“Let us turn our thoughts today to Martin Luther King…”
I love the James Taylor song “Shed a Little Light” and his call to:
“recognize that we are bound together in our desire to see the world become
a place in which our children can grow free and strong”

That is what the drive for equity in schools is all about. According to the Penn Excellence and Equity Consortia, we, as leaders need to:

• Be prepared to lead challenging conversations around race, equity, poverty, immigration, politics and school improvement in today’s complex world.
• Be equipped with the critical problem-solving and decision-making skills needed to make ethical and effective choices as a part of our daily lives as school leaders.
• Be able to respond to the challenging and complex leadership dilemmas that ultimately define our leadership.

How do we achieve this?
As Einstein says:
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Often, we jump to popular or “tried and true” solutions before we have properly examined the problem. If we truly want to address both the achievement gap and the resource gap to achieve equity, we need to take a deeper dive into our own district data and use critical thinking to solve those problems in our schools. The best place to start, before focusing on solutions, is to determine true cause so that we can apply the proper interventions. Using data and transparent critical thinking can help us deal with emotionally-charged issues and make the ethical, effective and sometimes difficult decisions we need to make in today’s complex world.

As the song goes “Shed a little light….so we can see” – using current data and transparent processes, can help you do just that!