Abstract
In this study, I examine partnerships between districts and school improvement organizations (SIOs) focused on instructional reform, investigating how these partnerships conceptualize and negotiate equity in practice. Using a qualitative comparative case study design of nine district–SIO partnerships across the country, I find that partnerships’ equity approaches in practice were related to how critically reflective they were as a partnership. Partnerships represented a spectrum of criticality that ranged from an emphasis on equality and standardization with limited interrogation of equity to an emphasis on oppression-combating approaches to equity and prioritization of critical reflection. The findings signal that in district–SIO partnerships, both ideas and individuals are powerful in shaping equity sensemaking and often impede more expansive ways of conceptualizing equity.
Keywords
Although such partnerships have been studied for some time (Rowan, 2002), less attention has been paid to understanding how districts and SIOs collaborate to effect equity-oriented school and district improvement. Increasingly, district–SIO partnership research, especially work examining research–practice partnerships, explicitly calls attention to power dynamics, equity, and social justice in partnership work (Denner et al., 2019; Farrell et al., 2021, 2023; Vetter et al., 2022). Rarely examined, however, is how leaders in district–SIO partnerships conceptualize and collectively make sense of equity and how power dynamics shape negotiations around equity in practice. These questions are critical, given what we know about educational equity as an idea. “Equity” can be conceptualized in many ways (Jencks, 1988; Levinson et al., 2022), and different conceptions have tangible implications for whether and how policy serves minoritized students (Allbright et al., 2019; Ching, 2023; Guiton & Oakes, 1995; Herbel-Eisenmann et al., 2018; Hodge, 2020). And perhaps most importantly, equity as an idea is contested and political (Freidus & Turner, 2023; Trujillo, 2013). Political and normative pressures privilege status-quo arrangements (Trujillo, 2013), making opportunities to disrupt inequities in practice particularly challenging.
In this article, I examine an understudied dimension of district–SIO partnerships: how they, collectively, make sense of their focus on equity as they design and enact instructional reforms. Aligned with Diem et al.’s (2014) conceptualization of critical policy analysis, this study “unpack[s] the assumptions” (p. 1077) about equity that underlie district instructional policy and inform its implementation. To do so, I use a qualitative comparative case study design to investigate nine PL partnerships across the United States. These PL partnerships were collaborations between school districts and SIOs with curriculum and/or PL expertise, and they focused on designing and implementing equity-focused initiatives that offered curriculum-embedded PL to middle- or high-school teachers in mathematics or English language arts (ELA). I address the question: How do district–SIO partnerships make sense of their equity focus as they design and implement district-level instructional reforms? More specifically, how do partnership leaders conceptualize and collectively make sense of equity in instructional reform? And what role does power play in shaping how equity conceptions are taken up in implementation? In doing so, I heed calls to “make explicit the existing conceptions [of equity] at play within a partnership” (Farrell et al., 2023, p. 215), and I address previously underexplored questions of how partnerships navigate misalignments, tensions, and power dynamics as they make sense of equity.
Overall, I find that partnerships’ equity approaches in practice were related to the extent to which partnerships engaged in critical reflection. Powerful ideas and individuals shaped partnerships’ equity sensemaking and often impeded more expansive ways of thinking about equity and justice in policy and practice. In the sections that follow, I present the context for this study, the conceptual framework guiding the work, and relevant literature. I then present the findings and discussion, in which I situate the contributions of this study to the field’s understanding of the tensions and possibilities in equity-oriented district–SIO partnership work.
Conceptual Framework
I ground my study in a conceptual framework that bridges conceptions of equity with critical sensemaking theory (Allbright et al., 2019; Ching, 2023; Helms Mills et al., 2010; Levinson et al., 2022; Weick, 1995). Figure 1 depicts the conceptual framework, which I describe in more detail in the sections that follow. At a high level, this framework characterizes the equity sensemaking process in district–SIO partnerships as a negotiation of different conceptions of equity in practice, which are informed by powerful individuals and ideas.
Conceptual framework.
Conceptions of Equity
Drawing on political philosophy and empirical scholarship, I first ground my study in five unique conceptions of equity: equal, meritocratic, compensatory, reformative, and anti-oppression (Table 1).
Conceptions of Equity
Note. This table summarizes each equity conception and its primary focus.
An equal conception—referred to elsewhere as a Democratic Equality perspective (Guiton & Oakes, 1995; Jencks, 1988)—promotes equal distribution of resources across all individuals regardless of background or merit (Kornhaber et al., 2014). This perspective is grounded in an underlying ideology of equality. It prioritizes sameness across all individuals, especially regarding distribution of resources, and considers differences in outcomes to be acceptable when equivalent resources are provided. For instance, building on a hypothetical scenario from Guiton and Oakes (1995), a proponent of this perspective would ensure that all students, regardless of individual characteristics, merit, or effort, receive the same resources in the classroom and have the same opportunity to access advanced coursework.
A meritocratic conception—also referred to as a Libertarian perspective (see Allbright et al., 2019; Guiton & Oakes, 1995)—is rooted in classical liberalism and grounded in an underlying ideology of meritocracy (Stone, 2011), which emphasizes individualistic notions of earning opportunities without attention to structural inequalities. This perspective sees equity as distributing resources based on demonstrated merit or effort (Jencks, 1988). Guiton and Oakes (1995) explain that this perspective would, for instance, define the assignment of higher-performing students to more rigorous classes as equitable, with those higher-performing students having earned their place in more rigorous coursework. This conception of equity sees differences in outcomes as natural—it does not necessitate equal outcomes for all individuals, nor does it attend to differences due to individual characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, or gender.
The compensatory conception aims to remedy differential access or outcomes due to characteristics such as race, ethnicity, or gender. The compensatory conception is rooted in a progressivist ideology that supports market regulation to ensure social progress (Horsford et al., 2018; Stone, 2011). This conception supports targeting resources to individuals whose access to those resources has been constrained due to “irrelevant” characteristics such as aspects of their identity (Guiton & Oakes, 1995). This perspective would consider it appropriate to provide additional resources to students who are underrepresented in high-level coursework based on aspects of their identities, such as race/ethnicity or linguistic status (Guiton & Oakes, 1995).
The compensatory perspective also includes the notion of compensating to attain some level of adequacy, suggesting that all individuals should be given what they need to meet a particular threshold (Allbright et al., 2019; Guiton & Oakes, 1995; Ladd & Loeb, 2012). Thus, any level of redistribution of resources necessary to meet those goals is appropriate, and any variation in outcomes beyond that threshold is acceptable. A common operationalization of this perspective in education is the notion of student proficiency on standardized assessments. In the case of higher-level coursework, this perspective would be most concerned that all students in those courses, especially students in marginalized groups, reach a threshold level of proficiency with the content. In this study, the foundation’s call for proposals aligned with a compensatory conception, given its attention to student proficiency, especially for historically marginalized students.
The reformative conception of equity emerged in my data analysis. This conception represents the perception that the conditions of instruction—including safety and well-being in the classroom—are central to ensuring equitable educational experiences for students. Thus, this conception is focused on the conditions in schools and classrooms. A common operationalization of this conception is the goal of supporting increased student voice (e.g., via increased discourse) and agency in the mathematics classroom. Notably, this conception focuses on belongingness as a means to accessing academic rigor and does not explicitly connect to forms of oppression and broader systems of power (Gutiérrez, 2011). In this way, the reformative conception resonates with some aspects of anti-oppression conception of equity (described next) but does not go so far as to explicitly name structural renderings of oppression.
To conceptualize the anti-oppression conception of equity, I build on Allbright et al.’s (2019) transformative conception and Kornhaber et al.’s (2014) expansive conception by drawing on Black feminist scholarship and political theory. I theorize the anti-oppression conception as focused on the conditions in and out of schools that perpetuate forms of oppression (Young, 1990). These conditions include the ways in which oppression has been institutionalized in policies and practice. For instance, in theorizing about racism as a system of power, Collins (2009) argues that racism can manifest through the policies and norms of social institutions such as education, healthcare, and housing; the “rules and regulations” that have become taken-for-granted ways of acting within social institutions; and portrayals in the public domain that further instantiate ideas about race.
