How? Easy. McLean County Unit 5<\/a>, a school district covering a big chunk of Bloomington-Normal, IL metro area, is just 45 minutes west from Urbana, but about a year ahead on the trajectory charted for them by the SEE LLC. After Unit 5 hired them in 2020, the company duly produced their Equity Audit (this was one of the documents we analyzed in the previous post) and developed an Equity Action Plan<\/em>, which Unit 5 proceeded to implement. Both the Equity Action Plan and the first Quarterly report on its execution are available online<\/a>.\u00b9 Below is our analysis of the documents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Plan is thankfully quite short (its creators compensated for that with busy rubrics,\u200a\u2014\u200aeach of the Five Strands of Systemic Equity\u00a9 <\/em>has sublists, with items and subitems,\u200a\u2014\u200abut one can vividly imagine a far, far longer document), yet its animating spirit is quite clear: the creators of The Plan love above all words, words, words<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The primary output The Plan plans for are texts. A lot of them: a \u201cDELT Statement<\/em>\u201d and a \u201cBOE Statement<\/em>\u201d, a \u201cdiversity messaging campaign<\/em>\u201d, a statement of \u201cmission of SEAT<\/em>\u201d, an \u201cinclusive list of organizations and municipalities<\/em>,\u201d \u201cBuilding Level Equity Plans<\/em>,\u201d \u201ctestimonials<\/em>,\u201d \u201cmessage from the district that shows support & importance<\/em>,\u201d and on and on and on, all the way down to agendas and minutes (yes, agendas and minutes, those powerful tools in reducing inequity in K-12).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Texts<\/em> are the key deliverables of The Plan, rendering it a performative<\/em> exercise. The Plan is first and foremost about flooding the zone with verbiage. Just like the Equity Audit, the constructs of The Plan sprouting off the Five Strands of Systemic Equity\u00a9are bulky yet ephemeral. Any changes they propose in procedures or processes are ceremonial (a typical objective is to \u201censure the district\u2019s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion as a critical and ongoing strategic value\u201d <\/em>), any innovations are ritual: The Plan lays them out in paragraphs upon paragraphs, bullets upon bullets, written in that peculiar dialect of its creators (\u201cintentionally embed equity-driven pedagogy in curriculum, resources, instructional approaches\u201d <\/em>or \u201cproactive practices to nurture a positive, meaningful relationship<\/em>\u201d<\/strong>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Contextualizing aside n.1. <\/strong>How did this twisted language form emerge, you might wonder? Hardly a secret: this is the language of the vast literature for educational leaders<\/em>. (Argue what you want about whether America has enough teachers or not; the shortage of educational administrators is not on the horizon. And the pipeline producing them goes through the endless lectures and seminars filled with the tortured prose of Equity Audits and Equity Plans.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some excerpts from random books for leaders concerned about their objectives. Google for yourself if you need more\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Are you puzzled by that prolegomenon to The Plan (\u201cObjective<\/em><\u2026>is the most important element of <The Plan>. Objective should begin with an active verb<\/em>\u201d)? Well, if you had an educational leadership degree you\u2019d read and hear that phrase again and again, verbatim, often accompanied with a helpful nudge to introduce \u201ceither a quantitative and\/or qualitative metric\u201d <\/em>while in the grad school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you had an educational leadership degree, you just wouldn\u2019t understand why the rest of the world feels alarmed seeing a supposedly important, impactful plan to begin with an admonition to start an objective with an active verb; to you this would be exactly the<\/em> way to write an important, impactful plan\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Plan does not stop at objectives, agendas and minutes. It goes deeper, to the core of English language, to the definitions<\/em>. The creators of The Plan take the business of definitions seriously. (The Equity Audits by SEE LLC, we notice, also do not spare space for definitions.) The Plan not only calls to \u201cdevelop and communicate district wide definitions surrounding equity, diversity and inclusion<\/em>,\u201d but also requests to \u201cdevelop and communicate a common definition of culturally responsive pedagogy and practices<\/em>\u201d and introduces (in accordance with the educational leader\u2019s canon) adjacent quantitative metric: \u201cnumber of buildings that share definitions used by each building\/dept.<\/em>\u201d If you\u2019re implementing The Plan, make sure you post those lists of equity terms in every storage shed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Contextualizing aside n.2.<\/strong> This obsession with the language shouldn\u2019t be a surprise to anyone. A Gramscian hegemony toolbox now dominates our collective subconscious; his views on the oversized importance of positional warfare <\/em>(flooding the zone with, <\/em>say, the definitions<\/em> is a perfect manifestation of that concept) are shared today by all political factions of this nation (Bannon admits to flooding the zone with bullshit; SEE LLC prudishly floods it with the definitions, to quote, \u201cBias: <\/strong>An organic information process of the human brain to identify preferences, inclination, disposition, or preferences.