Advancing Equity Through Instructional Leadership Teams: A Theoretical Model

Abstract

While instructional inequity persists throughout U.S. schools, urban schools serving students with a wide array of out-of-school factors that affect their schooling are especially challenged to ensure that Black and Brown students receive what they need to learn as consistently as white students do. Critical race theory helps explain why this inequity exists but does not explain how educators can address it. Drawing upon this theory and our experience with school-based Instructional Leadership Teams (ILTs), we use literature on transformational change, distributed leadership, and organizational learning to propose conditions under which ILTs can be engines for instructional equity.