Fix Injustice, Not Kids and Other Principles for Transformative Equity Leadership

Book excerpt: Six principles for leading unequivocally in ways that disrupt inequity at its roots. Fix Injustice, Not Kids and Other Principles for Transformative Equity Leadership offers a deep dive into the leadership values, commitments, and practices that help educational leaders create and sustain equitable schools and districts. Drawing from their extensive equity and inclusion work with schools, Paul Gorski and Katy Swalwell introduce key components of the equity literacy framework. They then challenge principals, equity professionals, and other K–12 leaders to embrace six guiding principles for meaningful equity leadership: • Direct confrontation: Honestly naming and directly addressing the conditions that perpetuate inequity. • Fix injustice, not kids: Avoiding deficit views, focused on "fixing" people who are marginalized, and embracing structural views, focused on eliminating inequitable conditions. • Prioritization: Reimagining policies and practices and rebuilding institutional cultures in ways that account for historical and present inequities and their ramifications. • Just access: Reconsidering what we provide equitable access to and whether it is itself equitable. • Evidence-based equity: Applying an equity lens to the ways we collect and interpret data and exercising caution about popular data collection tools and methods. • Care, joy, and sustainability: Withstanding inevitable resistance while embracing visions for love, joy, and community that cultivate and sustain transformative equity. Powerful stories from students and staff members reveal the troubling gaps between their everyday school experiences and the often high-optics, low-impact equity and diversity programs, events, and strategies embraced by school leaders. They also reveal key moments of growth as leaders learned how to deepen their equity understandings and enact more meaningful equity approaches. This thought-provoking book offers guidance to those who want to do better and are on the path to achieving some of today's most crucial goals: disrupting inequity and becoming transformative equity leaders.