Dr. Alfredo J. Artiles introduces the concept of "defect craft" to explore how ideologies about disability intersect with racial disparities in education, particularly in the overrepresentation of students of color in special education. He argues that disability has a dual role: while it can offer protection, it has historically been used to marginalize and stratify certain groups, especially racial minorities. Defect craft challenges the view that these disparities are solely due to individual deficits, instead highlighting how cultural assumptions, institutional practices, and historical factors contribute to systemic inequalities. By examining how "othering" practices deny marginalized groups their full humanity, Artiles urges a more nuanced, intersectional approach that incorporates race, socio-economic status, and historical context. His research in a suburban school district shows how oversimplified explanations of racial disparities overlook the complex ways that policies, space, and resources are distributed, reinforcing cycles of disadvantage for socioeconomically deprived and racialized groups.
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Welcome
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to collab.
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Cast, Hello. I'm richka Chopra, host of collab cast our collab cast conversations are a resource from the urban collaborative supporting over 100 districts in 29 states across the country to build equitable and inclusive practices.
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We are here to listen to stories and personal experiences of people in our community, their successes, how they got there, and advice they might share with others who are facing some of the same challenges and opportunities they may have had. Each of our collab cast speakers connects us to the theme of the month that we are looking to explore with you all our urban collaborative members, these themes concern issues that you have told us you are grappling with, and want to learn more about this collab cast, we will be discussing and learning about an ideological concept called defect craft. We are here today to learn from Dr alfero artiles, who coined this term about what defect craft means, and understand how it connects with the continued disproportional identification of students of color for special education services in our school districts. As we all continue to work on disproportionality, we will learn about how our understanding of this ideological concept helps us in our efforts to create policies and practices that are supportive of all of our students and their learning. Dr Alfredo J artillez Is the Lee l Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University. He is the director of the Research Institute at Stanford's center for comparative studies in race and ethnicity. Doctor artilles received an honorary doctorate from the University of Katherine Berg in Sweden, and was honorary professor at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. His scholarship examines equity paradoxes created by educational policies. He studies how protections afforded by disability status can unwittingly stratify educational opportunities for minoritized groups, and is advancing responses to these inequities. Doctor artilles edits the book series disability, culture and equity from Teachers College press. He has been appointed to three consensus panels of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and medicine, and was a member of the White House commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanics. Dr artilles is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education. He is a fellow of the American Educational Research Association and the National Education Policy Center, and a senior research fellow at the Learning Policy Institute. He was a resident Fellow at Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the behavioral sciences. As you can see, he brings so much experience and in research, in policy and in practice to us today. Welcome Dr ateles, and thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. Ruchika, it's a pleasure and an honor to be part of this effort. You have been a long admirer of the urban Collaborative for decades, and I am grateful for the opportunity to share this work that my colleagues and I are doing. Thank you so much. And you know, we at the Urban collaborative are always trying to bring information to our members that might help them in developing their equitable, inclusive practices for our students with disabilities, and your work in the field is guiding work for many of us, so we welcome you and thank you for being here with us. Can we start this discussion today by having you explain the concept of defect craft to our listeners and ask if you can share the reasons you think we should consider this ideological concept in our practices. Thank you so much for the question. I think it's an important one that continues to evolve through the work that my colleagues and I are doing. It's something that drawing insights from a lot of the experiences we've had in districts and states around the country for the last 30 years. The point of departure in thinking about different craft is the notion of disability. If we think about this idea, disability has been with us for a long time. Is a quintessentially human experience. It's everywhere. It's something that we have to contend with and relate to.
