All three are fully acquainted with the demographics that weigh on student achievement, including race, class, language and, most of all, poverty. But it is clear that each has high expectations for all of their students, believing every child has opportunity to learn.

For White, measuring equity is better determined by evaluating student outcomes, rather than just opportunities. In Louisiana that means getting all 26,000 high school seniors to earn a college-going ACT score, for example. College preparedness is an outcome that matters and serves as a rallying cry for the students, families and educators in his state.

Aguilar has much the same feeling. Preparing students for a post-secondary education — ensuring every student has the opportunity to go to the college they choose — is an important way to measure whether the education system is working. That means ridding school districts of structures that all but guarantee inequity. To that end, he’s built “colleagueships of expertise” made up of academic, research, technical and community members who provide divergent views on the best way to influence positive outcomes.

Manning also believes education inequities have always been structural with too much adherence to standardization models. In her view, equity traditionally was a box to be checked after a couple of training sessions, with no outcomes measured. For Manning, wresting control from those who start out behind is not the way to equity in any way beyond lip service. She believes that broader experience and a broader worldview are the path to more targeted solutions.

How do you describe equity for K-12 education?

An equitable education system puts students at the heart of how it operates, meaning the system is flexible enough to allow students, schools and school communities — all with different needs — to meet standards for quality and achievement.

Stringent standardization of our schools has been an impediment to equity, but with the flexibility afforded by the Every Student Succeeds Act, we seem to be moving in the right direction. In years past, we’ve gone through different iterations of what equity means and used buzzwords like achievement gap, opportunity gap and equality to talk about it. It seemed like achieving equity was more about checking a box by offering a couple of training sessions. Now, our focus on equity seems more intentional. We are calling out systemic oppression, discrimination, racism and sexism and implementing quality professional development and policies that endeavor to make a difference in our schools. We are making progress toward meaningful conversation and actions toward equity.

What do you see as the persistent challenges to equity?

A lack of flexibility, especially with regard to curriculum, is a major challenge to providing an equitable education.

Education today demands that teachers follow curriculum with fidelity. We have pacing guides that are a roadmap for what students should be learning at any point in the year. In my experience, following curriculum to the letter makes it difficult to slow down and adjust the content or pace to meet the needs of the students in the classroom.

Thankfully, I’m in a situation where I have a great deal of flexibility. I can teach at a pace that is appropriate for my kids. And while my class size sometimes is really big, the majority of times it is small enough to meet the needs of individual students. I wish that it was that way for most teachers, but in our current system it is not.

Another impediment to equity is the movement away from teaching soft skills. Education is more than just ABCs and 123s. Accelerated academics are easy to implement and measure. We’ve been retreating from teaching kids to learn how to interact, collaborate and communicate with one another — so-called “soft skills” that are harder to teach and more difficult to assess. There’s less play and more tests, benchmarks and kids sitting in desks beginning in kindergarten.

This departure from teaching soft skills has bearing on the mental health of our children. It impacts their ability to manage very real stresses and trauma in their lives like being new to this country or living in poverty or with addiction. It inhibits the ability of students to talk with each other to solve their problems. And, notably, it means students are not able to focus on learning while in school.

How does funding impact equity and opportunity?

School funding is always an issue. There are many people who argue that funding doesn’t have an impact, but it does. As important as per-pupil funding, though, are other factors like parental involvement. For example, there may be one school within a system that has a very strong parent-teacher organization and successfully generates tons of additional funding. Then there’s the school across town with parents who may be well-intentioned but don’t have the same capacity to raise money.

We need to be thinking about our community investment in all of the schools within a district to account for differences in parental support or, in some cases, privilege to ensure that we have equitable funding systemwide.

We also need to think more critically about where we are putting dollars. Because of changing demographics, increases in mental health issues and other circumstances, we are asking educators to do more for the same
compensation and without additional training. Professional development is vital to enabling educators to better serve our students. We also need to consider a larger investment in the health and well-being of our students with the addition of more mental health therapists and nutrition programs like hot breakfast in many of our school communities. For too long we’ve been putting dollars into curriculum and assessments.

Are you hopeful about creating more equitable education?