The anti-oppression conception attends to both individual and structural orientations toward oppression and social justice (Chubbuck, 2010; Collins, 2009; Young, 1990). An individual orientation acknowledges how individual action can perpetuate oppression, such as one-on-one encounters of racial violence. Educational solutions targeting an individual orientation might include addressing educators’ implicit bias that results in interpersonal instances of racism in the classroom (Collins, 2009). A structural orientation acknowledges shared responsibility for combating various forms of systemic oppression (Young, 1990, 2005) and recognizes the ways in which oppression is perpetuated through systems, policies, and cultural norms within and outside the classroom (Chubbuck, 2010; Collins, 2009). Educational solutions that take a structural orientation would include implementing culturally responsive or social justice teaching, which critiques the Eurocentric nature of curriculum and instruction in U.S. education and interrogates power dynamics in communities and society (Gay, 2013; Villegas & Lucas, 2002). A structural orientation would also include reworking student coursework assignment practices in schools to dismantle discriminatory policies or involving teachers and administrators in advocacy for local out-of-school policies (Kornhaber et al., 2014).
Critical Sensemaking Theory
Grounded in these conceptions of equity, I posit that as district–SIO partnerships engage in equity-focused reform, they actively make sense of how they conceptualize and approach equity in practice (Turner & Spain, 2020), and that this sensemaking process is shaped by power dynamics within partnerships. Seminal sensemaking theory explains how individuals respond to ambiguity or change by drawing on environmental cues and retrospective reflection of events to organize chaotic information into a coherent narrative, which informs action (Weick, 1995). Weick et al. (2005) theorized, “Sensemaking is about the interplay of action and interpretation” (p. 409)—a social-psychological process of noticing, extracting cues to aid understanding, and acting. Sensemaking is a process that involves multiple individuals making sense of incoherence in an embedded context (Coburn, 2005b, 2006; Spillane et al., 2002). The bidirectional arrow in Figure 1 between conceptions of equity and key partnership priorities and activities reflects the “interplay of action and interpretation” that Weick et al. (2005) theorized.
Though Weick is considered the originator of sensemaking theory, scholars have critiqued this theory’s lack of attention to the role of political and power dynamics in shaping sensemaking (Datnow & Park, 2012; Helms Mills et al., 2010). As Helms Mills et al. (2010) argued, Weick’s (1995) theory characterizes sensemaking as “a democratic process, whereby all voices were more or less equally important” (p. 187). Others have similarly highlighted that sensemaking theory “tends not to address contestation, emphasizing shared understanding” (Datnow & Park, 2012, p. 351). Offering critical sensemaking, Helms Mills et al. (2010) extended Weick’s theory to attend to how factors such as leadership hierarchy or financial resources may result in certain individuals having greater influence over collective sensemaking. Critical sensemaking speaks directly to co-construction in policy implementation literature (Datnow & Park, 2012), which acknowledges how “differential access and use of power” (p. 351) shape who and what influences local interpretations and interactions. Critical sensemaking and co-construction theories, then, offer an antidote to concerns that sensemaking theory overlooks important political and power dynamics. This attention to power is particularly relevant when examining district–SIO partnerships, given previous work that has shown how power in multi-organizational education partnerships deeply shapes the nature and progress of such efforts (Denner et al., 2019; Farrell et al., 2023).
District–SIO partnerships vary in their criticality, fluidity, and openness toward change (Farrell et al., 2023). As such, the ways that partnerships make sense of their equity focus can vary meaningfully. Synthesizing concepts from critical sensemaking theory and the literature on power in multi-organizational education partnerships (Denner et al., 2019), I posit that partnerships’ sensemaking processes can range in their extent of critical reflection—from limited interrogation of widely held ideas and norms in education to critical reflection of equity, justice, and oppression. Limited interrogation represents the subtle ways in which “taken-for-granted knowledge structures” shape action (Schildt et al., 2020, p. 243) and manifests in district–SIO partnerships as relying heavily on preexisting templates or ideas with little reflection about their assumptions or implications. In their theory of critical sensemaking, Schildt et al. (2020) characterize limited interrogation as algorithmic processing—or, the tendency for individuals and organizations to integrate new ideas into preexisting and “salient discursive templates” (p. 248). In her study of developing “equity sense” at a community college, Ching (2023) found that “ongoing realities rendered illegitimate equity conceptions that seemed to contradict dominant norms and practices” (p. 27). This finding reflects the strong tendency for individuals and organizations to operate in line with dominant—and powerful—ideas and status-quo arrangements in the field.
In contrast, critical reflection—or Schildt et al.’s (2020) concept of reflective processing—represents a process by which individuals, organizations, and multi-organizational partnerships can engage with new knowledge by examining assumptions and underlying ideas and being intentional about considering new ways of thinking. Critical reflection includes attending directly to power dynamics in partnership work, questioning norms and the “guise of neutrality” (Denner et al., 2019, p. 177) that may perpetuate inequity in partnerships, and actively interrogating equity as an idea. In district–SIO partnerships, critical reflection shows up when partnerships see their equity work as a constant learning process that demands individual and collective reflexivity, humility, and development.
On the whole, these sensemaking processes acknowledge that power—or, “influence towards a course of action that an agent would not otherwise undertake” (Schildt et al., 2020, p. 242)—can reside in both individuals and ideas (Foucault, 1975). Leveraging aspects of their identity and status, individuals can exert power as they guide partnership activities in ways that promote or suppress critical reflection. Dominant ideas and ways of thinking can hold power, especially when they go uninterrogated. In contrast, critical reflection may challenge dominant ideas, countering the power that status quo ideas can hold.
Grounded in this conceptual framework, I examine how district–SIO partnerships make sense of their focus on equity and the role of power in that sensemaking process. While sensemaking theory has been widely employed in studies of policy implementation (Allbright et al., 2019; Bertrand & Marsh, 2015; Coburn, 2001; Comstock & Margolis, 2021; Halverson et al., 2004; Hodge, 2020; Kornhaber et al., 2014; Rigby, 2015), no studies to date have used critical sensemaking to examine how partnerships reconcile misalignment or conflicts around equity conceptions and the role of power in shaping equity-focused instructional reforms.
Literature Review
I ground this study in two primary bodies of empirical literature: (a) equity conceptions in policy studies and (b) SIOs and education reform, including work examining partnerships between SIOs and school districts. This literature underscores that greater attention should be paid to how leaders of SIO-district partnerships make sense of equity and how power shapes those processes.
Equity Conceptions and Policy Studies
Recent literature examining educators’ beliefs about equity shows how equity conceptions vary meaningfully across actors, that districts can have dominant approaches to equity that inform leaders’ actions, and that equity conceptions are consequential for policy and practice (Allbright et al., 2019; Ching, 2023; Hodge, 2020; Kornhaber et al., 2014). District and school leaders’ personal ideologies about equity can influence how they approach and interpret policy with tangible implications for students, including decision-making about resource allocation, data use, and instructional supports and priorities (Allbright et al., 2019; Herbel-Eisenmann et al., 2018; Hodge, 2020; Roegman et al., 2022). For instance, in their study of school finance reform, Allbright et al. (2019) found that conceptions of equity among district leaders varied across two case study districts, and these differences mirrored how district leaders allocated school funding. This literature also suggests that organizationally, districts can operate from dominant equity approaches. For instance, in their study of principal data use, Roegman et al. (2022) found that the two districts they examined had different and distinct approaches to equity—one emphasizing cultural responsiveness and one emphasizing access to rigorous academics—and these district-wide equity approaches shaped principals’ data use practices. Thus, districts cohere around operational definitions of equity that are often rooted in multiple equity conceptions, and those equity definitions inform behaviors and practices.