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Through our lifetime in one way or another, every human being cannot be freed from experiencing or coming in contact with disability. So from that perspective, it is critically important that we have a good understanding of the complexities and the historical trajectory of the idea of disability. Now I conceptualize disability as having a dual nature. On the one hand, just as we see disability around us everywhere, we see communities and societies responding to it to protect individuals that are going through that or experiencing it. And so in that sense, disability becomes an object of protection, which is wonderful we need to we have, as we know, we have had a long struggle to enhance their rights and entitlements for people with disability to have access to education and to get protections in health and labor, etc. And so disability is, on the one hand, an object of protection, but at the same time, there is a long sad history that disability has been used as a tool for marginalization and stratification, and we don't necessarily stop regularly enough to think about this duality of the idea of disability. And the challenge we have given this framing is that we need to understand when disability serves that stratifying function. It is in our best interest to understand, how do we strengthen the developments to protect people with disabilities and empower them and work with them. But at the same time, we need to understand how is this negative impact of disability coming into effect, a very unique, classic example of how disability can be used to stratify these disparities in identification across certain groups that might be due to socioeconomic differences, ethnic differences, linguistic differences, and more consistently, along racial lines, at least in the United States. Even though there is evidence that this may be happening in other nations around the world, we have struggled with the idea of racial disparities in identification of disability for racialized groups, we don't have a good handle on that. And the notion of defect traffic came about as a result of our efforts to begin to bring a little more nuance to explaining the situation when we think about racial disparities. The preferred explanation that we hear from many people in the field, in education, in psychology, medicine, is that the answer is in the individual, that these individuals have particular deficits by for a number of reasons, and that is the explanation why we have so many of them categorized as having disability. What is left out in that explanation that is more of a mainstream, traditional way of thinking, is that decisions to identify disabilities are also embedded in cultural practices and are surrounded by institutional context. We bring a number of assumptions and use tools that are also embedded in a set of premises that may benefit some groups more than others. And this is not to say that disability is not a reality. It is not to say that every diagnosis is the result of bias practices. It is a reminder that in order to have a comprehensive understanding of disability, we need to account for both the psychological, emotional, biological dimension as well as what's happening in that person's life, in the institutions in which this person is living and being educated and so forth. And so that's the aspiration of the defect craft idea to be mindful of that other side of the argument that we have relegated to the background, and the defining consideration around defect craft is to examine the role of ideologies. And I built from Bonilla Silva's definition of ideology that he described as meaning in the serve of power. Ideologies are meanings in the service of power. So somehow we come up with ideas, way of making sense of things, concepts that are, for some reason, serving people who have something to gain from it, to maintain a hierarchy. So keep that in mind, that ideology is about meaning in the service of power, and so different craft calls attention to what we do every day, the practices in communities, in schools, the routines that we rely on to serve students that might be related to curriculum or pedagogical approaches or placement decisions or assessment tools that we use those practices are in turn, situated in broader dynamics that are structural, that are related to histories of inter group relations in communities and societies, and it is at that interface that we have to pay attention to. What do we learn?
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And when you open that door, how is it can we find evidence of the idea of disability being used as a means of marginalization? I like John Powell's definition of othering, because defect craft is all about relying on the mechanisms of othering. John Powell is a distinguished professor at Berkeley, lawyer with a distinction distinctive record around racial justice, and he describes othering as any practice that denies someone their full humanity and their dignity. It is based, he claims, on the assumption that either we are better than certain people or certain people are irrelevant, and at its extreme,
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it also suggests some people are dangerous.
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So othering is a very difficult thing to understand. It is ubiquitous. It's very much part of the human experience. In fact, I'm involved with the National Academy of Education now, with a committee that is trying to build a report on this idea of other and how it can be mitigated when you speak about this, it gives a really good basis for us understanding and continuing this conversation about what you mean by defect craft, as well as What are some of the other concepts that people in our districts, in our schools are considering, and these concepts around othering and and when you were talking about the context of of who our students are and where and how disability interacts with their with themselves, with their communities, and reminded of just thinking about the social model of disability and thinking about how that needs to be remembered, and how in educational practices that that doesn't always reflect us thinking about these things we we've created practices that are almost in some ways, and policies that are some ways assisting us to even further other some students and continued thinking of disability as something that needs to be corrected in the person, and you talked about that in the individual, as opposed to thinking about the constructs around them and surrounding Our students who who who are of focus as schools and school districts. You, along with some researchers, other researchers and other colleagues of yours, conducted a study on a school, a school district, on the impact that this concept of the ways of thinking about students, this concept of defect craft, was having on that particular districts practices. Can you share some of your findings? Because that might help our listeners to understand how this might show up in their practices. Sure, let me just say a couple of additional things about this idea of different craft before I jump to the study great, just because I think they are really critical to keep in mind as we try to get a basic understanding of defect craft, you mentioned the social model of disability, and you know the fact that different craft is opening a space for us to consider that model, which is true, but different craft is actually beyond the social model of disability. It is an interdisciplinary concept that draws from alternative fields of study that complement a social model of disability. One of the long standing limitations in the social model of disability has been the lack of explicit attention to issues of race and intersectional considerations of disability, until recently. Now it's happening in the community of Disability studies scholars and practitioners, but for a long time, it did not happen. And also the fact that we need to bring a connection between that notion of the social model of disability to very specific implications for practice. But that's a different conversation. I just wanted to put it in that broader interdisciplinary context. The other thing about different craft is that through the othering processes and practices that we see happening in schools and districts, what happens as a result of those practices is that deficits are attached, or deficiencies or problems to already stigmatize groups or individuals. These are typically members of stigmatized groups, like racial, minoritized groups, or so called Multilingual learners.