I am actually more optimistic. This has been a wake-up call. I am encouraged that we will now be more intentional, braver and more creative in confronting these issues in our country. The more active and vocal we are, the more likely we are to actually work toward and, hopefully, in the end, achieve equity.

How does your mission of pushing the boundaries of our own understanding impact equity?

We all need to challenge our own perceptions. The only way to do that is to seek an experience that is different from our own, one that challenges our understanding and pushes beyond our comfort zone. For teachers, that means opening the classroom door and inviting people inside. It also means getting out of the classroom to learn about what’s happening in other environments — other classrooms and schools.

This is the best way to work toward equity. Broader experience yields a broader worldview and a greater likelihood that we’ll reach across difference to have civil conversations and find understanding and common ground.

May you describe how you view equity and opportunity for K-12 education?

The very construct of the educational system is designed to produce inequitable outcomes, particularly for students in historically disadvantaged communities. We must interrupt the inequities that are a manifestation of that design.

At Sacramento City Unified School District, we are working to do that. Equity is a core value that is represented in our commitment to reducing the academic achievement gap by ensuring that all students have equal access to the opportunities, supports and tools they need to be successful.

Our focus has never been just to provide greater access. I’ve seen organizations who have provided great access with measures like giving all students access to AP courses. Sac City is first making certain every student is exposed to a rigorous curriculum and strong teaching so that access becomes a byproduct of that effort.

How do you define success for Sacramento students?

Our mission is to graduate students who are globally competitive lifelong learners, prepared to succeed in a career and higher education institution of their choice to secure gainful employment and contribute to society. We are working to give every student an equal opportunity to graduate with the greatest number of post-secondary choices from the widest array of options.

In California, we’re fortunate to have a very robust master plan for higher education where students can access the California Community College, California State University (CSU) or University of California (UC) systems in addition to private colleges and universities. But students who graduate must have completed a course pattern called the “A-G” subject requirements. The intent of this series of 15 college prep courses that must be passed with an “A,” “B,” or “C” is to ensure that students have attained a body of general knowledge that will provide breadth and perspective to new, more advanced study. A “D” grade is a deficiency in the eyes of our higher-education partners. Only those students who pass the courses would have the greatest number of post-secondary choices.

When we talk about the widest array of options, we’re striving toward having students who graduate being able to apply to a UC or a CSU segment, but also having access to choose from the entire system of campuses that are within the CSU and within the UC. Some of the campuses are more selective than others. We’re working to make sure that students — should they choose to — can apply to the most selective colleges from that segment of higher education. We want to reduce the propensity for African-American, brown and Southeast Asian students to undermatch by enrolling in open access colleges and universities, while their counterparts tend, at a much higher rate, to enroll in the most selective colleges and universities.

How are you working to change the tendency to attribute deficiencies to external forces?

I have often found that among adults in the educational system, we are too quick to attribute results to external forces. So, for example, when we talk about pursuing college or more specifically about the phenomenon of undermatching, we quickly connect a student’s path to notions like parents of African-American, brown and Southeast Asian students don’t support the idea of their children going to college. Or, in the Latino culture, the machismo inhibits dads from allowing their daughters to attend university. Or, we may think that parents just don’t understand financial aid or the difference between a community college and a four-year college or university. To be successful, we must change our tendency to use these biases as justification for student achievement.

We’re working to shift this paradigm by communicating our expectation for every one of our students. Our hope is to impact how parents feel about the opportunities available to their children. So, for example, we use a student’s academic profile, comparing their record of achievement to local and national benchmarks, to show parents that his or her student should consider applying to different colleges and universities.

We’ve taken a similar approach with summer school, by automatically enrolling and then appealing to parents to bring their children to class to help improve grade-level proficiency and better their future opportunities. This summer we are serving more than 3,000 students from rising first through 12th grade students. We have seen an 80 percent attendance rate since we began on June 18th.

You are known for using data to improve student outcomes. Describe how you’re doing that at Sac City.

