Chartering Ways Forward: Educational Equity and Cultural Responsiveness

By Maria Khan & Dr. Kristen Wilcox

The American Institutes for Research (AIR) Equity in Education initiative is supporting research-practice partnerships (including NYKids, Tech Valley High (TVH) and Chatham High School) to work on high leverage problems of practice focused on equity in education amid pandemic recovery.

In today’s blog, we share some updates regarding this work and discuss how we are chartering ways to address issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and cultural responsiveness with our partners.

Improvement in Action through NYKids’ Partnerships

NYKids supports our school partners through agenda setting, sharing of improvement tools, and most importantly setting time and space for sharing our improvement work.

Over several meetings with NYKids, Tech Valley High and Chatham identified a shared goal statement:

We will address the barriers to learning and engagement for children, staff, and community members through our DEI and mental health initiatives in the remainder of the 2021-22 school year. 

Both Chatham and Tech Valley High then identified priority areas to reach this goal. Chatham aims to focus on social emotional learning (SEL) practices to support students while Tech Valley aspires for student success through elevating student agency and retention and belonging, specifically for students of color and those from low-SES backgrounds.

During each meeting, we discuss specific objectives, use new improvement tools, and identify action steps to keep moving this work along. We have also created a shared Google Drive to house all documents, including NYKids’ and other research studies, and improvement project workbooks for the RPP team members to work collaboratively in between check-ins.

Currently, both schools are using improvement tools to help guide a deeper dive into the kinds of improvement they can achieve in their priority areas – specifically identifying that one driver where they want to focus their efforts, one process they want to change, and one short improvement cycle they want to test out.

Our next steps include for the schools to share out progress on aim statements, driver diagrams, any new protocols or procedures that were developed and tested and any new data they gathered/analyzed.

AIR RPP Resources

The AIR team shared a new Longitudinal Asset Map tool that “draws on datasets across the sectors of education, health, housing, social services, employment, and technology access”. The asset map provides a bird’s-eye view of schools and communities to support conversations through data visualizations around resources and constraints in different communities. The longitudinal database allows users to download data from a number of databases for secondary analysis  and conduct state, district, and county comparisons about the differential impacts of the pandemic.

AIR RPP Water-cooler Event Highlights

On May 5, 2022, AIR hosted a water-cooler event for RPP members including NYKids and partner schools (Chatham and TVH) to reconnect, share progress, and learn from each other. The water-cooler event kicked off with an icebreaker activity, followed by each team’s update on their projects, next steps, some questions and concluded with announcements from AIR on what’s coming next.

NYKids, TVH and Chatham also shared progress on our work as well as NYkids materials, and received some suggestions on resources for educational equity, publications on the Black and Brown experience of COVID-19, webinars on teaching and leading with trauma-informed care, and other materials (such as youth participatory action frameworks).

Next Steps

Our goal through our partnership with AIR, Chatham and Tech Valley is to keep moving forward within the chartering phase and identify plans to tackle a number of issues as we emerge from the pandemic in the coming months. And we look forward to preparing for a fall convening of the entire RPP network in Chicago.

We look forward to keeping you posted about our work with AIR and hope you find the resources we shared here of use. If you have questions and suggestions for us or want to get involved in one of our improvement initiatives, please send us an email at nykids@albany.edu.