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And what happens is that whatever difficulties these groups are having, they are presented as inherent characteristics of these groups, and in that way, contributes to a deficit mindset to explain the disparities we're trying to understand. And so in that sense, different craft shows how we start from a set of assumptions that are ideological about groups and attach them as inherent to them. And that creates circuits of thinking that are circular, and we keep building those to move from deficit assumptions of those groups.
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Dollars into the designation in that new category. And so in that sense, when you see racial disparities in disability rates, what they claim many of these folks is that, because there is a disproportionate poverty rate among these communities, it is only logical that we have these disparities in disability. Now I'm not denying that poverty can cause disability. There is a wealth of information showing that, and it has a huge impact, but when you see the patterns in the evidence about racial disparities over generations really addressing large numbers of these students, you have to begin to wonder, is it possible that entire communities are really subjected to these kinds of conditions just because there are rates of poverty in their communities? I mean, as we know, there are substantial literatures documenting the role of resilience and protective factors in many communities, and we know a number of people that come out of those adverse circumstances and manage to find their way out of difficult situations. And so it's it's a good reminder to really see the nuance and how people learn, as Ray McDermott said, in tight circumstances, particularly because defect craft really sanctions a deficit mindset, which is something that these groups are already confronting in their educational experiences. And by bringing poverty to the explanation, what they do, unfortunately is to biologize race. We know race is not a biological construct. We know it doesn't exist at the genetic level. And yet, by making this reasoning that these are inherent traits of these students, you begin to implicitly argue that race is a biological concept, and that's a very dangerous notion, because we have a long history of Eugenics and other kinds of efforts in the past that were based on the same premise. And so I just wanted to make sure that I reminded everybody of this really critical dimensions of different craft, and the fact that it's a good way of exposing the ideology of color neutrality, the fact that we tend to ignore and erase the role of color in how we examine educational injustices and inequities, and that we have To account for that structural weight of race and other opportunity gaps that we have seen historically in our society. Now, last year, we published a study that we conducted in a suburban district. This was a very interesting experience. We went to work with a team of colleagues, and I we're going to provide the citation for this study. We have access, we had access to a lot of data from this districts. We our departure for the conceptualization of the study was that the problem with the study of racial disparities was the oversimplification of the problem. A lot of researchers were just posting binary questions, for example, do we have over representation, or is Special Education racist? We have developed a lot of research efforts in that area to answer questions that are misleading. If you ask me, instead of asking, for example, about the situated nature of this problem, that is considering how local context, including historical factors and socio cultural factors, shape those patterns. And so one of the key premises we brought to this was to examine the problem in a historical perspective. The second thing we tried to add to the design of the study was to account for the role of space. To what extent, when you look at how the experiences of
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socioeconomically deprived groups as well as racialized groups experience their inequities, you see a very clear pattern of space that the distribution of opportunities are very much specially distributed. It is important to keep that in mind that we haven't paid enough attention attention to space to understand how those marginalized groups have been experiencing inequities in terms of the selection of the site.
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We analyze the whole data for the state, and found that suburban districts had received the most citations compared to urban and rural districts in a period of time.