\u201d No kidding.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Who owns the language, owns the political landscape, goes the reasoning. This mindset explains, inter alia, the ongoing replacement of confrontations over actual policies with performative trolling. The fascination with hegemony through the language is permeating the right-wing discourse (which elevated definitions<\/em> to the rank of sacred formulas: job creators<\/em>! war on Christmas<\/em>! radical Islam<\/em>!), but obviously isn\u2019t foreign to the left-leaning opportunists either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Triumph of the hegemony notwithstanding, true Marxists (or libertarians) would dismiss this whole theoretical edifice. The significance of the superstructure\u200a\u2014\u200aschool boards, online trolls, chambers of commerce, you name it\u200a\u2014\u200ato itself is true tautologically, but its relevance to the deep social and economic changes is secondary at best. We will pay attention to how we educate our children, and who we fail to educate not when we learn all the correct predicates, but only when that failure becomes a critical bottleneck in the socio-economic landscape (pretty soon in my reckoning)\u200a\u2014\u200anot sooner than that. All the ritual dances the state legislatures perform, whether forbidding teaching critical race theory, or insisting on mastering culturally reflective pedagogy, will have near zero impact on how well the students will be able to understand the meaning of a metaphor in a novel, or a residual in a statistical analysis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Superstructure,\u200a\u2014\u200aand in our case this includes all the noisiest parties in the pseudo-fights on how to remedy the inequity of educational outcomes and how to make our schools halfway decent,\u200a\u2014\u200aare the ones least interested in the actual changes. The axes along which they position their armies are orthogonal to where the societal imperatives point. Yet this orthogonality suits the superstructure perfectly: they can exercise oversized influence doing what they learned to do,\u200a\u2014\u200afighting meaningless wars over words they try to strip of meaning\u200a\u2014\u200awith little effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At this point, if you\u2019re a CRT-panicked parent, you\u2019d probably exhale: these Plans and Audits, concoctions of ritual texts and useless glossaries are nowhere close to the radical indoctrination juggernauts one could have imagined. All performance, signifying nothing to worry about, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not quite, if you\u2019re employed by Unit 5. If you are, and think that the definitions are the matter between you, the text and the dictionary, it\u2019s time to reconsider. As the quarterly report indicates, the district is assessing \u201cstaff knowledge of and <\/em>comfort<\/em><\/strong> using the equity terms<\/em>.\u201d Make sure you don\u2019t wince reciting them. This is the second, oppressive<\/em> characteristic of The Plan,\u200a\u2014\u200anot overtly advertised, yet a distinct threat of coercion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Is that<\/em> a harbinger of liberal backlash at the dissidents of woke? That is, surely, what the feverish right would want one to think, and that is, as surely, nowhere close to reality. The reality is way more mundane. While the teachers are in the business of education, the administrations (almost all of them, and surely those of Unit 5 or District 116) are in the business of bureaucracy, the power exercised by virtue of their office. And like all bureaucrats, they would like to expand that power, gradually, step by step, a bit here and a crumble there: one more assessment to fulfill, one more training hour to check, one more rubric to report\u2026 Improving nothing in students lives, the bureaucrats increase their power, or, as their definition helpfully offers, \u201cthe capacity and ability to exercise influence among individuals, or at a structural or systemic level<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And this is the third feature of The Plan: self-serving.<\/em> The bureaucracy keeps expanding its power, and increasing its ranks. Nothing drastic: a few \u201cfamily coordinators<\/em>\u201d hired, a new director, of Diversity and Inclusion, as it happens, with their brief defined by The Plan as overseeing texts production. Here you have yet another element of administrative buildup, perfectly insulated from any measurement of success or failure. How one can evaluate the performance of an administrator, when there are no criteria on which they might fail? If you complain that word production does not improve students\u2019 algebra scores, they\u2019ll offer to speed up the rate of word production, if you complain about the lack of special education teachers, they would offer to increase the number of buildings where the lists of definitions are posted…<\/p>\n\n\n\n Performative, oppressive, self-serving,\u200a\u2014\u200ais there nothing<\/em> in The Plan that is actually useful? Of