At the same time, other work highlights the contested, negotiated, and political nature of equity within organizations and the policy field more broadly (Freidus & Turner, 2023; Shah, 2018). Key stakeholders across spaces—for example, policy elites and community members—can have very different perspectives on equity and justice (Freidus & Turner, 2023). Dominant norms and widely accepted ideas within organizations and across the field, often determined by powerful policy actors, can frame how the field discusses equity and can suppress alternative conceptions of equity that challenge existing norms (Ching, 2023; Freidus & Turner, 2023; Trujillo, 2013; Trujillo et al., 2021; Turner & Spain, 2020). Further, certain equity conceptions—such as equality and individual choice—are instantiated in policy itself and dominate in policy conversations more broadly (Chu, 2019; Hodge, 2020; Kornhaber et al., 2014; Nygreen, 2016; J. Scott, 2013). As education actors navigate contestations and dominant ideas about equity, they engage in an “ongoing negotiation” (Turner & Spain, 2020, p. 805; also Ching, 2023) to co-construct the meaning of equity within their sociopolitical and organizational contexts.
These studies underscore how organizations operate from dominant equity conceptions while also highlighting how power and contestation are part and parcel to equity-oriented reform, especially when actors challenge dominant equity conceptions. Still, work examining equity conceptions in policy implementation is nascent. Notably missing from this scholarship is attention to district–SIO partnerships and how individuals and organizations reconcile multiple conceptions of equity in practice (Allbright et al., 2019; Farrell et al., 2023).
SIOs and Education Reform
Over the last 2 decades, the education field has seen a rise in partnerships between public schools and organizations external to the public school system—SIOs (Burch, 2009; Rowan, 2002; Scott & Jabbar, 2014; Trinidad, 2023; Trujillo & Woulfin, 2014). Scholars have attributed this increase in involvement to the explicit requirement or encouragement in instructional policies for districts to leverage external support (Burch, 2009; Honig, 2004) and highlight both benefits and potential risks to SIO involvement in public education (Trinidad, 2023).
Beneficially, SIOs that focus on providing direct school supports bolster capacity for instructional reform and system improvement (Coburn, 2005a; Honig, 2004; Pak et al., 2021; Trinidad, 2023; VanGronigen et al., 2020). These resources can include direct instructional support to teachers, systems management to district central offices, and network building within districts to improve communication (Honig, 2004; Trinidad, 2023). Some studies have found instructional support from SIOs to be especially influential on teacher practice, particularly when they build buy-in from local districts (Pak et al., 2021), given their ability to devote significant time and resources to teaching and learning (Coburn, 2005a; Trinidad, 2023). Thus, SIOs can serve as a critical resource to fill gaps in capacity at the district level for supporting instructional reform.
Yet, SIO involvement in public education introduces challenges and risks. SIOs bring their own organizational contexts, interests, and ideologies to bear on work with public school districts. Given SIOs’ position as external to the public school system, scholars raise concerns over lack of accountability, undue influence on public schooling, and the potential for undemocratic decision-making in public school districts that privileges private organizations over community engagement (Burch, 2009; Scott & Jabbar, 2014; Trinidad, 2023; Trujillo & Woulfin, 2014). These dynamics are prominent in scholarship on philanthropy, which documents how philanthropic actors can leverage financial resources to champion their ideas in educational spaces with little regulation (Reckhow & Tompkins-Stange, 2018). Furthermore, SIOs, which are often privately funded, operate with different funding structures and business models, resulting in different financial incentives that shape their operations (Burch, 2009; Hodge et al., 2019; Scott & Jabbar, 2014; Trujillo & Woulfin, 2014). Furthermore, as curriculum companies increasingly offer PL directly to districts (Hodge et al., 2019), districts become increasingly dependent on relationships with for-profit companies. As such, individuals in SIOs may have different priorities and sources of influence than leaders in public school systems.
In recent years, there has been a rapidly growing body of scholarship on district–SIO partnerships, especially research–practice partnerships, which has more recently highlighted the importance of examining power dynamics and how equity is taken up substantively in partnership work (Denner et al., 2019; Farrell et al., 2023; Vetter et al., 2022). Research–practice partnerships are one type of district–SIO partnership involving researchers and practitioners, which is distinct from the PL partnerships in this study. However, this literature offers important grounding for the types of power dynamics that may emerge in district–SIO partnerships, such as assumptions about whose knowledge and expertise is valued, who has authority over decisions and responsibilities, and how the work benefits participating organizations (Coburn et al., 2008; Denner et al., 2019; Farrell et al., 2021; Ghiso et al., 2019; Yamashiro et al., 2023). Scholarship on research–practice partnerships has also conceptualized different types of sensemaking processes around equity and social justice, calling theoretical attention to different ways partnerships might approach equity in their work and the nature of collaborative engagement around that equity work (Farrell et al., 2023; Vetter et al., 2022). However, empirical work examining such dimensions is limited.
In sum, the literature suggests that equity conceptions are consequential in policymaking and implementation, are often contested and political, and should be named and examined explicitly (Allbright et al., 2019; Denner et al., 2019; Farrell et al., 2023; Ghiso et al., 2019). Given increased attention to district–SIO partnerships and more recent centering of equity and justice in such partnerships (Farrell et al., 2021; Vetter et al., 2022), examining how district–SIO partnerships make sense of equity together and the power dynamics that they navigate as they do so is a critical and understudied line of inquiry and the focus of this study.
Methods
In this section, I describe my study sample and methods. I use a qualitative comparative case study design to examine equity sensemaking in district–SIO partnerships (Yin, 2014).
Study Context
This paper is part of a larger study of 12 PL partnerships. The partnerships received foundation funding to collaboratively design and implement PL opportunities for teachers grounded in high-quality instructional materials over a 2-year time span. The foundation specified that the partnerships should involve school districts and SIOs specializing in curriculum, PL, and/or district reform. SIOs could be curriculum development organizations, which offered expertise and often PL on the specifics of the curriculum, or PL providers who focused on curriculum-agnostic instructional support, such as coaching for new teachers. Thus, “partnership” in this study refers to a sustained collective engagement across organizations for instructional improvement—though, aligning with concepts from Farrell et al. (2023), the nature of collaboration across partnerships varied from coordinated division of labor to collaborative joint decision-making.
The foundation also centered equity in its goals, though loosely defined. It highlighted a goal of supporting “equitable instruction” and serving “student populations that are at least 50% Black, Latino, emerging multilingual or English learner (EL)-designated, and/or low-income” (Foundation, 2017). Throughout the grant period, the foundation emphasized a range of concepts, including cultural relevance and responsiveness, supporting ELs, and improving achievement for historically marginalized students. Importantly, however, the foundation never shared a clear definition of equity with grantees, nor did it require that partnerships take up particular practices or approaches. This allowed for variation in equity approaches across partnerships, making it an ideal context for this study.
Study Sample
This analysis focuses on nine of the partnerships from the broader study. I selected these nine partnerships because they focused on either mathematics or ELA instruction and thus shared similar accountability contexts. For interviews, I aimed to select participants from each partner organization in the initiative who were most deeply involved in the partnership work (Table 2). To recruit these leaders, the broader project team asked partnerships to identify those deeply involved individuals in each participating organization. Importantly, the leaders who participated in interviews were actively involved in the ongoing implementation of the work—that is, the leaders who met regularly to determine their key priorities and activities and who often carried out those key activities, such as leading PL. As such, most leaders were typically mid-level leaders, such as mathematics leads in district central offices, rather high-level leaders like superintendents or CEOs. Importantly, because interviews were conducted at three time points, nominated leaders in each partnership were not always the same. This resulted in different amounts of interviews and total leaders interviewed across partnerships.
Partnerships and Participating Leaders
Note. This table provides information case study sites and participants. District demographic information provided in Appendix A in the Supplemental Material (available in the online version of this article).
Data Collection
Data collection activities included semi-structured interviews and document collection. I, along with a team of graduate students, conducted three total rounds of hour-long video interviews with partnership leaders over the course of 2020 to 2021 (N = 45 individuals and 81 total interviews). All interviews were conducted over Zoom. Interviews were recorded and transcribed. In interviews, we asked leaders about the conceptualization and equity focus of the initiative, their definitions of equity, how they engaged collaboratively in the partnership, key strategies of their initiatives, and how their initiatives evolved over time (see Supplemental Appendix B [available in the online version of this article] for instruments). To bolster interview data, I also collected documents from each partnership’s initiative, such as presentation materials, sample lesson plans, formative assessment rubrics, data-tracking tools, and regular check-in forms in which partnerships recorded their ongoing activities throughout the duration of the grant. I used documents in two ways: (a) during round-three interviews to encourage concrete statements and examples from leaders about their equity focus and (b) during analysis to triangulate with interview data to understand partnership activities and the resources informing their approaches.