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And we also found that of the over 200 districts that were suburban in the state, about 43% were cited at least once, between 2004 and 2010 or 11.
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And so at that point, we said, Okay, we're going to target suburban school districts because which seems to be a problem in those contexts. Now, we also learned that the suburban districts that were cited frequently were more racially and linguistically diverse. They also had high.
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Poverty rates, and they had lower levels of achievement compared to suburban districts that were never citing. And so we were really narrowing down the escape, the possibility to change, to select the sites. And for that reason, we went for school districts that were suburban and had more than three citations in this period. We also learned that those districts citing who were cited had the highest number of students of color and suspicion rates, they were more than three times than their counterparts. And so these were really complicated, difficult contexts, and for that reason, we chose this district and the district we invited and this came down to about 30 districts. We ended up getting interest from two suburban districts to do the study. And the study I'm going to share with you is based on one district. We would report it on the other district in a separate article,
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and this was a suburban district that was significantly high achieving in the state, it had been recognized consistently over the years for the Excellence in academic performance, ironically enough, and at the same time, they had received three citations between 2004 and 2011
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in both disproportionality in special ed as Well as in discipline. It's interesting to hear about how you all came to the to the place of determining who the district, what districts, and that you were going to be able to study, and that you that you studied, because I think many of our district members will relate to some of the conversations and the things that helped you identify, even if they may not be suburban, and would be interested to understand why suburban districts came up as as an area of focus and an area of need, as opposed to urban districts, because, again, most of our members are urban member districts. So it'd be just interesting for them to understand how that happens, because I think many of them live and breathe some of the same issues that you said I then helped you identify the suburban district that that you ended up studying, right? So let me highlight a couple of themes in the findings before we move to the next question. The first one is that, as I mentioned before, we were really interested in the role of space and history in the present. That's part of our set of assumptions in examining the role of different craft, and we examine the data through that lens. And what we learned was that those two axes, space and history, played a major role in this pattern of repeated citations in a district, ironically, that had resources. Yeah, and we're doing very well, particularly for white students. And so we have to remember that different craft is always calling attention to the historical legacies of inequalities in the present. And for that reason, we have to keep that in mind now, when we talk to the staff in the district and we talked to staff at the school level, as well as central office, we noticed this discourse about the district as a family. We are a family. We all like each other. We work hard. We're doing the best for kids, which is wonderful. You want to hear that, and you want to see that in a district that is committed to excellence. Then when we started to dig a little deeper into that discourse, we realized that this discourse about being a family was somewhat differentiated, that certain groups were not necessarily included in this notion of family, particularly for African American students. Now we call this district Lake View, pseudonym. Lakeview was sitting next to city center, which is also another pseudonym for an urban district that was predominantly black district, urban district next to Lakeview. And so what happened is that over time, when we looked at the history of the Lakeview community, we saw this historical move starting in the mid 20th century, of white communities living urban settings for economic and racial reasons, just as black communities move and were displaced from the south and other regions into the North and the Midwest, we saw this white flight phenomenon. And this is what happened, actually in this district, and that's how city center became one of the most segregated districts, racially segregated districts in the country at the time of the study.
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And next to this was this lake view district. So the district, by its from its inception, was connected to historic patterns of racial segregation. And the question was, how are those tensions embedded or sedimented today? One of the ways in which we saw that was this idea of family, that there were family, and they use it in very generic ways, but then they started to.
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Distinctions that those kids who were coming from city center were not really keeping up for very specific reasons, and they somehow, by implication, were not included in this idea of being part of the family.
