Theme

Educational equity

Fair is not the same as equal: what each student actually needs, where that idea came from, and who has to count it.

Journal entries

Oct 17, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Research proposal draft

First draft: the research proposal, on paper

My first full draft of the research proposal is written: a counterstorytelling analysis of neurodivergent BIPOC students' academic and belonging experiences in a private Midwest school, pairing narrative inquiry with MAP growth data. It is a draft and will go through revisions — but it exists.

Oct 7, 2026 · Reading · Research direction

The Dreamkeepers, and the teachers I want to learn from

I love Gloria Ladson-Billings, and the Dreamkeepers chapter of her culturally relevant teaching work most of all. She found the teachers who actually succeeded with African American children and studied what they did. That is the standard I want my research measured against — and the reason narrative inquiry is the right method for it.

Oct 6, 2026 · Educational equity · Career reflection

Fair is not the same as equitable

My whole career has been about growing in my understanding of fairness versus equity. Fair treatment is not necessarily equitable treatment — students need scaffolds that help them reach their best potential — and I want to understand what that requires in the elite school where I teach.

Open questions

live

What would a blueprint of belonging actually require a predominantly white private school to build — and how would the school know the building worked?

live

What does educational equity mean in a school that no law requires to count anything?

live

If ESSA doesn't bind my school, what does — and is that enough?

live

Does admitting students on financial aid make a school equitable, or only accessible?

live

What would have to change for a BIPOC student, family, or colleague to say "I am this school" rather than "I go to this school"?

live

Can a student feel they belong the moment they arrive, or does belonging always have to be earned?

live

What would my school have to be willing to publish about itself before I could call its equity work real?

live

When equity work is voluntary, does it survive the person who started it?

Research ideas

developing

A blueprint of belonging for predominantly white private schools

The constructive goal of the dissertation: a study-derived, buildable plan for how a predominantly white private school welcomes, supports, scaffolds, and retains its BIPOC and marginalized populations — including neurodivergent students and students marginalized for gender identity or any other way they are placed outside the bubble of normalcy.

emerging

An equity inventory for an independent school: what would we have to count?

A proposal to build something like ESSA's disaggregated reporting for a school that is not required to produce any — starting with the four levers Barth names (funding, curriculum, teachers, discipline) and adding the discretionary ones my own study is about: extensions, retakes, referrals, and who is offered a scaffold.

exploring

Culturally relevant teaching as a community practice, not a classroom technique

Ladson-Billings's Dreamkeepers teachers saw themselves as members of the community they taught in, and teaching as giving back to it. I want to think about what it would mean to incorporate culturally relevant teaching into the community around my school — and to use narrative inquiry, the method her book is built from, to do it.

Reading & influences

Article · AERA Annual Meeting paper · 2026

Blueprints for Belonging: Black Students' Aspirations and the Architecture of College Futures

The closest prior use to my own setting: an AERA 2026 paper using an Afrofuturist lens and Spencer's PVEST framework to examine how Black high school students conceptualize college as mobility and possibility, centering youth voice and lived experience in a vision of college readiness grounded in affirmation, cultural identity, and resilience. It shares my population and my conviction that students' own accounts are evidence. Where it looks forward to college futures, my blueprint looks at the building the students are standing in now — who the school was drawn for, and how to redraw it. Author details still to be confirmed from the AERA program before citation.

Article · Patte Barth · Center for Public Education

Educational Equity: What Does It Mean? How Do We Know When We Reach It?

The cleanest working definition I have found: equality is students treated the same with access to similar resources, equity is each student receiving what they need to graduate prepared for life after high school. The brief also names the four levers research connects most strongly to student outcomes — funding, curriculum, teachers, and discipline policies — and the last one is exactly where my dissertation lives. It is written for public school boards, which is why I have to translate it for an independent school where none of those levers is counted in public.

Website · U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights

The Impact of Civil Rights Laws

The federal government's own account of what the civil rights laws did in schools: enforcement removed barriers that had legally shut doors, and the Office for Civil Rights exists to keep those doors open. I am reading it for the distinction it forces on me — the language is almost entirely about access, and access is the floor of equity, not the finish. A page dated August 2025 is also a reminder that enforcement priorities shift with administrations, so a school that treats federal pressure as its only reason to look will stop looking the moment the pressure lifts.

Website · U.S. Department of Education

Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)

ESSA is where equity becomes a reporting obligation: results are broken out by subgroup, so a claim that everyone is treated fairly turns into a number anyone can look up. That is the discipline I want for my own building. The catch is jurisdiction — the testing-and-reporting machinery attaches to public schools and the agencies that fund them, and most independent schools sit outside it. In my school nobody is required to count anything, which means equity work has to be chosen rather than compelled. That is a harder and more interesting question than compliance.