I organized transcripts in a Dedoose database, where I pre-coded them with attribute codes to identify leaders’ partnership and content area focus (Miles et al., 2014). I used a spreadsheet to track details about individual leaders, such as organizational affiliation.
Data Analysis
I followed methods for qualitative comparative case study analysis (Bush-Mecenas & Marsh, 2018; Yin, 2014) by organizing and coding data, memoing, and analyzing within-case patterns, and then analyzing cross-case themes to develop assertions.
A Priori and Emergent Coding
I engaged in iterative coding using a priori and emergent codes (see Supplemental Appendix C in the online version of the journal). Central to my conceptual framework, I coded for “equity focus,” “sensemaking processes,” and “key priorities/activities.” Regarding equity focus, I applied sub-codes for the four conceptions of equity: equal, meritocratic, compensatory, anti-oppression. Importantly, I found no instance of a meritocratic conception in my data, and the reformative conception of equity emerged at this stage. Regarding sensemaking processes, I applied sub-codes for limited interrogation/preexisting templates and critical reflection. Regarding key priorities/activities, I applied emergent sub-codes to categorize the activities the partnerships prioritized, including culturally responsive teaching/social justice teaching, curricular use training, anti-bias training, systems/policies (e.g., examining districtwide coursetaking patterns and tracking policies), data tracking, and family/community engagement. While coding, I also generated approximately 40 pages of free-form memos, which included memos for each partnership and individual interview to track emergent patterns. At this stage, memos allowed me to track details like key partnership activities and the specific roles that each partnership leader and organization played in the partnership.
I used my conceptions of equity codes to generate counts of each conception employed by each study participant. Within each partnership, I generated total counts for each equity conception and calculated a percentage of the partnership’s overall equity-focused statements that aligned with each conception (see Table A2 in the Supplemental Appendix in the online version of the journal).
Because I generated counts, I was intentional in my coding process to identify comparable units of text in my data. I adhered to Campbell et al.’s (2013) notion of “units of meaning” (p. 303)—coded sections of text that could be interpreted on their own, requiring no additional context to understand their meaning. These excerpts represented “meaningful conceptual breaks” in interview respondents’ comments (Campbell et al., 2013, p. 302), consistent with Miles et al.’s (2014) characterization of coded chunks as “monothematic” (p. 74) and Krippendorff’s (2004) notion of “thematic distinctions” (p. 107). While identifying units of meaning necessarily involves a level of subjectivity of the coder, it is preferable in exploratory research and research that uses semi-structured interviews than other more discrete forms of coding (e.g., semantic coding that determines units based on sentence structure) which are likely to decontextualize comments (Campbell et al., 2013; Garrison et al., 2006). As Krippendorff (2004) and Campbell et al. (2013) argue, meaning units allow for contextualization of comments, with an understanding that the conceptual break is driven by the questions and theoretical framework guiding the analysis.
Importantly, code counts showed patterns in the data across partnerships as a whole and for individual leaders within partnerships about which equity conceptions were most and least prominent. These magnitudes indicated general themes across partnerships in how partnerships brought together multiple conceptions of equity to inform their equity approaches in practice—for instance, that several partnerships relied heavily on an equal conception of equity, while also employing compensatory and anti-oppression conceptions of equity. In addition, analyzing counts at the level of individual leaders revealed differences in how leaders within partnerships were conceptualizing equity and potential misalignment. Importantly, I did not base my analytic conclusions off counts alone. To understand how leaders employed multiple conceptions simultaneously and how they negotiated misalignment, I turned to within-case analysis.
Within- and Cross-Case Analysis
In this stage, I focused on understanding the nature of partnerships’ conceptions of equity and the nature of their equity sensemaking processes. This analysis revealed more nuanced understandings of how partnerships brought together different conceptions in practice and how partnerships negotiated misalignment and tensions. In this stage, I generated a meta-analytic matrix (Averill, 2002; Miles et al., 2014) and 90 additional pages of memos of partnership-level themes. I iterated between my matrix and memos to support my synthesis across categories.
To understand qualitatively how equity conceptions coalesced in partnerships and the sensemaking processes partnerships engaged in, I reviewed coded excerpts and used memos to characterize the dominant themes in equity focus, sensemaking processes, and key priorities/practices for each partnership. I then summarized these themes by category in my meta-analytic matrix. My matrix allowed me to see commonalities in equity approaches in practice across partnerships, which represented how multiple conceptions of equity coalesced into an equity approach that largely guided the partnership work. I then generated additional memo text to distill these equity approaches in practice across partnerships. Regarding power, I first analyzed coded excerpts for sensemaking processes. Within these processes, I characterized the source of power as individuals or ideas, identifying powerful individuals and ideas based on their “influence towards a course of action” (Schildt et al., 2020, p. 242), and I added to each partnership memo to characterize sources of power. For example, in moments of resistance, I identified the powerful individual(s) based on whose perspective most shaped the partnership’s decisions around equity. I then situated each partnership within the conceptualizations of sensemaking processes presented in the conceptual framework, characterizing the primary ways in which partnership leaders described their collaborative engagement around equity.
Finally, looking across cases, I identified patterns in the types of sensemaking processes and power dynamics present in partnerships, how these related to specific equity conceptions, and whether/how certain equity conceptions were taken up in key priorities and practices. For instance, reliance on preexisting templates and practices, which was common in partnerships that prioritized equality, represented adherence to dominant (and powerful) ideas about standardization. Furthermore, powerful individuals (e.g., partnership leaders with financial authority) influenced the extent to which the partnership as a whole engaged in critical reflection, at times limiting other leaders’ attempts to push for more expansive and anti-oppressive ways of conceptualizing equity. This final stage allowed me to synthesize overarching patterns about equity conceptions, sensemaking processes, and power.
Positionality and Trustworthiness
My identity as a White woman, educator, and academic researcher informs my relationship to this work. I conceptualize educational equity as ensuring all students receive an educational experience that respects and uplifts their identities and their humanity. I believe this requires critically and continuously analyzing how policies and practices have marginalized and oppressed students based on race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, language, gender, and other identity characteristics. I am also a former teacher and PL provider who engaged in PL partnerships like the ones I examine here, which piqued my interest in this work and informed the conceptual framework I used to approach this analysis. My position as an academic researcher affords me the opportunity to engage in the reflexivity I believe is necessary for equity-oriented work. At the same time, as a White woman and an academic, I acknowledge the privilege of being able to study equity and justice without experiencing some injustices, such as racism, firsthand, and to critically analyze partnerships without needing to grapple with the daily challenges that accompany efforts to enact system-wide district change.
To ensure trustworthiness of my findings, I triangulated interview data with document analysis, which supported my conclusions about key partnership priorities and activities, and I revisited the evidence for my findings throughout analysis. I also presented preliminary findings to the larger project team to solicit alternative explanations and confirm findings with others who had conducted interviews. I triangulated data by interviewing multiple individuals in all but one partnership and collecting documents to examine alongside interview data (Ravitch & Carl, 2016). I regularly attended to disconfirming evidence (Maxwell, 2013) and discussed these instances with colleagues both familiar and unfamiliar with this research.
Findings
In this section, I present the findings. Throughout this section, I use the term equity conceptions to indicate the specific equity conceptions detailed in my conceptual framework (Table 1). The term equity approach in practice refers to how equity conceptions coalesced into the specific approaches that partnerships took in their equity work, ranging from equality-focused to oppression-combating. The term sensemaking processes indicates the extent of partnerships’ critical reflection, ranging from limited interrogation to critical reflection.