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So this socioeconomic, racial and demographic changes contributed to the ways in which the districts were increasingly segregated economically and racially, and that in turn produced very specific inequalities in the experiences of certain students in the district that created also a very specific culture in the district, to the point that in the past, through interviews, we learned that at least one superintendent who tried to change this and build policies and changes to the segregated nature of the district, ended up being fired because there was this really deep commitment that they wanted to maintain excellence, and the segregated will just get rid of that. The achievements that were obtaining at the time, we also found what we call special opportunity structures, that there were opportunities that were offered to certain groups that were specialized in nature. And so, for example, that superintendent that tried to change the district also tried to make sure that the idea of inclusive education will be brought forth in the policies and practices of the district, and part of that was this notion of attending your neighborhood school. And that was something that was contentious at the time, but by the time we did the study, there was an interesting twist to this idea, and we saw how this notion of attending your neighborhood school was co opted onto the guise of an inclusive approach. To say it is better if we move certain groups of students to certain schools, specifically students with special education needs, as well as English learners, because that way teachers will not have to be wasting time moving from one building to the next across the district to serve the needs of these students, and for that reason, we put all of these students in these one or two schools to address that logistical, managerial question. So it was an interesting twist in the notion of attending neighborhood school, because even though it was used in the past to engage with the idea of inclusive education, there was no concern that English learners or students with disabilities will have to travel across the district, subverting that way, this idea of attending neighborhood schools in our work around inclusive education, for years, we've been talking about neighborhood schools and thinking about communities serving their own students in different schools that are a part of that community, so that they can be built as such. But how there have been so many times that that particular concept has led to segregation of certain communities, or even just clumping together of certain of certain individuals, staff as well as students, in the name of neighborhood schools, in the name of inclusive education. So it's interesting that just listening to what you're saying reminds me of so many other districts where we see that playing out and again, in that in that same theme of we are building inclusive practices. We are building neighborhood schools, but not so much for that group of students, or that couple of students or teachers, those students need some more specialized programming. So that's why we bring them together in some schools where that where the teachers then and keeping in mind teachers needs, as opposed to where the students are coming from. So that was just interesting to me when you said that, because it, I know it plays out in many of our districts, right? And you know what happened? Let me restate that pattern so that it's clear that when there was pressure to integrate racially the district 20 years ago as a result of whatever was happening in the country at the time, you know, the remnants of Brown versus Board of Education that actually moved into the 80s and sometimes even early 90s, to integrate racially. The argument against it, because there was this inertia against integrating,
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because of the white flight that had created this district. There was no interest in integrating racially, they argue they use the inclusive school argument. They said, well, we don't have to bust kids around the district because we'd want to keep people in their own neighborhoods right for inclusive purposes, right? And then years later, we have this situation where they are now making the opposite argument. We need to concentrate certain groups, ELLs and students with disabilities, in particular schools where you have a very clear pattern of housing surrounding those were more segregated. You have the housing projects around the schools. You have more segregated kinds of practices in real estate. We have people telling us that realtors will discourage what.
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Families to move into those neighborhoods in these schools that were more diverse, and they're saying, Well, we really need to make sure that they are there. There's their place there this group clls and students with disabilities, because that's easier for teachers to stay located and placed in those states without having to move around the district. So the idea that they defended earlier to keep people in their place because of neighborhood schools was not relevant anymore, for the sake of maintaining the segregation. But so it was a fascinating thing, and now this had a number of consequences, because then resources flowed in different ways to different sites. Of course, in this particular schools, you had very different set of resources and opportunities and supports for teachers compared to schools that were that had a large white student population and so forth, and that, in turn, had implications right for for opportunities for students. Some of the staff actually claim, well, this is only a the elementary level, because once they hit middle school and high school in the district, they're all coming together anyway, so there is no such a problem.
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However, we looked at data within middle school and high school and found that there was a different way of segregating kids through other kinds of resources and practices. Again, thinking about different craft as that lead into understanding how those differences are maintained for practices, and one way of doing that was tracking that access to certain opportunities, to AP courses and other kinds of resources and labs and extracurricular activities were very much racialized. And when you looked at the enrollment patterns, racial enrollment patterns in those schools, it was clearly a pattern marginalizing black and brown kids.
