Equity Warriors
How a North Carolina school district is tackling the status quo to dismantle unfair practices that lead to predictive outcomes by race
BY SHARON L. CONTRERAS AND NORA K. CARR/School Administrator, March 2021

Sharon Contreras (left), superintendent in Guilford County, N.C., says implicit bias can affect every aspect of how schools serve their students. PHOTO COURTESY OF GUILFORD COUNTY, N.C., PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Ask other leaders in the Guilford County Schools what made us become fighters for equity across the school district, and the answers vary. For some, it was seeing ourselves reflected in the faces of our students, 70 percent of whom are children of color and close to 70 percent of whom live in poverty.

Others analyzed the district’s achievement data and wondered how it was possible that race and ethnicity continued to outweigh poverty in terms of predicting students’ academic outcomes, especially in a district whose students, staff and schools often earn national recognition for excellence.

Some found renewed commitment during the high school graduation ceremonies held inside the county’s juvenile detention centers. Others might credit the relentless focus on equity expressed by the superintendent or cite the impact of a cabinet retreat conducted at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala., which honors lynching victims.

Regardless of the source of awakening, we know that transforming learning and life outcomes for students has life-and-death consequences.

Systemic Attention

Equity is the foundation and centerpiece of Guilford County’s academically oriented strategic plan, “Ignite Learning.” The plan was developed by district administrators and adopted by the school board after an extensive listening and learning process to gather input and build readiness for the major changes to come.

Creating a shared vision and sense of urgency were just the beginning, however. Dismantling inequitable systems requires a detailed examination of school and district processes that may appear benign on the surface but consistently yield predictive results.

“Any system, process or policy that yields race-based outcomes isn’t race neutral,” says Deena Hayes, who chairs Guilford County’s board of education. An anti-racism trainer and community organizer, Hayes works with business, school and governmental organizations nationwide. She is the first woman and first woman of color to lead our school board, which governs our 70,000-student district.

“For far too long, educators have focused on changing individual students and their families rather than stepping back to see how the system as a whole is functioning,” says Hayes. “We’ve been blaming the fish for going belly-up instead of examining the toxicity of the lake water in which the fish are swimming.”

Without systemic, long-term and cross-systems intervention, public schools — often unwittingly — reflect and reinforce the same race-based inequities found in health care, housing, employment, access to nutrition, law enforcement, courts and jails, Hayes says.

Before the pandemic, an 11-year gap existed in life expectancy between those living in Guilford County’s poorest and richest zip codes, according to the county health department. COVID-19 has inflamed existing disparities. With researchers expecting significant learning losses due to months of shuttered schools and remote learning, achievement gaps will only grow without structural changes.

Implicit Biases

While overt racism is easier to identify and condemn, implicit or unconscious bias is more insidious — and pervasive — in public schools. Unseen and thus invisible to most, implicit bias gets baked into school and district policies, protocols and processes — advantaging some students while disadvantaging others.

In this manner, bias infects the systems that operate silently and unquestioned behind the scenes — or what diversity experts refer to as structural racism.

Implicit bias can infect every aspect of schooling, from how honor society members are selected to which parents receive courtesy phone calls for discipline matters and which parents are referred to social services instead.

Equity audits can help illuminate a district’s blind spots regarding how implicit bias and structural racism are affecting students on a systemic basis. This process also helps leaders develop a shared language and safe context in which to have productive conversations about race.

Illuminating Data

To trace the source of the unseen yet toxic groundwater eroding the district’s ability to serve all students well, the Guilford County district has conducted equity-focused audits in several key areas. This process started with the superintendent’s transition team, which was formed to help shape the district’s strategic plan.

These audits included outside reviews of academic and discipline data, career and technical education programming, magnet school programs and enrollment processes, gifted education and Advanced Placement enrollment and student discipline, among others.