Overall, I find that partnerships’ equity approaches in practice were related to their sensemaking processes and reflected a spectrum of criticality. That spectrum ranged from partnerships that emphasized an equality-focused approach to equity and engaged in limited interrogation of ideas about equity, to partnerships that emphasized oppression-combating approaches to equity and tended to prioritize critical reflection. Not all partnerships were internally consistent in their conceptions of equity and how critically reflective they were, and powerful ideas and individuals influenced which equity conceptions and sensemaking processes were prioritized. In what follows, I first characterize all nine partnerships along a spectrum of criticality. I then present three cases to illustrate that spectrum.
Characterizing the Partnerships Along a Spectrum of Criticality
Figure 2 positions all nine partnerships along two axes and reflects the central argument of my study: that partnerships’ equity approaches in practice were related to the extent to which they engaged in critical reflection. In this figure, I position partnerships’ equity approaches on the vertical axis—that is, how their conceptions of equity coalesced in practice to inform the partnership’s approach to equity; and their partnerships’ sensemaking processes on the horizontal axis—that is, the extent to which partnership leaders collectively prioritized and engaged in critical reflection. This visual represents a spectrum of criticality that takes into account both equity approaches and sensemaking processes—moving from least critical in the lower left quadrant (equality focused, limited interrogation) to most critical in the upper right quadrant (oppression-combating, critical reflection). With this depiction, I show that equality-focused partnerships tended to engage in limited interrogation of ideas about equity (e.g., the cluster of partnerships in the lower left quadrant), whereas partnerships that emphasized oppression-combating approaches to equity tended to also prioritize critical reflection (e.g., the cluster of partnerships in the top right quadrant).
A spectrum of criticality.
Importantly, partnership leaders drew on a range of conceptions of equity when describing their equity work, and partnership leaders’ conceptions of equity were not always consistent with their colleagues’ conceptions. As a result, while some partnerships can be positioned squarely within one quadrant (e.g., Egret, Evergreen, Ogden, Oxford), others reflected internal inconsistencies and thus fell along different points of each axis. Power dynamics were evident throughout—manifesting as powerful ideas that dominated partnership work or powerful individuals who influenced the direction of the work.
Ultimately, partnerships’ equity approaches and sensemaking processes—and the power dynamics inherent in them—influenced how partnerships approached their reforms. To illustrate these findings, I delve into three cases that represent the relationship between partnerships’ equity approaches and their sensemaking processes. I selected the highlighted cases because they illustrate different points along the spectrum of criticality: the extreme ends (e.g., the lower left and upper right quadrants of Figure 2), as well as a case that fell in the middle of the spectrum, reflecting internal inconsistencies.
Limited Interrogation and Powerful Ideas: The Case of Evergreen
A subset of partnerships (i.e., those in the lower left quadrant of Figure 2—four total) prioritized an approach to equity that emphasized equality of inputs, and these partnerships engaged in limited interrogation about equity as a partnership as they engaged in their work. Evergreen was emblematic of this type of approach. Evergreen was a partnership between a large southeastern district and two SIOs. Both SIOs brought expertise in PL, coaching, and systems management, which informed their efforts to develop teachers’ skills through PL and build district capacity to sustain those skills. Evergreen partnership leaders emphasized an equal conception of equity, which shows clearly through the partnership’s goals. As a district leader in this partnership explained: We want rigorous grade appropriate instruction for all. We want to make sure that we have great teaching practices across all of our students . . . We want our classrooms to be very similar across the board [emphasis added], in terms of guaranteed access to the core curriculum, making sure that core curriculum offers the maximum amount of opportunity for students.
Reflecting the largely uncontested nature of the equal conception of equity in the equality approach, this emphasis on sameness across classrooms and equal opportunities was present across all partnership leaders. For instance, one SIO leader explained: “We want every child to have access to these materials. We don’t want it to be students who are honors, gifted—no. Every kid in [the district] has access.” Another SIO leader noted: “Our number one goal is dispelling the opportunity gap for all students . . . ensuring that we’re increasing access to the high-quality curriculum, strong instruction, deep engagement in student work, high expectations from teachers and really all stakeholders.” This partnership aimed to ensure that all students across the district received the same core resources and opportunities. In doing so, they anticipated improvements in performance across all students, including students of color and low-income students, who they described as lagging behind their peers on standardized assessments.
This largely consistent emphasis on the equal conception of equity in Evergreen reflected this partnership’s—and several other partnerships’ (Figure 2)—primary approach to making sense of equity: a general acceptance and limited interrogation of powerful ideas about individualism and standardization (Farrell et al., 2023). This limited interrogation was apparent in several ways in Evergreen—most prominently in the partnership’s use of a preexisting framework and approach to instructional reform. Both district and SIO leaders described their work as an attempt to enact the approach in The Opportunity Myth report—a report and approach developed by an SIO that emphasized a need to ensure high-quality instruction, grade-level resources, teachers with high expectations, and deep engagement for all students (TNTP, 2018). One SIO leader described this report as an “anchor” for all their work that, as she explained, “really ground[s] conversations around why it’s important to make sure that we are giving this access to all students.” District leaders also remained focused on the strategies presented in this report, deferring to an SIO who held expertise around those strategies. As one district leader explained: “In [our district], we have a vision of instructional excellence, which are five practices that we want to see students doing in the classroom every single day . . . We read [The Opportunity Myth], which . . . align[s] perfectly with our vision.” Leveraging this approach gave the partnership a preexisting roadmap—emblematic of Schildt et al.’s (2020) notion of algorithmic processing—for making sense of their equity focus and enacting an equity-oriented approach.
For SIO leaders in this partnership, enacting this approach to equity-focused instructional reform was an opportunity to assess the viability and potential for scale of this approach and business model. An SIO leader explained: When we saw this opportunity . . . it was like, “This is a chance to put [a scalable] strategy [into action].” So we are all sharing that same orientation, and we’ve been able to lead Opportunity Myth briefings for everyone. It does feel like the entire district is oriented on this problem . . . we are committed to ensuring that all students are receiving access to these four resources, and we have to continue to unlock why they’re not.
Thus, in addition to the district’s support of this approach, SIO leaders saw it as a potential boon for their longer-term organizational work.
In addition to this focus on equality and sameness, Evergreen partners expressed some compensatory and anti-oppression perspectives within the context of their approach. Leaders, especially district leaders, discussed a need to focus their supports on schools that served higher proportions of historically marginalized students (compensatory). Furthermore, partnership leaders called attention to the issue of teachers choosing not to use high quality curricular materials in their classrooms and reducing their academic expectations of their students due to problematic mindsets or bias, equating teachers’ low expectations as a form of “systemic racism.” This perspective reflected an anti-oppression conception of equity, albeit one largely focused on an individualistic conception of oppression. Still, despite some nods to anti-oppression, most of this partnership’s discussion of their work referred to all students, rather than oppressed groups of students. In a notable moment in 2020, SIO leaders started to call for greater attention to success of Black and Brown students in their work. Rather than prompting critical reflection of their practices, these calls caused tensions among partnership leaders. District leaders characterized this focus as straying from their original intent for the work. The SIO’s calls for greater attention to race were ultimately not borne out in implementation—the partnership work remained focused on ensuring students have equal access to high-quality, grade-level instruction, further exemplifying the power of the dominant ideas around individualism and standardization.
Thus, on the whole, Evergreen leaned toward limited interrogation as they made sense of their focus on equity (Figure 2). The partnership’s dominant focus on the equal conception of equity, coupled with a largely uninterrogated acceptance of the powerful ideas of standardization and individualism, reflected how they designed and implemented their initiatives—partnership leaders focused on leveraging a strategy that emphasized the need for all classrooms to offer the same resources and opportunities for students by supporting teachers to use the curricular materials with fidelity and monitoring/tracking teacher progress through data collection.
Evergreen is emblematic of key patterns across partnerships. Equality-oriented partnerships tended to rely on preexisting scripts or schemas—in particular, entrenched ideas about standardization and equal access—for making sense of their equity focus, indicating that ideas were particularly powerful in shaping the equity approaches that equality-focused partnerships implemented. The powerful ideas of equality and standardization (Farrell et al., 2023) and preexisting templates for enacting an equality-based approach dominated in implementation.
