Past week saw a lot of action on the equity audit front. First, the Board of Education of Urbana School District 116 met on 2.1 to examine, inter alia, two new contenders to provide this critical service to the district. That was followed by the meeting of the Equity Task Force, on 2.3, to discuss the outcomes of the Board interview. The results of our quick research into these two vendors was given on the previous post; this is an account of what I could derive from observing the meetings.
The Board meeting on 2.1 was darkly comical.
District’s director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Dr. Caffey, introduced the presenters, who then told the Board members about their companies and proposed equity audit process, and answered Board’s questions.
Dr. Lewis presentation was magisterial, agreeably vague and largely covered what I reported earlier. (A novel detail: while his web site is currently showing 25 published books, and his resume, – on the same web site, – 28 books, the Board slides listed 30 books… “Recent additions,” he commented. “Wow,” we comment. )
Most of the novel stuff we learned came from the Q&A.
Dr. Lewis certainly knows how to handle questions from provincial rubes like us. He was generously prefacing his answers with “Great question, – let me make it easy for you to understand“. (This, let me reveal the secret to the uninitiated, is a slick device to make sure no followup questions ever ensue: you start with assurances that only fools would fail to understand your reply, then equivocate, et voila! the mark will never ask for a clarification… Where did we see this approach?)
[warning: not a transcript!]
- Dr. Lewis, what are the tangible deliverables of your action plan?
- Let me make it easy for you to understand: I call it a time stamp. There are short term actions, a few weeks time stamp. Then there is a medium term, which is longer. And then there is what I call a long term, which is whichever the stakeholder call it the longer timeline…
The Board members bought it, by and large. Indeed, Dr. Lewis exhibited knowledge of what is SPSS, or a control group; clearly, an analytic heavyweight is in town. The Board even bought his theory that he cannot discuss his prior equity audits because of the non-disclosure agreements forced on him. (Even accepting the premise that public school districts would hide the results of their equity audits from their taxpayers, Dr. Lewis could have been asked – in November, when he first gave that preposterous excuse to Dr. Caffey, – to name the districts where he worked, so that they could’ve been queried.)
In short, the Board liked Dr. Lewis.
To see what’s behind all this air of analytic competence, I took the trouble of picking at random a recent paper from his list of peer-reviewed publications.
Structurally, the paper was remarkably similar to the general Equity Audit genres. It started with a lengthy theoretical introduction reminding the readers about the DuBois’s work, refreshing us on the geographic situation of North Carolina (a Southern state), and how Brown v Board of Education was received in the South. Then, after a somewhat garbled discussion of methodology, the paper produced some statistical tables, plots and maps, deriving descriptors that had little to do with the questions they posed. Lastly it repeated the uncontroversial claims that “neighborhoods with the highest proportions of Black residents <…> align spatially with the violent crime rate and poverty (FNS), and to a lesser extent, with socioeconomic adversity.” That’s about it. In essence, the sole purpose of all this “spatial analysis,” was, it seems, to create a padding, first to the paper, then to Dr. Lewis’ resume, and finally, by establishing his bona fides as a data analysis wizard, to the credibility of his business. (I mean, it won’t work on anyone actually analyzing the data, but on the school boards? like a charm.)
Yet, while the content of the paper is unremarkable (and, as one could easily establish, essentially extracted verbatim from the doctoral thesis by one of the authors), the paper still stands out in terms of the sheer number of glaring misprints, mistyped formulas, questionable references…
My favorite blunder is a reference to a monograph on spatial analysis in epidemiology published by the Oxford University Press in 2008. The paper’s bibliography points not to the actual publication (does not mention the actual printed edition at all), but rather to vetbooks.ir, a repository of pirated books and other materials, hosted in Iran, no less. (Kids, don’t do that at home.) I am not a prude: science has no borders, and if you really need a text, what the hell, do whichever it takes. But for Pete’s sake, this is not what the bibliographies are for, to tell where you lifted your source materials.
I do not have time to do the Board’s work for them, and thus stopped my perusal of Dr. Lewis’ output right there. It seemed subpar, either as sociological, or as applied data analysis research. If anyone has some pointers indicating the opposite, I’d be happy to explore them, – but from what I saw thus far, Dr. Lewis does not have statistical expertise, but rather tries to create an aura of one. Not a good look.