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So that's what I meant by the role of space and history in understanding how different craft was at play. Does that make sense? It does. It does. And when you were looking at at this particular district, were there some other solutions that they had tried to be able to address this, or was this something that they they didn't consider as that they themselves as a district were disproportional, like, how were they thinking about themselves and their own practices? And if they had tried some solutions, you mentioned a few, why did they not work and what could they have done differently? Yeah, so your question is related to the next theme I wanted to highlight in the findings, which is how staff makes sense of this, and how did they explain? Remember this, this was cited for four times in a between 24 2004 and 2015
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we covered the data for analysis until 2011 but we looked at the data until 2015 they had been cited two more times. After we finished our analysis, we didn't include that. Yeah, so we asked exactly what you asked, okay, how do you explain this? What's happening? What is your reasoning behind this? Why do you keep getting cited? Is there anything that's happening here. And the response is, when we look at Paris of interviews and focus groups, there was a language of different craft braided in spatial dynamics that really was redefining this imagery of damaged bodies. These kids are broken. They just are not ready for this, which in turn, if you think historically, this is a discourse that has been used recurrently, especially with black communities and other marginalized groups, of course, as groups that are psychologically, emotionally, socially defective. A lot of the explanations was, well, we're cited because these kids end up in these programs because they just come from a place where they just cannot be ready for this. Now they connected in that way, geography with ability, right? They say they're coming from city center, they're coming from those housing projects and those families, and by saying that, then there was this cultural explanation to say those communities and those families have things the way they do.
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Teach language, engage with each other, work ethics and so forth that don't bring them up to speed to really keep up with this district that is celebrated for its excellence, academic excellence, we have the evidence that we're doing a good job, and they're just landing behind because they don't bring the toolkits that they need. But the idea was a geographic connection between ability level and the situation. Of these that was mostly coming from the inner city. They will say things like, we have higher standard for our students.
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We have really great attendance rate. Our attendance rate is just off the charts. We are known historically for very high expectations. And so we notice the pronouns, our expectations, our standards, our attendance rate, but then they will say things, quote, some of those people are caught off guard. That's something that a teacher said at some point, and so that there was this.
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The other in language that is very much
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emblematic of the craft of us and them. It's very much about othering certain groups that, in this case, was very much connected to historical patterns of segregation. There was this argument about an expectation mismatch, also that it was recurrently mentioned in the discussion that was a core thread in the different craft work that we documented that enable the staff to exercise what we called building from Ross white innocence, the insistence on the innocence of contemporary whites just don't have anything to do this. We're just dealing with this because that's the way it is. Because that freedom from having responsibility for the recurring citations,
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and so it is unfortunate that we what we see in the end, is how different craft pushes people and achieves engaging with race. Yeah, that race, that racial group, doesn't get it without
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acknowledging the role of racism, right? And continues that that power dynamic that you were talking about earlier continues that because we don't see it as a reason why we might be doing things that might be supporting this disparity, and we are the ones who create the system and the structures, so we don't even see how that plays into this power dynamic between the students, their communities and ourselves, exactly. And it's an interesting it's a perverse paradox to see how race is used to deny or obscure the role of racism, but that's exactly what different craft us. And behind that there was a color evasive stance that some teachers were conflicted about whether there was even in fact, segregation right in the district or in the communities, or whether segregation was simply the result of the type of self sorting mechanisms that students and families naturally engage in while they are there, because that's what they like. They will say that in the school they segregate themselves. And it's in that way you just deny the role of color, yeah, in the formation of those patterns, right? And we see that continuing in conversations of color, like you said, socio economic and just disability classifications, right? That that we almost give acknowledgement to, that is the group that's othering themselves. It's the group that's segregating themselves, as opposed to thinking about how our structures are totally supporting and leading to more of that. What could be ways that our district leaders who are listening to us today, or school personnel who might be listening to us, teachers who are working with students, can think and consider defect craft in in their work, and what could be some steps that people can take? I know that it's it's larger. This conversation, like you said, is evolving one you said in the beginning. And I know that it's a conversation that takes into so many different nuances, concepts and themes. But how, how could we start to as as district leaders, as school leaders, as teachers, think about peeling away some of this conversation when we think about the students that are in front of us, it's a very difficult question. You know, some of the other theme that we report in the findings is the efforts of the district to address right the problem, and that illuminated, in part, what you're asking me, you know, what are the learn? What do we learn from the way this district responded. And one of the major issues in this context is beyond this district is everywhere in the country, by virtue of the policy framework we have in the country, over emphasis on compliance. Compliance is approached as a procedure. And the district did a number of things. I showed ironically, that they were complying. They were doing the self study, they were doing the PD, they were doing all of these things that were required from the CC's expectations of the policy. But in the end, there were mostly symbolic gestures to address the deep rooted, special and historical nature of the problem. And so in thinking about your question, I think
Unknown Speaker 39:21
let me just highlight a few things. The first one is that this is, this is an ongoing process. This is not something that you implement and you take care of it. You inoculate people with professional development and you get rid of it. That's not the case. This is something that you have to approach thinking. We need to be on guard, non stop. We need to continue to review, which in turn, I think is in line with the best thinking we have today about school reform, that schools are always engaged in continuous improvement and are always mindful and reflective about the work they need to do in any area.
