2022 Wallace Foundation Distinguished Lecture Education Reform,Past and Present: Asking Equity Questions and Looking for Hope

Abstract

Drawing on a set of studies conducted over 3 decades, this article provides a reflection on what has been learned by centering equity questions in research on educational reform. These studies reveal the need to explore educators’ belief systems, emotions, and agency in relation to reform. They also underscore the co-constructed nature of reform and the importance of attending to context and scale. Although prior research reveals the complex challenges educators, policymakers, and communities face in promoting educational change with social justice aims, it also provides lessons for a hopeful path forward. Pursuing an equity agenda in this pivotal moment requires deep thinking about how we conduct research on educational reform, prepare the next generation of scholars, and work across disciplinary and national boundaries.

“Education researcher” is not usually on the list of occupations that young people mention when asked about their career goals. Almost no one grows up knowing what education research is or wanting to be an education researcher. More often, it is a profession that people arrive at in an effort to address abiding concerns in the field of education, with hopes that their research can make a difference. My own journey was no exception. Deeply troubled by the ways in which schools reproduce societal inequalities along racial and socio-economic lines, I set out on a path to conduct research on educational reform efforts that were aimed at achieving equity. It has now been almost 30 years since I began asking: What are the equity questions here?

I am struck by both how little and how much has changed in this period. On the one hand, I am despondent that equity-based reforms that seemed so sensible years ago have yet to be implemented on a broad scale. On the other hand, I see signs of hope with the growing recognition among researchers, policymakers, and educators that equity must be a central focus of the work we do. It is becoming increasingly clear that educational systems need to be reimagined to serve all students well, particularly those who have been marginalized due to their race, culture, language, socioeconomic status, gender, and/or sexual identity. This transformational work will take time, and the students and educators in our schools today cannot wait. We must simultaneously find ways to improve their experiences today while redesigning systems for the future. In this article, which is based on the Wallace Foundation Distinguished Lecture I delivered at the 2022 AERA Annual Meeting, I reflect on what I have learned by asking equity questions in research I have engaged in on educational reform and consider what a path forward might look like for our field.

Take a moment to reflect on the wise words of author bell hooks (2003): “When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus on resolution, we take away hope. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominant culture” (hooks, 2003, p. xiv). We must ask critical questions, but as bell hooks says, if we only provide critiques, we take away hope and empowerment. She stated: “Hopefulness empowers us to continue our work for justice even as the forces of injustice may gain greater power for a time. . . . Education is always a vocation rooted in hopefulness” (p. xiv).

I began my journey into education research in the late 1980s as an undergraduate in Hugh (Bud) Mehan’s sociology of education course at the University of California San Diego. Having studied life inside classrooms to uncover the constitutive actions that led to inequalities (Mehan, 1979, 1992), Mehan enlightened me to the importance of looking closely at the lived experiences of students and educators. I was incredibly fortunate that he introduced me to the field and invited me to join him, Lea Hubbard, and others on a study of AVID, a now well-known college preparatory program aimed at untracking students who showed academic promise but were underrepresented in college preparatory classes and in universities. We studied the impact of untracking on the college pathways of these students (Mehan et al., 1992). Students were placed in rigorous courses and enrolled in an AVID elective, which helped to support their success. AVID stands for Achievement Via Individual Determination, but students did not succeed on their motivation alone; they also benefited from the web of school supports provided by their AVID teacher, tutors, and peers in navigating the pathway to college, and they enrolled at much higher rates than their non-AVID peers (Mehan et al., 1996). Ours was the first major study of AVID before it grew from its roots in one teacher’s classroom in San Diego to a nationwide program (Mehan et al., 1992). The program has been life changing for thousands of students and promoted a college-going culture in many schools, and thus, there are important equity gains. What would it take for all students, not just those in a special program, to have opportunities? This would require people to grapple with their deep-seated beliefs and examine how schools structure opportunity, often by race and class (Hubbard & Mehan, 1999). Yet these beliefs can sometimes go unaddressed.

In graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles, I was fortunate to join a nationwide study of racially mixed detracking secondary schools led by Jeannie Oakes and Amy Stuart Wells (Oakes et al., 1997; Oakes & Wells, 1998). This study helped to provide some answers that the earlier study did not, namely, what dynamics would unfold as educators attempted to implement school-wide reforms that confronted people’s ideologies about race, class, and ability and disrupted patterns of within-school segregation. At the time the study was launched, in 1992, there were some schools across the United States that were experimenting with detracking, often inspired by research by Jeannie Oakes, who had carefully documented the negative effects of tracking, particularly for students who were relegated to low-track classes with watered-down curricula, less prepared teachers, and low expectations (Oakes, 1985). Groups of reform-minded educators around the country sought to address those conditions, sometimes also inspired by student activism regarding racial justice (Oakes et al., 1997). The project involved 10 schools that we studied longitudinally to capture the change process as it unfolded in real time.

Schools shifted structures to allow more open access to rigorous coursework, provided academic support for students, and experimented with new scheduling arrangements. Challenges arose, however, because not all teachers felt they had the tools to teach heterogeneously grouped classes, and some also felt that not all students had the “raw material” to be successful in honors and advanced placement courses (Oakes et al., 1997). An equity question that I sought to address involved teachers. I was interested in understanding teacher agency in detracking schools because it was clear that there were teachers who were strong advocates for equity as well as others who demonstrated active and more passive forms of teacher resistance to detracking (Datnow, 1997). Some White, affluent parents of students in high-track classes also opposed detracking because they felt their children stood to lose (Oakes et al., 1997). In some instances, resistant teachers and parents found political allies on school boards. At the end of 3 years, although all schools made strides, they were substantially less far along in detracking than I had expected. More significantly, 3 decades later, there are relatively few detracked secondary schools in the United States, and the majority continue to track students by perceived ability in spite of a robust research base showing the negative effects of tracking (e.g., Oakes, 2005). This fact is one of the most sobering I have faced in my career, and it says a lot about the gap between research and practice and the formidable barriers to equity-driven reforms. Namely, people who hold the power are often unwilling to detrack schools because it would disrupt existing status hierarchies. Courageous leaders who wage this fight often face opposition. As we consider how to move forward, we cannot focus only on dynamics existing in high schools or the communities they serve, however, without looking at the larger educational system in which they are embedded. Policies, practices, and decisions in the realms of elementary and middle school education—and higher education—shape what is possible in high school reform.

An important element that emerged from the detracking study was a consideration of what it would mean to scale equity-based reforms. Although the study produced examples of how schools undertook detracking in their contexts, it was not intended to be a recipe book (Oakes & Wells, 1998). Instead, it emphasized focusing on the principles of detracking, namely, the need to attend to the technical, normative, and political elements of change, rather than focusing on simply replicating the structures that other schools had implemented.

These lessons about how reforms might travel proved useful in examining another type of reform in U.S. education, namely, the comprehensive school reform (CSR) models that became popular in the late 1990s and into the 2000s (Desimone, 2002; Peurach, 2011; Rowan & Miller, 2007; Stringfield et al., 2012). This was a time in American education in which schools had relative autonomy in decision-making about how to organize the core of teaching and learning and often less support from districts in this arena. Yet they were held accountable for results on standardized measures. The CSR models aimed to be whole-school reforms, and they were created by external reform designers based primarily in nonprofit organizations and universities. Along with Sam Stringfield and other colleagues, I had the opportunity to do a deep dive into understanding the implementation and effects of these reforms, examining what they meant for daily life in schools (Datnow et al., 2003). Again, I asked: What are the equity questions here? When examined with an equity lens, some interesting nuances regarding CSR as an educational change approach were revealed. The models varied in terms of their theories of action, with some aimed first at changing educators’ beliefs, with the assumption that this would lead to a change in practices, and others operating on the reverse.