Critical Reflection: The Case of Ogden
On the opposite end of the spectrum of criticality was a subset of partnerships oriented around combating oppression, and these partnerships tended to engage in more critical reflection around equity as they made sense of their partnership focus (the upper right quadrant in Figure 2). Ogden is illustrative of these patterns. Ogden was a partnership between a large western district and three SIOs. One SIO specialized in PL and coaching; a second SIO specialized in performance assessments, curricular adaptations, and EL supports; and a third was an individual consultant who specialized in coherent district operations and organizational change. Leaders in the Ogden partnership regularly called on both the anti-oppression and compensatory conceptions of equity when describing their beliefs. Leaders expressed that instruction should include specific supports for ELs (compensatory conception of equity), that teachers should develop asset-based mindsets and practices toward ELs including supporting their use of home languages in mathematics, and that instruction should be culturally responsive (anti-oppression conception). At the same time, schools and the district should cultivate parent and community engagement that leverages families’ “funds of knowledge” for mathematics and critique and disrupt broader systems and policies that perpetuate marginalization, such as racialized tracking in mathematics coursework and deficit-oriented assessment systems (anti-oppression conception). Exemplifying this multidimensional perspective, the district leader explained: We’re trying to disrupt the idea that some students are good at math and should be accelerated and then end up in a more well prepped place, and other students don’t deserve to be in that accelerated track . . . There’s all these ways in which adults spin these narratives that rationalize things like tracking. [Our] definition of equity is that students are more in charge of their own destiny. [They] have no doors closed to them and feel like they belong in the math class that is most challenging and engaging for them.
This district leader consistently called attention to the “long-standing marginalization of students” that existing tracking and coursetaking policies perpetuate. At its core, this partnership emphasized a critical and assets-based approach to instructional reform that attended not just to educators’ individual beliefs and behaviors, but also family engagement and broader systems and policies that perpetuate marginalization of student groups based on race and language.
Ogden engaged regularly in critical reflection, which allowed the partnership to reflect on powerful ideas as they emerged. Leaders often referred to their work around equity as a learning process. One SIO leader described this experience as being “on a learning journey together.” All partnership leaders referenced that their partnership was in the process of co-constructing an equity definition which explicitly eschewed a preexisting schema or approach to enacting equity work. As one SIO leader explained, “Unlike some of the other partnerships where the [SIOs] have a codified PL process that they use, and they’re just kind of coming into the district and doing that, we’re really co-constructing this with the district to meet their needs.”
Emblematic of this co-construction and critical reflection was the partnership leaders’ work to interrogate their own understanding of equity in mathematics and learn from resources and experts in the field. For instance, the partnership used a resource, A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction (Cintron et al., 2021), to reflect about ways that racism manifests in mathematics education. Among other things, this report argues that the perspective that “‘Good’ math teaching is considered an antidote for mathematical inequity for Black, Latinx, multilingual students” is rooted in White supremacy because this perspective fails to acknowledge the Eurocentric nature of curricula and mathematics knowledge in the United States. This is a distinct departure from The Opportunity Myth (TNTP, 2018) leveraged so heavily in Evergreen, which aligns closely to the perspective critiqued here. One SIO leader explained that “[the report A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction] in combination with seeing what was happening in real classrooms, really deepened the learning for myself and the leaders.” Furthermore, this SIO leader explained that they, as a partnership, prioritized “tapping into the broader conversations happening in the field” to stay abreast of conversations in the field around culturally relevant mathematics. Thus, rather than relying on preexisting templates for their thinking and behavior, these leaders drew on a variety of resources to facilitate critical reflection about equitable mathematics.
Partnership leaders in Ogden credited the district leader as the main driver of the partnership’s orientation toward critical reflection. One SIO leader explained, “I think in general the partnership is excellent . . . I would say in no small part to [the district leader] . . . the external partners are really side-by-side with her.” Likewise, a second SIO leader explained, “I just think the adaptiveness and responsiveness of [the district leader] has been just huge.” The district leader herself acknowledged her role in prompting interrogation within the partnership: I think that my partners have the same viewpoints [as they did at the start of the work], but I think they had less of a stage for sharing their voice before I arrived. So I think they’re more able to share their perspectives that are more aligned to where we are now.
Like the SIOs, this district leader saw their collective learning in the evolution of their approach to equity, explaining that she sees “more depth to our equity goals now.”
Importantly, this partnership wasn’t without power imbalances among individuals. In particular, the consultant SIO was a White male who had a direct line to the district cabinet and superintendent. The other SIO leaders and the district leader on this partnership work described the consultant SIO as a “very big kind of conceptual thinker” and an “influencer” with “a lot of political capital” in the district. As the consultant SIO himself explained, “I represent a person that’s been hired by the district to help with that overarching big picture.” This benefited the project because it gave the partnership a direct line to top leadership in the district and ensured that their work fit with the larger district vision for instruction. At the same time, the district leader and other SIO leaders explained that the consultant SIO made decisions at times that did not reflect or even strained their work. For example, the district leader in the partnership discussed the need to revamp the district vision for equitable mathematics because the vision “originally was created by [the consultant SIO] without too much interaction with the team.”
The district leader of the partnership explained how racial/ethnic identity and positional status played a role in the consultant SIO’s power: He’s also a White male. And there are some complex social dynamics that had been tricky for me, within in my role as the head female director of mathematics. I’m often undermined by his simple gender and race. And on occasion, he takes advantage of that. So I mean, that’s been tricky . . . It’s problematic that he’s paid as a consultant. And he’s paid twice my salary or three times my salary, but I do the bulk of the work that he gets credit for.
It’s also notable that the consultant SIO emphasized the anti-oppression conception of equity least among partnership leaders in this project, which may have helped to explain the misalignment of the equity vision he had helped to establish without the other leaders.
Still, partnership leaders leveraged these tensions as opportunities for critical reflection. When the consultant SIO helped establish policies and practices in the district that conflicted with the partnership work, it prompted the partnership to revisit and revamp those policies and practices. For example, the district leader instigated the collective development of a new vision statement and framework for understanding equitable mathematics in the district, which informed their PL for teachers and their efforts to examine data on instructional tracking in the district.
Ogden represents important takeaways across partnerships. First, oppression-combating partnerships like Ogden focused on more than just individual teachers and classrooms, but approached instructional reform from a more structural orientation that aimed to disrupt policies and practices that perpetuate oppression. Second, oppression-combating partnerships were more likely to engage regularly in critical reflection and interrogation around their equity work, which allowed them to challenge powerful ideas and powerful individuals. Bolstered by an influential district leader in the partnership, Ogden symbolizes how partnerships can challenge and explicitly address power dynamics in service of equity through critical reflection.
Internal Inconsistencies and Powerful Individuals: The Case of Bedford
Finally, not all partnerships were as internally consistent in their equity approaches and sensemaking processes as Evergreen and Ogden. Other partnerships, including Bedford, experienced internal inconsistencies. In Bedford, disagreements among partnership leaders led partnership leaders to compromise with an equity approach that emphasized belongingness and well-being but failed to situate student well-being in broader systems of oppression.
Bedford was a partnership between a large southeastern district and two SIOs. One SIO specialized in PL and coaching, while the other SIO, which was the prime grant-holder for this partnership, specialized in building district systems to sustain change. In their work, Bedford prioritized what they saw as a lack of student voice, agency over learning, and belongingness in the typical mathematics classroom (rooted in a reformative conception of equity). A leader from the grant-holding SIO explained: [Our] bite-sized piece of equity is building every student’s ability to feel safe and comfortable in the classroom and to feel like they’re heard. So building their identity and building their agency. I know equity includes so much more than that, but that’s been our bite-sized piece this year to try to focus on.
Partnership leaders paired this emphasis on belonging with aspects of compensatory and (less frequently) anti-oppression conceptions of equity. For example, leaders across organizations in this partnership expressed a belief that novice teachers should receive more support for how to develop a sense of student belonginess in mathematics, particularly given that novice teachers are most likely to be assigned to teach historically marginalized students, and that curricula should include culturally diverse representation and explicit resources tailored to ELs.