Unknown Speaker 39:54
So that's the first thing. This is long term work that is always unfinished. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 40:00
The second thing is that leadership matters, and superintendents and principals play a huge role in setting a climate and stipulating what are the non negotiables in our community, at the school level or the district. And as you do that, I'm not naive to know that just by making those grandiose statements is going to take care of it. You need to, at the same time, do the political work of having coalitions and partnerships with people in school boards and in leadership positions in the state and the region and the district to make sure that you continue to have disagreements and conversations so that people understand where to refine the ideas and so forth. It's not only about declaring things, it's about doing that coalition building and gaining support at all levels to maintain but But you, as the leader of the district or the school, have to take a stand leadership matters, and one, one sad example is the district we studied. They started with this year long training. They brought out a consultant. They had about 300 plus staff that they were going to be targeting. In the end, they said, Well, maybe just target the people that we think are going to benefit. By doing that, you're already framing the whole thing from a different craft perspective, as if it's only about fixing biased people. And you know, different craft is not about bad people doing bad things. Different craft is broader than that. It's about practices and systems and institutions. But they shifted that way and said, Let's just target 20, right? We're going to give the training to 20 people. And in the end, after making that watering down decision, they said, Okay, it's going to be optional, yeah. And so you see how the leadership piece was was really not there to really say we need to take a stand on this and make a difference. So leadership matters is the next thing is, you have to bring a historical perspective how are ability differences regarded in this district? What is the history of that in the school, about the community surrounding the school, the same biracial differences and segregation in the history of the city or community? What do we know about that? Is there anything that might have happened before that may be playing a role today, right, in the way people come to the conversations in the way we see students and families. Is there any evidence that there has been efforts in the past, as you asked me a few minutes ago, do we have evidence of sustained engagement with these communities, or we just keep ordering these folks? So history is critical in doing this space, again, plays a huge role, and you have to spend time thinking, Are there any opportunities for kids, structures of opportunity for kids that are special in terms of where they live or the access to services, or the opportunities to engage in certain things and participate in programs and so forth? Can we change that? And you know, one of the most difficult things to realize is that these pro citations are only the surface of the problem, right? You can fix the numbers, you can comply with the requirements. I mean, the policy is ambiguous. That allows you to find ways of complying. And so you have to come to this work thinking we must transcend the framing of shifting the numbers to get rid of citation status. Of course, that's critical. Of course, you have to work on that. But the conversation should not be only about this proportion. The conversation should be about how do we set up educational programs for thriving? I've been working with Lauren Katherine, among others. Who is it? As we all know, leader of the urban collaborative with a group of researchers and partners in the West Coast looking at these issues as well. They also are chronically cited, and one of the early decisions we made was, let's make this project about black student thriving, as opposed to black student disproportionality. That changes the perspective and the field of action for the solutions. So those things come to mind, which, again, I think, I think the last piece that you just I mean all of these, I made a long list of things for myself to think about when we work with districts, about about this continued improvement work that we do and that we need to be in that mindset. It does not end in two years. It doesn't end in five years. It's a continued improvement work that changes as our student body changes, as our staff body changes, as a historical context of who is in our school changes because, because communities change over the course of history, thinking about leadership, how important the role of leaders in our schools are, as well as who are those leaders? Right? Not only the superintendents, the principals, but thinking about those groups of teachers and other people in the district that create change.