In 2019, while an external analysis of the gifted program praised the district for using “every single best practice for equity,” disaggregated enrollment data continued to tell a different story. Black and Latino students remained underidentified (33 percent of the gifted population compared to 57 percent of the total district population) and white and Asian students were over-represented (61 percent of the gifted enrollment compared to 38 percent of the total district population).

In response, we expanded our use of local norms, alternate data points, rubrics and student performance portfolios in the screening process. By diversifying the tools used to define giftedness, schools began identifying more children of color and children living in poverty as academically gifted and talented.

The district also stopped giving prized seats in its magnet school for gifted students to younger siblings of qualified students, which pushed out children who qualified for the highly selective program on merit rather than family connections.
At the high school level, a plethora of application processes and unique school-based protocols added over time created a daunting gauntlet for parents and guardians to traverse if they sought seats in the district’s most competitive academic programs and magnet schools.

The cumbersome process unfairly advantaged more affluent and educated families, who knew how to navigate the system. As a result, many of these coveted opportunities no longer reflected the diversity of the school district.

Confronted with data showing the growing inequities, principals helped design a new online application and a streamlined process. Teacher-made entrance exams and parent/student interviews were replaced with less subjective, independently developed online assessments. Applications were scored against the entrance criteria. The result: placement of more qualified students who reflect the district’s overall demographics in advanced and accelerated programming and classes.

Accelerating Access

Similarly, a review of enrollment data in the district’s 27 high schools indicated that students of color and students living in poverty were not equitably represented in the district’s robust Advanced Placement program. To attack this issue, Guilford partnered with Equal Opportunity Schools to encourage more qualified students of color to enroll in college-level courses.

The change at Western High School has been dramatic. In 2017-18, only 19 percent of the school’s Black students and 22 percent of Latino students took an AP course. This fall, 27 percent of Black students and 30 percent of Latino students enrolled in one or more AP courses. Student performance on AP exams has remained consistent.

“Educators have much more power than they realize to influence and change the trajectory of our students’ learning,” says Tony Watlington, the district’s chief of schools. Each principal receives a customized school scorecard that identifies key leverage points. “When we dig deeper into why things are the way they are, we are able to identify areas of focus that can make a real difference in kids’ lives.”

Staffing Changes

Like many school districts, Guilford County’s staffing patterns reflect national studies showing the most vulnerable students are more likely to have inexperienced teachers who did not go through traditional university preparation programs.

Once viewed as a stop-gap measure, our district’s lateral entry program has become the primary staff pipeline for the district’s highest-poverty and lowest-performing schools. This school year, 56 percent of all beginning teachers came through lateral entry. In our highest-poverty schools, 34 percent of all teachers are new to the profession (within the first three years) and 31 percent are lateral entry, so they are learning how to teach while on the job.

To address this glaring inequity, we sought and received charter-like flexibility from the state as a turnaround strategy for 11 schools with the lowest student performance. This approach frees up funds to differentiate teacher roles and salaries and provide incentives for recruitment and performance. It provides more funds for professional learning and instructional coaching — support new teachers desperately need.

The results have been impressive. In just two years, Guilford increased the percentage of teachers who met or exceeded growth in the targeted schools by 33 percent in 2019 — the last year that state testing data was available due to the pandemic. The district also increased the percentage of teachers who met or exceeded growth in the 25 lowest-achieving schools from 74 percent in 2018 to 81 percent a year later.

While Guilford students posted academic gains in every subject and every grade on state accountability tests in 2019, students in the district’s lowest-performing schools improved at a more rapid rate. More of these schools also met or exceeded the state’s measure for expected growth — a sign that overall performance is improving.

More Warriors

Guilford County develops its education leaders to become equity warriors for a reason.

Making the structural changes needed to create more equitable schools for all children requires intestinal fortitude and strong political will. Knowing what to do is not nearly as hard as getting enough people to buy into the change to make it happen. With children’s learning and life outcomes depending on us, however, we can do no less.

SHARON CONTRERAS, is superintendent of Guilford County Schools in Greensboro, N.C. Twitter: @scontrerasgcs. NORA CARR is the district’s chief of staff.