On to The Equity Imperative. They put on a two man show, bouncing between the presenters. They were traveling salesmen, compared to Dr. Lewis’ visiting luminary persona. The presenters relied heavily on the elevated language of their website, and on their marketing slogan “we are not working for you, but with you.”
The Equity Imperative folks clearly botched the Q&A, primarily by being honest now and then. For example, they told that they never did an equity audit like what Dr. Caffey wanted them to do. A rookie mistake! Say you cannot talk about your work because of an NDA; gain a point instead of losing it! (Now, if you want to ask why Dr. Caffey selected the company that did not have any experience in the equity audit work, while this experience is claimed by the administration to be an important factor, ask him yourself: the administration long stopped talking to us.)
Altogether, after the Board meeting my personal bet was on the district opting for Dr. Lewis’ bland nothingness.
Boy, wasn’t I wrong. The next installment of our tragicomedy brought a huge plot overhaul.
The Equity Task Force (ETF) meeting on 2.3, was supposed to bring that body, allegedly responsible for all decisions on equity audits, up to speed.
(I’ll add the link to the video once we have it. The district is quite reticent with posting the meeting videos, and when they do, they often, – completely unintentionally, of course, – mislabel them, because why not.)
Two peculiarities about the ETF as the deciding body should be mentioned. First, it went on hiatus (between November ’21 and February ’22) right when the decisions about the equity audits were supposed to be made. Second, the body which already started staff-heavy (out of 33 original members, 24 were direct reports to the Superintendent, Dr. Ivory-Tatum, who also serves as the ETF’s “facilitator”) became even more so: out of the original 9 parent members, at least one resigned. By design, the district employees have a dominant say in the deliberations of the Task Force.
(And it shows: during the meeting I haven’t detected a single parent speaking; not even sure any parent was present at all. Why bother, indeed, if any discussion is dominated by the district personnel?)
The meeting was opened by Dr. Caffey’s recap of what happened at the Board interviews, after which the Superintendent took over and immediately made it clear, that with all the concerns about Dr. Lewis and the poor guys from The Equity Imperative, it makes sense to seriously revisit… Dr. Dubiel’s SEE LLC. Because, as Dr. Ivory-Tatum correctly asserted, we know what to expect. Oh, yes, we do…
After that, unsurprisingly, the meeting became a long litany of concerns about Dr. Lewis. The speakers complained about the lack of details regarding his past audits (duh), about him overly relying on “quantitative versus qualitative”, even about him not living in Illinois.
The district and the Board often mention a requirement (is it codified anywhere? hard to tell), that the audit cannot be run by anyone living in Champaign-Urbana, as they would be too embedded into the community, while a fresh eye is needed. Till the last meeting geographic restrictions (the equity audit pale) were invoked mostly to block those nosy university folks from doing any audit-related work. But now we see the upper bound: North Carolina is a bridge too far it seems. Some members of the ETF seconded that geographic exclusion with the observation that Dr. Lewis hails from a union-busting state. Indeed, how dares he?
As they say, e pluribus unum, but some are more unum than others…
The administrative drama we watched in real time had all the hallmarks of the Soviet Politbureau infighting. Real motivations (say, just as an example, that our Superintendent really digs Dr. Dubiel’s style and work ethics) couldn’t be expressed openly, but had to be rendered in genre-appropriate terms, such as preference for qualitative over quantitative, or affinity with the intentionality of the district work, and suchlike. Just like the gang getting rid of Khrushchev couldn’t say directly they were scared that old buffoon would trigger the nuclear war, and had to cloak everything into the word cloud of collective decision making, voluntarism and the Party line. It takes some effort to learn what means what in this version of newspeak, but once you do, the whole plot becomes worthy of a Coen brothers movie…
But we digress.
All these fireworks resulted in the following: Dr. Caffey is planning another meeting of the Task Force in early March (marking a full year of urgent intentional work by the committee that produced approximately nothing), meanwhile exploring possibilities to find out where and what kind of audits Dr. Lewis did, and whether to invite Dr. Dubiel for a second visit.
At this point I really have no idea what outcome to bet on. If I were one of the contenders, I’d probably won’t do the business with the district where rapacious observers are eagerly waiting for more fodder for their Marxist analysis. But capitalist forces often lure their subjects into improbable situations, so who knows.
We’ll keep the reports coming.