We discovered that only about 19 percent of our students had taken the SAT as juniors. Most students have waited to take the test until October of senior year, leaving no opportunity to try again before the fall college application deadlines. I found that unacceptable, so we used the data to demonstrate the need for change to our community. By and large, they were very supportive. Based on our funding formula, this year we had the ability to shift some budget resources and pay for every single junior to take the SAT during the school day last spring. We did the same at Fresno, and Long Beach has done this as well. Our labor partner supported the effort. And we have a working relationship with the college board, which made a lot of accommodations in terms of working to get fee waivers for as many of our students who were eligible, thereby reducing our cost. This fall, approximately 86 percent of our juniors are coming into senior year with at least one SAT score under their belt.

How do you work through difference to make changes that better the education provided to students?

We have been advancing a model of building “colleagueships of expertise.” This is not my term, but the approach has guided the way we make changes to the system. We will not introduce any change unless it has gone through a vetting process by a body of individuals that have formed such a colleagueship. The colleagueship is made up of individuals that have very differing views around whether or not the change that we are considering will have an impact on outcomes that we have identified. We’ve recently formed a colleagueship to address the disproportionate suspension of African-American students.

About a month ago, we held our first research practice forum where we invited researchers, technical experts and academics to join our practitioners in discussing how to change the outcomes in seven priority areas including: EL re-designation, college-going culture, reading by third grade, middle school readiness, high school readiness, graduation and increasing A-G completion rates. We had a lot of partners from Sacramento State, UC Davis, UC Merced, PACE out of Stanford and others. We will next form colleagueships for each of these areas. I am excited about the disruptions we will make to the system to bring greater benefits to all our students.

How do you define equity and opportunity in education?

As equity is applied to education, I think it’s helpful to view it through the lenses of both opportunity and outcomes. A child is not entirely an agent of his own destiny. Therefore, equity of outcomes for a child is essential. Policymakers must take greater responsibility over the life outcomes of a child than they would over those of an adult because the child has less day-to-day agency and, therefore, it’s incumbent upon us to look at equity of outcomes. Are we seeing fairness reflected in the outcomes that are being achieved rather than simply in the opportunities that are being given? What adults do with opportunity is up to them, but when it comes to a child, you have to look at the issue of equity differently, no matter your politics.

Describe how you’ve created policy that advances equity of opportunity.

There are of course a lot of examples, but I can give you a simple one to illustrate the point. The first policy we created was to provide every student a free chance to take the ACT. We did so because there wasn’t equity of opportunity for low income and students of color to take the test and thus to go on to postsecondary education. The result has been greater fairness in outcomes, with nearly 26,000 high school seniors in the class of 2017 earning a college-going ACT score, an increase of 7,397 students over the class of 2012. This is one example of how applying an equity lens to policy making can have, on balance, a positive effect for constituents.

How do you see the administration’s plans to move away from guidelines about race in college admissions?

Whatever your politics, there are directionally important steps being taken on the left and the right with respect to admissions that in their largely ideologically driven approaches are problematic. I think that the way the administration is approaching the question of racial equity in colleges is troubling. What troubles me the most is that leaders in Washington seem unwilling to acknowledge historical inequities. At the same time, I also think some rhetoric on the left – for example language New York Mayor De Blasio has used regarding the beneficiaries of admission criteria – has been troubling too. So, yes, I am very concerned about the rhetoric coming out of Washington. However, there are people on the other side of the aisle who are trying to incite populist feelings and resentment around this issue as well.

How have we come to weaponize words like equity and social justice in the education space?

The inventory of words that are rightly or wrongly viewed as weapons is growing. The breakdown of trusted and agreed upon stewards of language, most importantly local, print media, and its replacement with tribal media, has unquestionably led to an environment where words and emotions come together in a cocktail that yields frenzy. And frenzy is the modus operandi of today’s politics at the national, state and the local levels.

Before now, education had, perhaps, united partisans across partisan lines. But the presidential election laid bare some real ideological differences within coalitions. The election reoriented people’s politics, and fracturing is evident. Stepping into that breach and trying to acknowledge the complexity of issues is extremely difficult because you risk slings and arrows from both sides.

I still believe there is hope in coming together on education issues. From a political perspective, for example, technical education is gaining traction. Postsecondary education feels more directly and viscerally connected to value for real people than, for example, learning algebra. Whether political leaders will think it’s worth it to create new paradigms on education issues, allowing for non-weaponized spaces in which to get things done, remains to be seen.