critical race
theory-including dozens of state
laws to ban it-has extended to diversity,
equity, and inclusion initiatives
in school districts that are meant to
address racial inequities. In Almager's
program, teachers and district
leaders run into this issue across the
state, she said.
Sometimes, their districts are
" pretty harsh, " she said, and want to
scrutinize the equity audits and the
action plan to address the disparities
the audit finds
" Some districts do not want to use
the word equity or inequity. So they
use words like disparities, or disproportions
or things like that, " she said.
" We can change the wording and
keep the action. "
Equity audits are not new, Theoharis,
the professor from Syracuse, said,
so sometimes the debate about the
wording just becomes about semantics.
" Schools
have done needs assessments
forever. That's pretty common
and not a controversial practice, "
he said. " And equity audit is
just a different name for a thoughtful
needs assessment that takes into
account the diversity of our population
and groups that have been marginalized. "
Allison
Shelley for EDUimages
http://www.edweek.org
Education Week - May 17, 2023

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