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

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.

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.