The models defined the problems of U.S. schooling and the routes to achieving equity in very different ways (Stringfield et al., 2012). For example, Success for All aimed to achieve equity through a structured reading program to promote early literacy (Slavin et al., 1996). The Comer School Development program was motivated by a concern about students’ unmet socioemotional needs and advocated for designing whole-child focused schools (Comer et al., 1996). The Coalition of Essential Schools was very explicit in its commitment to democracy and included equity as a core principle (Sizer, 1986). The models also varied in the extent to which they provided organizing principles around which schools could design their own plans for change, as opposed to providing fully fleshed-out models. Regardless, there was wide variation in implementation due to a combination of factors, including how the reforms were initiated in schools, which was sometimes a political process (Datnow, 2000), the level of teacher and leader support, and the nature of professional development provided (Cohen et al., 2013). The patterns of implementation also had consequences for student achievement, which we were able to document through longitudinal mixed-methods studies (e.g., Datnow et al., 2003).

Some of the most challenging elements that reform designers faced were related to context and scale (Coburn, 2003), and there were important equity questions to address here as well. Reform models that proved successful in one location sometimes did not adapt well in another serving very different student populations, communities, and so forth. This led educators to make local adaptations to fit their students’ needs and their own. The co-constructed nature of reform became a hallmark of implementation, as people at different levels of the system, which included educational leaders, teachers, students, parents, and reform designers, jointly negotiated what the reform came to be in each setting (Datnow et al., 2002).

An examination of the data use movement in education, (which I prefer to call “data-informed decision-making” rather than “data-driven decision-making” because data do not drive; Dowd, 2005) provides another lens into how equity, educational reform, and scale intersect. Whereas the CSR models were externally developed, data use efforts are often locally developed. Arising with the focus on accountability ushered in by No Child Left Behind in the United States and other initiatives across the globe, data-informed decision-making has become increasingly popular over the past 2 decades (Mandinach & Honey, 2008; Marsh et al., 2006; Schildkamp et al., 2014). Colleagues and I had the opportunity to study data use in many different elementary and secondary school settings (Datnow et al., 2012; Datnow & Park, 2014; Lockton et al., 2019; Wohlstetter et al., 2008). As we engaged in this work, we noticed that few people were asking equity questions about data use. As Vicki Park and I took a close look at this issue, we found a variety of ways in which data use practices either open or close doors for students (Datnow & Park, 2018). For example, when schools focus largely on accountability and compliance rather than on equity and continuous improvement as their underlying goals of data use, they tend to close doors for students by narrowing the curriculum and focusing on test preparation activities. When educators focus their data use efforts on a small number of students on the cusp of proficiency markers rather than focusing on improving learning for all students, doors are closed rather than opened. Doors are closed when data are used to confirm rather than challenge assumptions about students and their families. These are not dichotomous practices or decisions, however, because there is great complexity and nuance in how data are used in schools. Ultimately, schools must be supported in data use that expands students’ opportunity to learn and that illuminates—and eliminates—systemic barriers.

Because the primary setting for data use activities in schools is the teacher team meeting, our studies provided a window into these collaborative spaces, involving hundreds of hours of observations (Datnow & Park, 2019). We paid close attention to teacher dialogue. As we reflected on the data we were gathering, it was important to again ask: What are the equity questions here? On the positive side, using data to inform decision-making encouraged some teachers to support claims with evidence and to examine student growth in more nuanced ways, and the use of data helped them personalize instruction. In this process, some teachers also relied on a wide range of data and sought to address students’ needs holistically. In other words, we observed data-informed decision-making as intended. At the same time, we also noticed how the use of data influenced how students were talked about in schools, and these had consequences for equity (Datnow et al., 2018). In particular, we found that the terms that evolved from accountability systems sometimes became labels for students (e.g., “far below basic kids . . . proficient kids”), not just descriptors of their achievement. Typically, teachers referred to students as “low” or “high.” These labels were relational and comparative and appeared to reify a hierarchy of student ability. We also noticed that teachers often assumed a shared understanding of what it meant to be a “typical EL [English learner] kid.” As we talked with these teachers, we gained more insight into their beliefs about teaching and learning and the students they served, and many teachers in fact shared asset-based thinking in our interviews. This led us to think about how the policy lexicon of accountability systems became a natural part of teacher dialogue, often unwittingly. Looking ahead, it is important to be aware of patterns of how policies and accountability systems shape everyday dialogue in schools, particularly because the language that educators use can influence their expectations for students. Building awareness of this issue is important, but we must also provide hopeful alternatives, including new language that can become a tool for change.

