The fog around early March meetings dealing with the Equity Audit lifted a bit: the district released the recording of the Board meeting on March 8. The recording is still incomplete, but it has sound (so generous)! There exists also, somewhere in the ether, a recording of the preceding Equity Task Force meeting on March 7, with guest appearances by Drs. Dubiel and Lewis. It would be, however, asking too much from the district to release it. The administration goes to great lengths to hide various recordings from the public view and we know how it would respond to such a query: they’ll ignore it.
Still, 45 minutes of the Board discussion related to the audit gave us enough to reflect upon. There was drama, there were emotions, and there were explosive accusations.
The recording starts with a lively sparring of what seemed to be two competing camps: one favoring Dr. Lewis, and other going with Dr. Dubiel. The Dr. Lewis camp insisted on the statistical prowess of this potential auditor.
The arguments of Dr. Dubiel’s supporters were far more loaded. Look, they said: the Board formed the Equity Task Force to do something. They did something. Now, if you question their work, they will feel their work was useless. Ergo, what they said should be done, full stop.
To be fair, we strongly commiserate with the Equity Task Force on the wasted work issue. Members of the ETF spent half a year, 6 or 7 of meetings, to produce a 5 pages of the “educational equity policy draft” (of which two pages are, noblesse oblige, taken by the definitions, and the rest is a collection of lists of somewhat repetitive desiderata).
We estimate, 20-24 of the district employees were present at each of the 1.5 hour long meeting, – this is five or six weeks of (paid, we hope) working time that was spent on the text which hardly anyone will use in any practical fashion. A performative act.
If that’s the only deliverable of a series of long meetings, it is painful. Nobody wants to toil for so long in vain.
This conundrum would be easy to avoid with a modicum of earlier attention from the Board and the broad public. This whole process would’ve been questioned far earlier. But, it was hidden from the broad public until the last Fall (obviously, in violation of the Open Meeting Act, – but who cares about such trifles here) : as usual, the secrecy breeds inefficiency and resentment.
The Board conversation then turned more accusatory. Board member Ms. Exum related that the Equity Task Force is tired, reluctant to continue their work and even that there was some intimidation observed.
(This is very bad and should be taken very seriously. Ms. Exum, an experienced HR officer, certainly knows that in Illinois intimidation is a felony. We have no doubts she has already acted on the information available to her.)
Dr. Ivory-Tatum, the Superintendent, continued the litany of complaints: while in the beginning of the process, she said, the Equity Task Force members were engaged, and spoke from their hearts, later on they clammed up, and even stopped participating, because of the disruptors, and their statements (which she referred to as the outside noise).
What an extraordinary view: the Equity Task Force process is derailed by a couple of disruptors…
Did Dr. Ivory-Tatum mean us? Our arsenal of actions consists of emails to the Board (heard by the Board and a dozen of viewers of Urbana TV Channel when the district bothers to post it), and this puny blog.
Meanwhile, Dr. Ivory-Tatum is making her preferences in the vendor selection perfectly clear, all the while serving as the Equity Task Force facilitator, on top of being the most powerful public official in Urbana who can hire or fire the majority of the members of ETF, – and she is blaming us for the interference?
Something does not square here.
Here’s an alternative explanation: the Board (and, perhaps, some members of ETF) are impacted by the manifest inadequacy of the equity audit vendors offered for their review by Dr. Caffey. That “outside noise” Dr. Ivory-Tatum is so displeased with is perhaps just reality knocking on their doors.
Following the Superintendent’s lead, Mr. Poulosky, the Board’s President, supported the position of the administration: to avoid the “collateral damage” of ETF feeling not heard, the Board should do what the ETF (i.e. the administration), wants, even while Mr. Poulosky himself feels that this is a wrong decision.
We knew that Mr. Poulosky rarely if ever contradicts the administration. Yet, to declare so openly that his fiduciary duty is to do not what is right for us, citizens and parents of Urbana (from his own viewpoint), but what the school bureaucracy wants, – this was a revelation. No wonder the USD116 audio equipment was initially so reluctant to broadcast it.
In the end, all the fireworks were for nothing. The Board was split, – three members preferred Dr. Dubiel, three went for Dr. Lewis, and one remained undecided. So, once again, a new interview with Drs. Dubiel and Lewis is to be scheduled, – their third appearance here; the decisive, very very very last interview…
The Equity Audit discussion was fascinating, but painful to watch. The members of the Board were visibly troubled, carefully searching for words: to quote one Board member, “a white <person> taking up space in an equity conversation is uncomfortable.”