Importantly, all leaders in the partnership consistently communicated that the partnership was focused on a belongingness approach to equity. However, this dominant equity approach did not reflect all partnership leaders’ personal conceptions of equity. As a district leader explained, “I think [the grant-holding SIO] has defined equity as . . . student agency. I mean, I wouldn’t necessarily define that as equity, but that’s the lens that we’re looking at this particular project through.” Indeed, the partnership arrived at this approach through a series of conflicts that reflected tensions between partnership leaders who were more oriented toward the anti-oppressive conception of equity and encouraged critical reflection, and those leaders who drew heavily on other conceptions of equity—namely, compensatory and reformative conceptions—and were less inclined to critically reflect on their ideas about equity.
The grant-holding SIO used their financial and positional influence to suppress alternative perspectives, which led to a definition of equity in the partnership that felt incomplete to leaders from the district and non-grant-holding SIO. As a non-grant-holding SIO partner explained: Last year from [the grant-holding SIO], equity was basically seen as EL [support] . . . And that’s not all that equity is, and I tried to convey that last year. And [subsequently], they wanted to really take the lead on the partnership, and it became, equity is student agency and identity. And again, that is not all that equity is . . . I feel like at points, we’re doing their job . . . We are constantly correcting their misconceptions and misunderstandings around the key parts of this partnership. I’m so frustrated.
This partner and the district leaders in the partnership were more likely to draw on anti-oppression conceptions of equity—for instance, describing the need for instruction to encourage students to “think about injustice—what does it mean to them and how can they address those injustices in the world.” These non-grant-holding SIO leaders and district leaders were also committed to critical reflection about their conceptions of equity. As a district leader explained: [Our understanding of equity is] a constant evolution. I know for me in my side of the house—and I know in [the non-grant-holding SIO] as we’ve been working with them a lot in looking at the equity stuff over the course of the year and the new products that they’re developing—as we learn more, we apply things differently, we understand things differently . . . Initially like a year ago, I thought it was okay like oh, we’re just going to do this section on equity . . . Now I’m like, no, that’s not how this works . . . And so I think it’s just been a natural evolution as we learn more, we try to do better.
Here, this district leader highlights the importance of critical reflection around equity as a sensemaking process for making sense of equity.
The grant-holding SIO, however, did not describe having the same orientation toward critical reflection. For example, to move the partnership work forward, leaders from the grant-holding SIO created consulted with an organization external to the partnership to create an equity plan for the partnership focused on belongingness and presented it to the other partnership leaders with little opportunity to discuss and reflect. The district and non-grant-holding SIO leaders perceived the grant-holding SIO as coercive, which caused tensions. A district leader explained: We had a bit of a hiccup early on in the year where we were at odds and questioned whether or not this was actually a working partnership or if it was a collaboration or [not] . . . We were basically told, “Well, this is our project. This is what we want to do, so this is the way we’re going to do it.” I was like, “Oh, okay. My bad. I thought this was a collaboration. It’s not. Got it. I will do whatever you want me to do.”
A leader from the non-grant-holding SIO corroborated this perspective: I feel a little burnt out, and I feel as though I can’t change their mindset. It’s like playing tug of war with a wall, and I can’t change their mindset and it becomes frustrating. So instead, I just get quieter, and I feel like a silent partner at this point in the partnership because it’s been too frustrating trying to get the right thing to happen.
These conflicts over equity conceptions—and the power of the grant-holding SIO—left the other partnership leaders resigned, deferring to the grant-holding SIO’s approach despite it not fully reflecting their own personal conceptions of equity. Given this tension between partnership leaders who were oriented toward critical reflection and those who engaged in limited interrogation of equity ideas, Bedford represented a middle ground on the spectrum of criticality (Figure 2) and offers important considerations for partnerships attempting to promote anti-oppressive conceptions of equity.
These processes ultimately shaped implementation of Bedford’s initiative, which prioritized activities oriented around belongingness. Their PL focused on developing teacher knowledge and skill around using discourse-rich mathematics practices that shift authority in the classroom from teachers to students, bolstering student autonomy and voice. PL focused on building teacher self-efficacy with these shifts in service of student belongingness. Despite interest among the district and non-grant-holding SIO leaders, the anti-oppression conception of equity was borne out in only small instances. For example, the PL was rooted in a curriculum they considered to be “non-Eurocentric,” which the district leaders had adopted in collaboration with local community organizations focused on supporting Black and Hispanic students.
In essence, this PL partnership’s focus on belongingness represented a compromise between partnership leaders. Given very different conceptions of equity among partnership leaders, Bedford partners settled on an equity approach that centered student belongingness, reflecting a blend of reformative, compensatory, and anti-oppressive conceptions of equity. Their approach to equity indicated a move toward an oppression-combating approach, but it fell short, given their limited emphasis as a partnership on structural renderings of oppression. Bedford underscores a key pattern about how partnerships make sense of equity: Whereas Evergreen showed that powerful ideas might constrain progress toward an anti-oppression conception of equity, Bedford showed that powerful individuals—deriving influence from financial and positional authority in the partnership—can also frustrate partnerships’ attempts to engage more critically in equity work.
Limitations
This study is based on many interviews with leaders across the nine partnerships and document analysis, which provided rich data on leaders’ experiences and perspectives on equity and power dynamics within their partnerships. Analysis of interview data and documents offers important insights into partnerships’ and leaders’ sensemaking of equity and power and align with approaches in the scholarship on equity conceptions and policy implementation (Allbright et al., 2019; Hodge, 2020). However, my dataset was limited by not including direct observations of partnership meetings and activities—a consideration for future policy studies of equity sensemaking.
Discussion
Collectively, the findings in this study contribute to the literature on district–SIO partnerships focused on instructional reform, bolstering the field’s knowledge about how such partnerships negotiate the meaning of equity in practice and the role of power in shaping their equity approaches. Building on scholarship that theorizes and empirically examines conceptions of equity in policy and practice (Allbright et al., 2019; Ching, 2023; Guiton & Oakes, 1995; Roegman et al., 2022), I leverage a rich dataset of interviews and documents to examine how partnerships collectively make sense of equity and the power dynamics that shaped those negotiations. I find that partnerships’ equity approaches in practice were related to how critically reflective they were as a partnership. Partnerships represented a spectrum of criticality that ranged from an emphasis on equality and standardization with limited interrogation of equity, to an emphasis on oppression-combating approaches to equity and prioritization of critical reflection. At the same time, partnerships were not always internally consistent in their conceptions of equity and orientation toward critical reflection, and powerful ideas and individuals influenced which equity conceptions and sensemaking processes were prioritized. In this section, I discuss these findings and situate them in the broader scholarship.
First, I found that powerful ideas often went uninterrogated, especially in equality-focused partnerships, and these ideas were deeply influential in those partnerships’ approaches to equity. Equality-focused partnerships relied predominantly on an equal conception of equity rooted in sameness—that all students should receive equal educational opportunities. These partnerships seldom engaged in interrogation of their accepted ideas about equity, instead rel-ying on preexisting schemas—in particular, entrenched ideas about standardization and equal access, or what Farrell et al. (2023) refer to as a logic of individualism and standardization. Notably absent from equality-focused partnerships was reflection on arguments that standardization itself rests on problematic assumptions for addressing inequality in education. For instance, Milner (2013) argues: “Standardization reform efforts advance a sameness agenda when the playing field for many students of color, English language learners, and students from lower socio-economic backgrounds in urban environments is anything but even or level” (p. 5). Because there was limited interrogation about equity occurring in equality-focused partnerships generally, these partnerships’ dominant approaches to equity were rarely discussed. Instead, they were latent—they emerged only after analyzing the associations between how partnership leaders were conceptualizing equity and their key priorities and activities. These findings speak directly to Ching’s (2023) concept of “equity sense”—the construction of an implicit understanding of equity; in this case, one built on dominant ideas in the field about individualism and standardization.
This implicit nature of equity approaches in equality-focused partnerships is especially important, as it reveals how power manifests through entrenched narratives about equity in education and policy. Instructional policy of the last several decades has offered a coherent equality-focused narrative that privileges standardization and achievement (Ching, 2023; Kornhaber et al., 2014). It may not be surprising, then, that several partnerships leaned heavily on the equality-focused approach. Prior work has shown how dominant ideas in educational policy and practice about equity—in particular, emphasis on individualism, achievement, and standardization—shape educators’ and SIOs’ decision-making and actions in practice (Farrell et al., 2023; Hodge, 2020; Roegman et al., 2022).
