A Culture Of Equity Calls For Leadership From The Top

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A culture of equity calls for leadership from the top

By Monica Minor Gant

Categories: Change management, Reaching all students, System leadership

We can, whenever and wherever we choose, successfully teach all children whose schooling is of interest to us … We already know more than we need to do that … and whether or not we do it must finally depend on how we feel about the fact that we haven’t so far.” — Edmonds, 1979 More than 40 years ago, Ronald Edmonds made this indictment of schools that fail to teach all students, pointing out that “differences in student performance … seem to be attributed to factors under the schools’ control” (Edmonds, 1979). He vehemently denounced the notion of family background as the primary cause of student performance because “such a belief has the effect of absolving educators of their professional responsibility to be instructionally

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References

Au, W. & Jordan, C. (1981). Teaching reading to Hawaiian children: Finding culturally

Edmonds, R. (1979). Effective schools for the urban poor. Educational Leadership, 37(1), 15-18, 20-24.

Erickson, F. & Mohatt, G. (1982). Cultural organization and participation structures in two classrooms of Indian students. In. G. Spindler (Ed.), Doing the ethnography of schooling (pp. 131-174). Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Irvine, J. (1990). Black students and school failure. Greenwood.

Kikoski, C. & Kikoski, J. (2004). The inquiring organization: Tacit knowledge, conversation, and knowledge creation: Skills for 21st-century organizations. Praeger.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), p 465-491.

Mohatt, G. & Erickson, F. (1981). Cultural differences in teaching styles in an Odawa school: A sociolinguistic approach. In H. Trueba, G. Guthrie, & K. Au (Eds.), Culture and the bilingual classroom: Studies in classroom ethnography, pp. 105-119. Newbury.

Schein, E. (1992). Organizational culture and leadership. Jossey-Bass.

Monica Minor Gant

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Monica Minor Gant, the associate secretary of academic support for the Delaware Department of Education, leads critical academic initiatives, ensuring rigorous coursework and ESSA implementation. With a strong commitment to equity and student success, she oversees various workgroups, including curriculum, instruction, and professional development, and exceptional children’s resources. Gant previously held district-level positions in Georgia's Clarke County School District and served as a principal and teacher in Ohio's Columbus City School District. She holds a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership from The Ohio State University.