Equity Pulse Check
The purpose of the Equity Pulse Check is to engage all stakeholders, as equal partners, in conducting a critical review of their school’s performance based on a few of the Great Schools Partnership’s Indicators of Educational Equity. The Equity Pulse Check is designed for all stakeholders to work collaboratively to identify strengths, challenges, and priorities in the school community and to work together to create long-lasting innovative solutions that produce equitable outcomes for all students.
It should take approximately 1-1.5 hours to check your equity pulse.
- Convene a group of 8-10 members of your school community (students, families, community partners, teachers, support staff, or administration).
- Review your norms before starting this process.
- Using the strands provided below (staff and staffing; school community; professional development), read and then individually assess the school community based on your personal experience and knowledge. As you read each indicator, assign a color to each statement:
- Green: We consistently do this.
- Yellow: We sometimes do this or we try to do this.
- Red: We seldom do this.
- After completing individual assessments, team members should discuss their responses, provide evidence (who, how, where, when), and agree on a final team color for each indicator.
- Review the final results of the color-coded strands. Then identify strengths, challenges, and growth opportunities.
- As a team, prioritize the challenges you plan on redressing first.
- Reconvene a team to review strengths, opportunities, and priorities.
- Share results with students, families, and teachers.
- Develop an action plan.
In many of the indicators below, you will see the word ‘educator’. By educator, we mean all staff who work in a school, in any role. This includes front office staff, bus drivers, and other staff who may sometimes be seen as educational support staff.
Please note: The charts below are not interactive; when taking your equity pulse, you may find it useful to print this page or the downloadable PDF.
| STAFF AND STAFFING | Consistent | Sometimes | Seldom |
|---|---|---|---|
| All educators believe that all families care about their children’s education. | |||
| There is a commitment among all educators to explore and discuss their own identities and the ways their identities have been impacted by privilege and bias. | |||
| Educators regularly review discipline, attendance, achievement, and other data to ensure that bias is not negatively impacting students. | |||
| All educators use asset-based approaches: using students strengths, interests, aspirations, and goals, helping students see their own academic and personal strengths and build on them. | |||
| All educators use asset-based approaches to teaching and discipline, helping students see their own academic and personal strengths and build on them. | |||
| School leaders seek out the perspectives, experiences, and voices of every demographic group about how the schools can best support all students (including the development of policy and curriculum). |
| School community | Consistent | Sometimes | Seldom |
|---|---|---|---|
| School and community groups build strategic partnerships to offer after-school opportunities, summer programming, internships and service learning opportunities, early intervention services, and job assistance programs. | |||
| Members of the school community recognize and interrupt implicit and explicit prejudicial and harmful language and actions when these interactions happen in the classroom, school hallway, lunchroom, library, gym, teachers’ room, front office, or any other space. | |||
| School community members are able to identify racial microaggressions or bullying of individuals and groups who have been historically kept from fully participating in schools due to their race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, income level, religion, language, disability, or other facets of their identity. | |||
| Educators work to repair relationships and rebuild trust if they find that students have been impacted by bias. | |||
| The school has processes and support systems that enable teachers to identify when a student is struggling and provides that needed support; families and students are aware of these structures. | |||
| The district has regular (e.g., monthly, bi-annual, annual, etc.) traditions around community forums, dialogues, surveys, and other ways of gathering community voices. |
| Professional Development (PD) | Consistent | Sometimes | Seldom |
|---|---|---|---|
| There is a commitment among all educators to explore and discuss their own identities and the ways their identities have been impacted by privilege and bias. | |||
| Support is provided to all educators in order to design safe and supportive classrooms by forging relationships and by listening to students and families. | |||
| The school provides time and resources for all educators to have conversations about implicit bias, identity, and privilege during planned professional development time. | |||
| Teachers engage in ongoing professional development and collaborative work to ensure that their curriculum is free of bias and that it helps all students recognize, identify, and confront the history of systemic racism; teachers are able to discuss these subjects with students. | |||
| The district provides ongoing anti-racism training for all educators. | |||
| The district partners with community organizations to provide opportunities for community- wide anti-racism and anti-bias discussions. |
The questions below can help guide a conversation about next steps:
- What are your growth challenges?
- What are your overall strengths?
- What are your priorities?
This resource was produced by the Great Schools Partnership and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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