But it is hard to think clearly while wearing mental blinders. The split view played a bad joke on the Board. One day you let the ETF spend hours on glossary of terms of oppression, thinking, well, that’s their stuff, who am I to interfere? The next day you see what a rotten deal for the district their plan of actions would bring, and try to backtrack… These cycles of indifference and pushback eroded the standing of the Board. In their alternating attempts not to offend and to do the right thing, the Board lost their footing and made quite a few critical mistakes. Let us list some of them:
- The Board ignored the lack of charge: what specific problems the Equity Task Force needs to solve. Combined with the collective refusal to take responsibility (the Board, the administration, the ETF members, – all in turn were claiming they are not the experts, and therefore cannot say what to do), that created room for replacement of substantive actions by the performative ones.
- As the Board failed to take the initiative, the administration-driven equity process failed to question a single procedure in the district leading to inequities. True transformation necessarily upsets – disrupts! – the prevailing order, and therefore cannot be led by the bureaucracy, by definition concerned with self-preservation and continuity.
- Ceding the authority over the process to the administration also led the Board to accept several patently false claims, such as:
- the idea that an “external audit” means audit done by someone outside the town (or county? or 50 miles radius around USD116 HQ? don’t ask us, neither makes any sense), rather than by someone outside of the organization (the latter interpretation is in fact clearly present in the ETF documents).
- the usage of bogus Non Disclosure Agreements claims by potential vendors as a tool to screen their shoddy work. The audits are commissioned by public bodies, and funded by the taxes (local, state and federal). Shielding the results of an equity audit from the public by an NDA is probably illegal and certainly should be easy to overcome using a FOIA.
- the notion that Board is unable to evaluate the quality of the proposed vendors for an audit, for the lack of “expertise.” One can (probably, somewhere, sometimes) be unable to vet the methods of the audit; the nature of projected or intended outcomes of an audit should be the key parameter on which to evaluate it.
So, the \(n\)-th iteration: where is this all going? We are not optimistic. The apparent choice the Board faces is between two species of equity opportunists: Dr. Dubiel’s variety, openly trying to sell standardized substandard reports, combined with a palette of ritualistic motions as the follow-up, and Dr. Lewis’ type, of pretend scientific exercise, amounting to graduate students feeding the high level data through software they don’t understand, and producing conclusions indistinguishable from the initial hypotheses.
One might discuss the essence of methods deployed by either of these equity entrepreneurs (on which we would be happy to report to the Board, – if the Board dared to overcome an unspoken proscription to talk to us, imposed on them by the administration). But do we really need to? The lack of any objective evidence that the audits or plans of actions of either of the Drs. ever improved educational outcomes in a single school that hired them, – this lack is obvious right away to anyone who bothers to spend half an hour investigating their products.
The most probable outcome, in our view, will go like this: the Board and the administration will pretend not to hear the outside noise, and proceed with (say) Dr. Dubiel. A year later, with fees paid, and hundreds of worktime hours sunk into the audit process, the district will be sluggishly implementing the usual set of pretend acts. And the Board will be trying to forget the whole experience as a bad dream.
And the kids? Oh, come on. Mr. Poulosky told you where the priorities in equity work should be.
Of course, the Board is not serving under some Putinesque tyrant. They have agency. They are quite free to act the way they reckon is good for us. Actually, they owe that to us, to act on equity so that something would finally change for the better. And if they are serious about this work, the course of action is quite clear.
First, they should thank the Equity Task Force for creating the Educational Equity Policy Draft. Then they should send a firm thank you, but thank you no to Drs. Dubiel and Lewis.
And then they should start from scratch.
Only doing it right this time. Paying attention to all the nasty, difficult, and absolutely vital details of where the obstacles are, for far, far better education that our minority kids, immigrant kids, kids with disabilities deserve. Involving far more parents and frontline educators in the process of identifying these bottlenecks. Working with the local community of scholars eager to help. Doing real research, with outcomes uncertain and therefore useful. Disrupting, finally, the systems of oppression that the administration is so eager to keep protected from us, the noisy outsiders.
Doing this would effect a real change. The Board can make this choice. Dare they?