Product Description
When the numbers don’t lie, this is your guide to doing what’s right
According to federal data, African American students are more than three times as likely as their white peers to be suspended or expelled. As a school leader, what do you do when your heart is in the right place, but your data show otherwise?
In Solving Disproportionality and Achieving Equity, Edward Fergus takes us on a journey into disproportionality by engaging our hearts and minds on the presence of biases that create barriers to the success of students of color. If your school is faced with a disproportionate rate of suspensions, gifted program enrollment, or special education referrals for students of color, this book shows how you can uncover the root causes and rally your staff to face the challenge head on. You will:
- Understand through compelling vignettes and case studies how bias affects policies and practices even in good schools
- Know what questions to ask and what data to analyze to get to the root cause
- Create your own road map for becoming an equity-driven school, with staff activities, data collection forms, checklists, and progress monitoring tools
If you are interested in developing a deep understanding of the policy, practice, and beliefs necessary for schools to address disproportionality and achieve equity, this book delivers all that and more.
Key Features
- Responds to an urgent need to eliminate disproportionality in expulsions, suspensions, and referrals to special education that ultimately contribute to dropout, cycles of intergenerational poverty, and the playground to prison pipeline.
- Informed by data (teacher surveys, disproportionality outcome data, satisfaction surveys, and state level data files) collected by the author for more than a decade as principal investigator and director of the statewide Technical Assistance Center on Disproportionality (TACD) in New York and principal writer of the state disproportionality plans for California Department of Education and Texas Education Agency.
- Includes powerful vignettes based on the author's practice intended to move readers' hearts and minds.
- Contains a number of valuable checklists, data collection forms, and checklists that contribute to effective school- and district-wide implementation.