Unknown Speaker 45:00
Much, be it not, maybe not in the the parent body or the board members like it. Sometimes it might be too in favor of some of the work that we're talking about, and it sometimes may not be, but bringing them in into this conversation, because leadership matters, and this whole component around partnerships and coalition building, we have to bring more people to the table, people with different experiences, different histories, different communities. Otherwise, when we're looking at space and thinking about those opportunities that you were you were sharing for our students, becomes less flexible, become less apparent, because if we are not listening to the voices of the communities that our students are coming from, we may not be crafting those opportunities in the best way possible so that they can they can use and benefit from that opportunity. This, I think, this work around defect craft that you are doing, and as you said, it's a work that evolves with districts and with the partners that you are engaged with, we look forward to learning more about how this goes and how this develops in certain districts, so that we can learn from each other as this work evolves in your work with the districts that you're working with, with other partners, right? So that we can build our own coalition to learn from each other on this. And our hope is at the Urban collaborative with Lauren being a part of this work with you, but then also, just as as a collaborative with our members, we are able to think more deeply about this so so thank you. Thank you for sharing this. Thank you for bringing this to the to the forefront here, but we before we leave, we do want to ask you, we always end our discussions with our collab cast guests about a piece of advice that you have wanted to give educators that you believe will help build our schools. You've talked so much about so many things that could help build our schools, but what is that one piece of advice that you might give to educators to think about how they might build their schools and their classrooms for our students to become learning spaces that welcome all of them? Yes, thank you. That's a great question to wrap up our conversation, and I'm going to share my ideas, not to suggest that I have the solution. By no means. I do have the answer the solutions. I only have the experiences and the desire and commitment to do this work. I think, just to stress the previous list of things I mentioned, you need to bring a very specific vision that is beyond the discourse in the education field today about gaps and about metrics that are important but are only halfway and so the vision has to be historical. Has to be grounding our analysis in history. Has to be intersectional, right? I mentioned this in passing. I want to stress it that it has to be intersectional. Is about thinking about disability as intersects with gender and language and class and race, etc. And also that foregrounds equity at the crux of the work that we do, not only in terms of outcomes. We tend to think about equity as an outcome. Do they have the same scope, but also about process. Equity is about participation and access to participation. And so in a way, you were talking about a philosophy that is really placing this idea of equity at the center. So build your commitment. Stay in touch with that commitment. Be humble to realize you can learn from others, teachers, parents, other leaders. Students, embrace families and learners beyond othering them that are different from you, embrace them and be able to realize they have a lot to teach you. And also, finally, critique the assumptions and the practices
Unknown Speaker 48:52
that different craft nurtures in systems about gaps and inequities that end up refining deficit views of these kids. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. There is so much to pull from this discussion. There's so much to I will need to repeat and listen to this discussion a couple of times to be able to really pull all the different pieces that you mentioned, as you mentioned that we will be sharing in our resources. We will be sharing some of your work. We'll be sharing some of your publications, so that people, as you delve deeper into this conversation, want to learn more about this that you're able to learn from some of the discussions and the research that already has happened in the field. We always, like you said, about the historical context, we always want to build on some things that have been learned already, as opposed to repeating some of the things that we keep repeating as we keep creating systems that keep repeating some of those mistakes. So thank you, Doctor Atlas for joining us today to share your learnings. We know that our listeners will learn from this. I know that I have we all will reflect on our practices and.
Unknown Speaker 50:00
And supports that we provide to our school communities, and consider how we might explore the concept of defect craft and how we might go about addressing it, because we all need to be able to sit in that space and be able to reflect, to think and look as to what we've been exposed to and what we are exposed to today, we look forward to hearing from all of you, our listeners, on how our conversation on defect craft connected with you, how you might consider sharing this with your own communities. Because we again want to learn about how this message gets transferred to others in your community, and the changes that you might consider once you reflect on this and your work. As always, we will have additional zoom meetings and access to connected resources on our website, urban collaborative.org that you can explore. Please reach out to us with additional topics and themes that you'd like to share with us, as well as things that you want to hear more about. And as always, we thank Keith Jones of Kripa for providing music for this collab cast and we again. Thank Dr athilles for joining us and sharing some of his work with us. Thank you so much. Thank you. I'm grateful for the opportunity you.