Equity and Culturally-Responsive Teaching: Opening our Minds to Close the Achievement

Raquel Nolasco • Cahn Fellow 2020

Despite best practices, educational philosophies, and a commitment to student-centered approaches, the achievement gap is ever-widening. At Hillside Arts and Letters Academy (HALA) our mantra is, “We do this job for our young people.” So why were we experiencing such disproportionality among one of our most vulnerable populations? The answer was revelatory. At the core, we found that there is no educational strategy–differentiation and scaffolding included–that can yield success without an equitable, culturally-responsive teaching (CRT) lens. Through honest self-reflection and group accountability, HALA’s Equity Team identified several urgent needs and developed strategies to interrupt the root causes of disproportionality at our school. We will discuss how to evaluate school-wide needs by building an Equity Team and analyzing root causes. We will explain how the data revealed uncomfortable truths that forced us to acknowledge and contend with implicit and explicit biases, thereby resulting in modifying teacher lessons, creating new project-based learning assignments, and evaluating curriculum to meet the needs of our vulnerable populations. Using data, we will demonstrate how addressing disproportionality through a CRT lens raises student engagement and achievement, and works to close the gap of disproportionality.