course, there is: a few reasonable if minor actions (like translating some of the school materials for families where English is not native language, or updating the school web sites) are part of The Plan. We shouldn\u2019t fault The Plan\u2019s creators though; even the most imaginative bureaucrat runs out of empty words now and then\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n What in the end we can make out of all this verbiage of the Equity Audit and The Plan? We think this is clear: the usual homeostatic reaction of a stable administrative system to potentially disruptive societal charge. As any bureaucracy would, the administration of Unit 5 tries to neutralize abrupt exogenous shocks, and, when possible, to extract some modest gains for itself in the process. Yes, a few hundred thousands of dollars will be wasted on SEE LLC in the process, along with the thousands of hours the teachers and staff of the district will have to spend on the word games. But the<\/em> system<\/em> in place will stay unperturbed. As the Audit\u2019s glossary readily suggests, The Plan is nothing but \u201cprocedures, processes, resources, and practices of the institutional structures that explicitly or implicitly, knowingly, or not, perpetuate inequities<\/em>.\u201d That what The Plan\u2019s creator ultimately want: to keep the things as they are, as long as they can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Truth be told, McLean County School Unit 5 is more or less okay as it is. The education children get there is not great compared to Singapore or Finland, but it is not bad at all compared to the rest of the state. Yes, the racial and socio-economic educational gaps are dramatic, but underserved groups are faring better in Unit 5 than in most of the school districts in Illinois.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, I guess, they believe they can afford to just fake<\/em> it, however amoral this is. If the equity process is reduced to a ritual dance, then nothing will change, the district won\u2019t deteriorate, the administration will grow a bit, jittery middle-class parents will calm down, and those minority kids\u2026 Well, didn\u2019t we send them a \u201cmessage showing support and importance<\/em>\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The problem is, we, in Urbana, just cannot<\/em> afford faking it like Unit 5. I will report detailed stats in a later post, but District 116 educates its underserved populations (and the rest of the kids) way worse, by any meaningful metric, than Unit 5, or even than our sister school district in Champaign. And we spend, per student, way more, too. The district is falling behind even comparing to the not too stellar districts nearby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Replicating what Unit 5 did with their Equity Audit and The Plan\u200a\u2014\u200amodestly expanding their bureaucracy; adding a bit more of administrative burden to its teachers, while not changing anything of essence,\u200a\u2014\u200awould not merely be a continuation of mediocre policies; it would accelerate the catastrophic slide we are witnessing here. The deterioration is felt by all of us, but its impact on the poorest and weakest is the most dramatic, and will have far more disastrous consequences on the underserved students\u2019 lives. Replicating the mockery of equity work Unit 5 did with their Equity Audit\/The Plan would be a cruel corruption of our desire for a better future for our children, better future for our town, state, country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We need a better plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [1] To be legally above board, let\u2019s start with acknowledging that the McLean Country Unit 5 <\/em>Equity Action Plan follows the Systemic Educational Equity\u2019s proprietary, copyrighted \u2018Five Strands of Systemic Equity\u00a9\u2019. Don\u2019t @ us!<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The initiative by Urbana School District 116 to retain a questionable company, Systemic Educational Equity LLC (further, SEE LLC) which we described in the previous post stalled, for now. (TL;DR: the company sells lazy copy-paste concoctions called Equity Audits, to school districts eager to put Paid in the rubric scoring their efforts on overcoming educational […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[20,28,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-equity-audit","category-mclean-country-unit-5","category-school-wars"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sabbe.org\/ymb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sabbe.org\/ymb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sabbe.org\/ymb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sabbe.org\/ymb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sabbe.org\/ymb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=867"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sabbe.org\/ymb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":992,"href":"https:\/\/sabbe.org\/ymb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867\/revisions\/992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sabbe.org\/ymb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sabbe.org\/ymb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sabbe.org\/ymb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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