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

by Paul Gorski, Katy Swalwell

Overview

Six principles for leading unequivocally in ways that disrupt inequity at its roots.

Fix Injustice, Not Kids and Other Principles for Transformative Equity Leadership offers a deep dive into the leadership values, commitments, and practices that help educational leaders create and sustain equitable schools and districts. Drawing from their extensive equity and inclusion work with schools, Paul Gorski and Katy Swalwell introduce key components of the equity literacy framework. They then challenge principals, equity professionals, and other K–12 leaders to embrace six guiding principles for meaningful equity leadership:

• Direct confrontation: Honestly naming and directly addressing the conditions that perpetuate inequity.
• Fix injustice, not kids: Avoiding deficit views, focused on "fixing" people who are marginalized, and embracing structural views, focused on eliminating inequitable conditions.
• Prioritization: Reimagining policies and practices and rebuilding institutional cultures in ways that account for historical and present inequities and their ramifications.
• Just access: Reconsidering what we provide equitable access to and whether it is itself equitable.
• Evidence-based equity: Applying an equity lens to the ways we collect and interpret data and exercising caution about popular data collection tools and methods.
• Care, joy, and sustainability: Withstanding inevitable resistance while embracing visions for love, joy, and community that cultivate and sustain transformative equity.

Powerful stories from students and staff members reveal the troubling gaps between their everyday school experiences and the often high-optics, low-impact equity and diversity programs, events, and strategies embraced by school leaders. They also reveal key moments of growth as leaders learned how to deepen their equity understandings and enact more meaningful equity approaches.

This thought-provoking book offers guidance to those who want to do better and are on the path to achieving some of today's most crucial goals: disrupting inequity and becoming transformative equity leaders.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781416631965
Publisher:	ASCD
Publication date:	06/26/2023
Pages:	250
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Paul Gorski, PhD, is the founder of the Equity Literacy Institute and EdChange. He has 25 years of experience helping educators, nonprofit workers, and others strengthen their equity efforts. He also is the research director of the Equity Literacy Institute, conducting and collaborating on research and other scholarship related to maximizing the transformative potential of equity efforts. Gorski has published more than 70 articles and has written, cowritten, or coedited 12 books on various aspects of educational equity, including Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty: Strategies for Erasing the Opportunity Gap and Case Studies on Diversity and Social Justice Education (with Seema Pothini). Gorski earned a PhD in educational evaluation at the University of Virginia.

Katy Swalwell, PhD, is lead equity specialist for the Equity Literacy Institute and founder of Past Present Future Consulting & Media. Over the past 20 years, Swalwell has served as a classroom teacher in public and private schools at the elementary and secondary levels, teacher educator, researcher, and administrator. Her books include Educating Activist Allies: Social Justice Pedagogy with the Suburban and Urban Elite, Social Studies for a Better World: An Anti-Oppressive Approach for Elementary Educators (with Noreen Naseem Rodríguez), and Anti-Oppressive Education in "Elite" Schools: Promising Practices and Cautionary Tales from the Field (coedited with Daniel Spikes). Swalwell's PhD in curriculum theory, research, and design is from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"So what can I do?" is a question that so many people ask when it comes to engaging in equity work at school. This is not the inquiry that will lead us to liberation. This book asks and answers a more powerful question: "If I care about children, their communities, and their futures, who do I need to become?"
—Cornelius Minor, author of We Got This: Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us to Be

Fix Injustice, Not Kids and Other Principles for Transformative Equity Leadership is exactly the book we need today when conversations about equity, diversity, and justice often are hijacked and distorted. This is a must-read for education leaders and professionals everywhere.
—Gloria Ladson-Billings, professor emerita, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Drawing on their extensive experience and research confronting injustice in education, Gorski and Swalwell's Fix Injustice, Not Kids and Other Principles for Transformative Equity Leadership is a gift to all who are committed to moving schools and school leaders from good intentions to powerful practices. Rooted by a most radical sense of equity, and grounded in real-life, supremely applicable approaches to making school structures more just and equitable, Fix Injustice, Not Kids needs to be read by current and future education leaders everywhere
—Wayne Au, professor, University of Washington Bothell and editor, Rethinking Schools

Paul Gorski and Katy Swalwell offer fresh insights on the cumulative and multifaceted dimensions of inequity through their prescient and timely "equity literacy framework" that is chock-full of conceptual tools and strategies for the outright transformation of institutional cultures that reach beyond diversity and inclusion to foster genuine equity.
—Angela Valenzuela, PhD, author ofSubtractive Schooling and Growing Critically Conscious Teachers: A Social Justice Curriculum for Educators of Latino/a Youth

Gorski and Swalwell have crafted for educational leaders a clear and courageous pathway beyond easy assumptions and good intentions—and toward decisive equity-literate skills and actions. Guided by scholarship, grown from their many years of practical experience in schools, and grounded in the reality of structural inequities—this is a foundational and transformational resource for achieving equitable and just schooling.
—Gary Howard, author of We Can't Lead Where We Won't Go: An Educator's Guide to Equity

As leaders, we should all strive to disrupt inequity. But just how do we do that? Look no further than Gorski and Swalwell's Fix Injustice, Not Kids and Other Principles for Transformative Equity Leadership. They provide a framework for moving beyond high-optics equity initiatives that only yield low-impact institutional results. Instead, they help leaders recognize inequity with a sharper lens and know how to disrupt it at its core.
—Zaretta Hammond, author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

This insightful book asks us to look beyond the current zeitgeist of antiracist work and helps us develop principles about the work we're seeking to do. As a justice-oriented educator, I appreciate how Gorski and Swalwell delineate how to do this work with integrity, curiosity, and willingness to push boundaries on the status quo.
—José Luis Vilson, veteran educator, executive director of EduColor, and author of This Is Not a Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education

With their basic principles of equity literacy, Gorski and Swalwell share a vision for the transformative power of collective action toward living and breathing equity not only at work but also in our personal lives, so that we become threats to inequity everywhere we go.
—Dena Simmons, founder of LiberatED

Fix Injustice, Not Kids and Other Principles for Transformative Equity Leadership is a compelling and sometimes uncomfortable book for educators who are willing to confront the conditions that perpetuate inequity and who have the courage to take actions that actually cultivate equity. It sheds a bright light on how the difference between doing "something" in the name of equity and taking meaningful action can change the educational trajectory for young people who are marginalized by much of what we continue to do in schools and classrooms.
—Carol Ann Tomlinson, author of How to Differentiate Instruction in Academically Diverse Classrooms, 3rd Edition

I appreciated the authors' emphasis on transformative over mitigative equity and the rich principles and examples to illuminate the difference. This will help educators consider the impact of their efforts. Equity-focused educators serious about deepening their practice will benefit immensely from the explanation of action steps through the compelling equity literacy approach, powerful narratives, and relevant exercises. Get this book.
—Mark Anthony Gooden, author of Five Practices for Equity-Focused School Leadership

Transformational change through the lens of antiracism is a monumental undertaking—one that Paul Gorski and Katy Swalwell do not shy away from. Rather, in Fix Injustice, Not Kids and Other Principles for Transformative Equity Leadership, Gorski and Swalwell help educators and school communities confront that lift directly, moving past surface-level good intentions and toward changed, antiracist outcomes—long overdue for Black and Brown youth.
—Kass Minor, author of Teaching Fiercely: Spreading Joy and Justice in Our Schools and cofounder, The Minor Collective