Before You Choose the Strategy, Develop the Strategist
Last month, we asked a deceptively difficult question: What can we take off our district’s “Christmas tree”?
If schools and districts want to avoid piling initiative after initiative onto educators, then another question quickly follows: How do we decide what stays?
It would be convenient if there were one perfect program, curriculum, intervention, or strategy that could eliminate systemic inequities. Where Equity Lives pushes us toward a more challenging answer. Before we can make better decisions about the strategies we use, we have to develop the expertise of the people making those decisions.
The Thing of the Thing
At the root of systemic inequity traps are not simply ineffective programs or poorly designed structures. There are also beliefs: beliefs about what historically lower-achieving students are capable of, expectations about how quickly they can learn, and assumptions about who is ready for rigorous opportunities and who needs something different first.
Internal beliefs do not remain abstract. They influence decisions about curriculum, intervention, placement, expectations, staffing, and support. Over time, those decisions become structures, and those structures become students’ everyday experiences of school.
That’s why changing the initiative without developing the people responsible for designing and leading the system can leave the underlying inequity untouched.
Chapter 4 describes the antidote as developing a critical mass of decision-makers across the school system with expert-level equity leadership knowledge and expertise. In other words, the “thing of the thing” isn’t finding the next initiative. It’s developing the adults who will decide what students need in the first place.
Teach. Lead. Counsel.
At Orenda, we often talk about this through TLC: Teach. Lead. Counsel. The work doesn’t belong to one person, one department, or one program. The adults teaching students, leading systems, and counseling young people all make decisions that shape the path students experience.
Those decisions can create a straight line toward X, or they can create detours. Developing equity leadership expertise gives adults across the system a shared foundation for recognizing the difference. It allows us to examine whether a decision moves students toward the outcomes we’ve promised them, whether it increases access to premium learning or creates another prerequisite, and whether we’re responding to evidence about what students need or to assumptions about what we believe they can handle.
This is also what allows a school system to become more coherent. Instead of asking different people to carry disconnected solutions, we develop a shared way of thinking about the decisions in front of us.
Expertise Creates Focus
This is where the Christmas Tree Effect becomes more than a conversation about initiative overload. Simply telling a system to “do fewer things” isn’t enough. We have to know which things matter most.
If X marks the spot, leaders need the knowledge and expertise to work backward from that destination and make wise decisions about the systems required to get every student there. From there, we can strategically select very few high-leverage efforts, implement them with quality, develop the adults responsible for carrying them out, and—perhaps most importantly—stay the course.
Systemic inequities aren’t dismantled by constantly starting over. They’re dismantled when knowledgeable leaders create coherent systems, hold high expectations for historically lower-achieving students, and remain focused long enough for those systems to change what students experience.
Before We Ask, “What Should We Add?”
As the school year gains momentum, there will inevitably be problems to solve. Our instinct may be to search for the next program, intervention, or strategy. Chapter 4 asks us to consider whether the more important investment comes before any of those decisions.
Do we need another initiative—or do we need deeper expertise around the work we’ve already chosen?
The goal isn’t to build the fanciest Christmas tree; it is to build a system where the adults making decisions have the knowledge, clarity, and shared commitment to recognize the most direct path to X—and the discipline to stay on it.