National Equity Project

The National Equity Project is an education reform organization that specializes in leadership development and changing culture and conditions in order to further equity objectives. It is a coaching and consulting organization based in Oakland, California, formerly known as the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools (BayCES) until its name change in July 2010. It is best known for its leadership in Oakland small school reform, which led to the creation of over 40 new small schools in one of the largest, most successful in terms of district Academic Performance Index (API) increases, and most community-driven school reform efforts in the country.

Early History and Small Schools Work

The National Equity Project began in 1991 as a regional office of the Coalition for Essential Schools, then based at Brown University. In 1995, it was founded as an independent 501(c)3 non-profit organization called the Bay Area Coalition for Essential Schools, or BayCES.

In 1998, under the leadership of Executive Director Steve Jubb, BayCES changed its name to the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools to emphasize its focus on addressing achievement disparities among student groups that they argued arise from racism, classism, language bias, and other forms of systemic bias. From 1995-1999, the organization coached over a dozen comprehensive high schools in the wider Bay Area to help them enact the practices of essential schools, and to put the values of equity in practice, meaning to shift practices and re-allocate resources to help students of color, low-income students and other vulnerable students improve their academic performance. They also developed an increasingly sophisticated coaching methodology in response to the challenges of facilitating significant change in urban schools.

In 1998 the Project, then BayCES, first partnered with Oakland Community Organizations (OCO) to plan a small schools initiative in Oakland. OCO activists were working with parents who were frustrated with overcrowded, dilapidated, low-performing schools, and saw small schools in the northeast, as detailed in books and articles by Deborah Meier and others, as a way to reduce overcrowding and anonymity and improve the quality of teaching and learning.

In 2000, the Project drafted a New Small Autonomous Schools policy that was passed by the Oakland School Board, authorizing the creation of a network of 10 new small schools. As BayCES, they received the first of two major grants totaling $22 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support design teams to plan and open their new small schools. Most of these funds were regranted to schools to cover release time and training for school personnel. They created a new small school incubator that vetted proposals, trained teams in small school best practices, coached teams in collaboration with each other and their communities, and in 2006 the incubator was passed to district management. In the end, over 40 new small schools were created. In 2004 Oakland was the most improved large district in the state of California in terms of district Academic Performance Index, which it has continued to be for the following six years. From 2000-8, the organization adopted a place-based strategy to focus on equity efforts in Oakland, Emeryville, and Berkeley, and stopped work in other places.

Recent Approaches and New Identity

In 2007, a new Executive Director LaShawn Route Chatmon was hired by the board after the retirement of Steve Jubb. Under LaShawn’s leadership, the organization began to focus increasingly on two levers for further improving education outcomes for vulnerable children: leadership development, and learning partnerships in instruction. In 2008-9, they developed new approaches and offered increased service to partners in these areas: Leading for Equity and Impact 2012 (Teaching for Equity). They sought and received major grants from new partner foundations to develop these areas: from the Kellogg Foundation to expand Leading for Equity programs, and from the Carnegie Corporation to develop and expand Impact 2012. The Impact 2012 has been evaluated by two external evaluators, including Stanford University's SRN center, and was found to improve teacher usage of formative assessment and improve academic performance significantly among targeted low-achieving students. The Leading for Equity program is currently being evaluated, and is informed by recent research on adaptive leadership, complexity science and systems change theory.

The organization's core insight is that people make change, and all education reform efforts need to take the development of people fully into account in order to succeed. In the National Equity Project analysis, most efforts rely on technical fixes or top-down mandates that do not develop people's capacity to carry out desired changes on behalf of vulnerable students. People's capacity has to be developed both in terms of technical proficiency (instruction, planning) and in terms of human relations, since collaboration, communication, and relationships are at the heart of any successful endeavor. In highly bureaucratic school systems, these basic truths are often forgotten.

No longer limited to the Bay Area or schools, the organization changed its name in 2010. As the National Equity Project, they have formally launched an effort to change the national conversation about achieving equity in education, and began working increasingly with community-wide initiatives to reduce disparities that result from structural racism.

References

National Equity Project web site