Ensuring Equity for ALL Students with Strategic Systems

Equity. It’s the core of our belief system at Yearling Middle School. We live by the idea that ALL Yearling students deserve access to the learning that will set them ALL on the path toward success in college and/or career and in life.

 

Every single student who attends our Title 1, highly diverse school matters and we consider it our moral and ethical obligation to serve every one of our students. It’s one thing to talk about equity being important in schools. But it’s another thing to take action and build systems that result in academic, social, and cultural equity for all. And all must really mean ALL.

I’m excited to share two “next steps” for us at Yearling in our commitment to equity. Two steps that were designed on data and evidence-based practices by our Yearling Middle School leadership team. 

 

Step 1 – This new system involves a deep commitment to developing cultural competency on our campus. We already laid the groundwork for a cultural competency committee to drive this work last winter and are now ready to take this work deeper. We are currently forming a cultural competency committee for 2020-2021 that will involve students, staff, and parents. This committee’s task will involve analyzing Yearling data and research to define cultural competency at our school, to generate an evidence- based plan to educate all YMS staff and students on cultural competency, to train all of our students and teachers on cultural competency, and to monitor the implementation and effectiveness of our cultural competency system. All means ALL socially and culturally as we work to build a culturally responsive and equitable learning environment in which all feel welcome, understood, and appreciated.

 

Step 2 – We have committed to untracking and eliminating the labeling and therefore limiting of our students. Based on research from the National Institute for School Leadership, the National Center on Education and the Economy, and AVID, our Yearling leadership team has committed to a three-year plan to systemically and nearly entirely “untrack” our school. We know from many years of research that when we track students, we can systematically limit their future, particularly our minority and low expectancy students. We want ALL students to leave our school with an equitable opportunity for long-term success. 

 

This process will be strategic and gradual. We decided to untrack one grade at a time so that our leadership team can provide the coaching and support needed to help our staff to master the system required to succeed in guiding heterogeneous classrooms. So, in 2020-2021, our sixth grade classrooms, with the exception of our gifted program and a couple other exceptions, will include balanced class rosters composed of students of varying races, ethnicities, genders, and historical achievement levels. To support this effort, our sixth grade teachers will work to perfect our learning scale system that we already have in place to guide every unit of study. Within our learning scales for every unit, all students will be challenged to produce work that reflects mastery on every level of the unit scale, moving from the lowest levels to the deepest levels of analysis and application. We will have a focus on project-based learning as the catalyst to push all students to application of knowledge. This model of scaled mastery in every unit provides the opportunity to differentiate our instruction based on students’ needs, to close learning gaps, to offer equitable access to the deepest levels of learning, for students to grow from collaborative learning with all students, while also offering the enrichment needed to push students who reach mastery sooner than others. All means ALL academically as we work to raise expectations and opportunities for ALL students.

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Our growth continues to evolve at Yearling Middle School, and these next steps will help us to develop and strengthen systems that will support our commitment to ALL of our students. Equity matters at Yearling Middle School and in the world.