The findings also speak to the important role that powerful individuals play in equity sensemaking in district–SIO partnerships. Scholarship on district–SIO partnerships calls attention to the importance of examining power dynamics within such partnerships—attending to questions like how decisions are made, who has influence over particular aspects of the work, and how the unique organizational and institutional contexts, resources, and identities of participating individuals create power imbalances (Coburn et al., 2008; Denner et al., 2019; Farrell et al., 2021; Yamashiro et al., 2023). As Farrell et al. (2023) argued, “Individual actors [in partnerships] will have their own orientations or stances towards conceptions of equity, and be positioned by their status, authority, role, or other social markers to advance certain ideas or practices successfully” (p. 217). Indeed, certain individuals in partnerships had undue influence over partnerships’ equity approaches, and resistance often occurred in response to more critical conceptions of equity. This was emblematic in Bedford, where, in an attempt to move the work forward, one SIO leveraged its authority as the grant-holding institution to dictate the equity approach for the partnership as a whole, subsequently suppressing critical reflection and alternative and more critical conceptions of equity that attended directly to oppression and marginalization. At the same time, it is also notable that powerful individuals, such as the district leader in the Ogden partnership, can also influence partnerships to think more expansively and critically about equity, suggesting that partnerships be cognizant of not only who and what is influencing their work, but to what ends.
Finally, oppression-combating-focused partnerships offer insights into how partnerships can approach equity sensemaking in a way that encourages active co-construction and challenges power dynamics. Oppression-combating partnerships focused not just on culturally responsive instruction but also disrupting broader instructional policies in their districts that marginalized students. These partnerships were most likely to engage in critical reflection and ongoing learning about equity that involved explicit interrogation of power and oppression, resonating with Irby’s (2021) conclusions that racial equity work is dynamic and responsive to changing context and Turner and Spain’s (2020) characterization of equity sensemaking as an “ongoing negotiation.” This orientation toward critical reflection may have aided these partnerships in questioning powerful ideas or individuals. As a poignant juxtaposition, critical reflection led Ogden partnership leaders to interrogate long-held norms around academic rigor and standardization so central to equality-focused partnership.
Importantly, my data do not make clear the directionality of the relationship between partnerships’ equity approaches in practice and their level of critical reflection. For example, it could be that taking an oppression-combating equity approach led partnerships to be more critically reflective; it could also be that engaging in critical reflection led partnerships to emphasize further the anti-oppressive conception of equity. Certainly, Ogden and Bedford leaders explicitly stated that their ongoing self-study and journey allowed their own understandings about equity to evolve—suggesting that critical reflection led to more anti-oppressive conceptions of equity. At the same time, it is reasonable to assume that individuals need some level of support for an anti-oppressive conception of equity to be motivated to critically reflect in the first place. Indeed, sensemaking theory would suggest that this process is much more discursive, rather than linear, in practice—that individual and organizational action represents a retrospective response to environmental cues. As partnerships progress with their initiatives, they collectively generate more cues upon which to inform their future actions. As such, the act of critical reflection may reveal new insights that lead to evolutions in their oppression-combating approach to equity, and their oppression-combating approach may highlight contradictions in their work that lead to further critical reflection.
Collectively, these findings also call to question how to approach equity-focused instructional reform more broadly and the role of SIOs in this work. A tension exists between scaling promising practices—through, for instance, curricular products and best practices for PL—and leaving space for ongoing reflection, negotiation, and co-construction of equity. Furthermore, given that SIOs often operate in a fee-for-service model, SIOs themselves may disproportionately benefit from providing the field with a scalable and formulaic approach to promoting equity-oriented instructional reform and simultaneously have undue influence over the field’s approach to instructional reform more broadly (Burch, 2009; Scott & Jabbar, 2014; Trinidad, 2023; Trujillo & Woulfin, 2014). While SIOs offer resources and expertise to districts (Coburn, 2005a; Trinidad, 2023), the field should be cognizant of the broader level of influence SIOs can and do have on public education (Scott & Jabbar, 2014).
Implications for Policy and Practice
This study highlights the deep importance of centering conceptions of equity not just in future research, but also in policy and practice. As Levinson et al. (2022) cautioned, “When ‘equity’ is used as a buzzword and placeholder for competing values and theories of change, education workers can talk past each other and limit opportunities for true transformation in the field.” Equity conceptions can have material consequences, informing the kinds of policies and practices that educators and policymakers prioritize and ultimately shaping educational opportunities for marginalized students. These findings suggest, then, that educational policymakers and practitioners should make explicit and deeply interrogate equity as an idea as they are designing and enacting policies and practices. Importantly, however, this interrogation need not focus solely on abstract definitions of equity, but also on the material solutions that policymakers and practitioners prioritize—and what equity conceptions are inherently privileged in those solutions. Indeed, culturally responsive teaching and standards-based reforms can reflect very different conceptions of equity. Without interrogating the equity ideas inherent in solutions, reflection on equity becomes a purely symbolic gesture.
At the same time, we also know that “equity” and “justice” language and justice-oriented instructional approaches like “culturally responsive teaching” can easily be co-opted to serve the status-quo (Miller et al., 2024; Scott, 2013). Educational researchers, policymakers, and practitioners should explicitly and continuously examine the meaning and goals of equity and justice and lean into the contradictions and misalignments that emerge. Doing so requires a willingness for policymakers and practitioners to critique their own practices and approaches. Moments of contradiction and misalignment—such as those documented in this study—and internal critique can serve as fruitful opportunities for interrogating institutionalized norms and practices and developing collective understanding and organizational change oriented toward equity that disrupts institutionalized oppression.
This study also offers important implications for educational leadership in particular. Existing scholarship offers guidance on specific practices that district leaders may adopt to analyze how routines and norms reinforce particular ideologies about equity—these might include equity audits or generation of equity-focused theories of action that make explicit their definitions of equity (Green, 2017, 2022; Irby, 2021). Furthermore, training for future educational leaders might include attention to conceptions of equity in a variety of policy domains (e.g., instructional reform, school discipline, school finance), how ideas about equity have become entrenched in current educational policy, and routines and practices that promote an organization-wide equity praxis.
Finally, in an era of increasing district reliance on SIOs for support and capacity building, this study offers important considerations for school district leaders, educators, and SIOs as they engage in district–SIO partnerships. Districts should choose partner SIOs wisely—prioritizing partnerships with those that both reflect initial alignment with the district’s vision for equity and that demonstrate a willingness to adapt to local context and grow together in their equity praxis. Once initiated, such partnerships should adopt an equity praxis that includes active and open-minded reflection about what equity is, how inequity manifests in education, and how power dynamics shape equity priorities.
Supplemental Material
sj-pdf-1-epa-10.3102_01623737251336728 – Supplemental material for Negotiating Equity: A Critical Policy Analysis of Equity Sensemaking in District Partnership Initiatives
Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-epa-10.3102_01623737251336728 for Negotiating Equity: A Critical Policy Analysis of Equity Sensemaking in District Partnership Initiatives by Meghan Comstock in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thank you to all the leaders and educators who shared their experiences as part of this study. I would also like to thank Laura M. Desimone, who was Principal Investigator of the study from which this work came and who offered rich feedback throughout data analysis and writing for this piece. Thank you also to Janine Remillard and Rand Quinn, who reviewed several iterations of this piece and offered invaluable insights.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (INV-000745).
1.
Based on Trinidad’s (2023, 2024) work, which builds on Rowan’s (2002) seminal contributions, SIOs encompass a range of organization types. In this study of PL partnerships, I focus on school support organizations specifically—“groups that work directly in schools to provide training, coaching, and other supplementary educational services” (Trinidad, 2024, p. 3).
Author
MEGHAN COMSTOCK, PhD, is an assistant professor of education policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research focuses on the implementation and politics of equity-oriented education reforms and policies related to teachers, teaching, and leadership.
References
Supplementary Material
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