District Leader

Education Week reported the following: Although the data available online are on individual schools and districts and are not aggregated by state, the department’s own crunching of the numbers offered a glimpse of the extent of some educational inequities at the national level. Among the findings: “At schools where the majority of students were African-American, teachers were twice as likely to have only one or two years of experience compared with schools within the same district that had a majority-white student body.”

Although the Center on Great Teachers and Leaders does not necessarily endorse the point of view expressed in this presentation (by The Education Trust) and the conclusions drawn from the data, it is a good example of advocacy for equity work using data. 

Annually, teachers in Chicago are presented with the Golden Apple teaching awards during a black-tie event. The Golden Apple organization and the Chicago media team up to air the ceremony for the community. Although the content does not reflect purely issues of inequitable access, it provides an example of strategic ways to engage with the media to share education successes. 

In 2010, Charlotte-Mecklenburg (in North Carolina) prioritized the equitable access to effective teachers in the school district as a key objective in its overall goal of providing effective educators for all students. Specifically, the school district called for high-need schools to have teachers and administrators with the same experience and degrees for teachers in schools recognized as Schools of Excellence and Distinction.

The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) and the Office of Educator Equity and Talent (OET), in partnership with the New Teacher Center, piloted a three-year program called TELL (Teaching, Empowering, Leading, and Learning) to provide educators in Ohio with data, tools, and support to facilitate school improvement planning and address issues of inequitable access. As a part of the initiative, Ohio is doing the following:

This brief examines 10 districts across seven states and describes student access to the highest performing teachers. The researchers found that low-income students had unequal access to each district’s highest performing teachers at the middle school level. These results were not consistent at the elementary level.