Our observations in teacher team meetings also revealed the ways in which meeting settings functioned as a site for teachers to make sense of the changes underway in their schools. We applied an equity lens to understanding teachers’ experiences in collaboration and how they advocated on behalf of their students (Datnow & Park, 2019). For example, Marie Lockton, Hayley Weddle, and I documented how groups of teachers in schools labeled as “low performing” advocated for their students. The dilemmas we saw some teachers grapple with revealed not only equity questions but ethical ones as well (Datnow et al., 2021). Some teachers felt caught in a bind between providing data for administrative purposes and what they felt was best for students, whom they felt were overtested with assessments that were not suitable for informing their instruction. Issues of fairness also came up in dialogues about class placement. What serves the interests of one group may not serve the interests of another. We found it instructive to use an ethics and equity framework that could be applied to unpacking decision-making in schools. Drawing on the work of numerous authors, this framework called upon us to consider who held the power in the decision-making, who were the silenced voices, who would benefit, and who would stand to lose. Ultimately, are decisions fair and for whom? In our work, we argued that these kinds of questions could be applied not only for research but also by educators in schools as they are seeking a path forward for particularly challenging decisions that have consequences for students because they help to illuminate some of the power differentials in decision-making processes. Notably, it often becomes clear that the students and in some communities, parents are the silent voices in decision-making. Applying this lens helped us to see the ways in which equity and ethics were closely intertwined in everyday interactions. It also helped reinforce how interdependent contextual levels are in school reform: Decisions made in one domain, such as the central office, can have positive intentions but raise unanticipated equity and ethical dilemmas at another level, such as the classroom.

The extensive time my colleagues and I have spent studying school change has also illuminated the emotional dimensions of reform, particularly reforms that involve disrupting patterns of inequality. Again, it is helpful to ask: What are the equity questions here? Early on in my dissertation work, the fight over whose definition of school would prevail was intensely emotional and political for the educators involved, and this particular battle was fought on gender grounds (Datnow, 1998). Although the topic of emotions was the focus of numerous educational change scholars some years ago, particularly internationally (e.g., Hargreaves, 2005; Kelchtermans, 2005; Zembylas & Barker, 2007), it has received limited attention since. Meanwhile, it is clear that emotions must be examined because engaging in change, particularly change oriented toward social justice, involves a great deal of emotional labor (Jansen, 2006; Zembylas, 2010; Zorn & Boler, 2007).

We have learned through our work that educators also do not just emote individually; they emote collectively in their work settings—in their grade-level teams, departments, and so on (Datnow & Park, 2019; Weddle et al., 2019). Sometimes, the collective work itself brings on a set of emotions. Teachers can find collaborative spaces to be sources of support for promoting equity in their schools, or they can find them to be sites of frustration. We found that teachers experienced stress in collaborative settings when they lacked sufficient time, could not get on the same page, or felt under the microscope. Teachers in schools under pressure to improve experienced more anguish over being surveilled in their meeting settings and in their classrooms. As one teacher said, “The stress levels are high this week” (Datnow et al., 2020, p. 134). Another commented on their exhaustion. Of course, site administrators were also held accountable by district administrators, who had implemented directives with the aim of supporting coherence and school improvement.

Principals often expressed positive emotions in relation to school reforms they initiated, particularly if they felt the reforms would open doors for students (Park & Datnow, 2022). New administrators often arrived at their schools with a genuine excitement about leading changes at their sites, but emotions sometimes shifted depending on how they were able to mobilize energy for change and the barriers they encountered. Understanding educators’ emotions in the context of reform is now more important than ever because they play a pivotal role in transforming schools and helping their students understand the complexities of the world around them. Ultimately, the emotions of educators in schools undergoing reform are not only individual but social and political as well (Zembylas, 2010; Zorn & Boler, 2007).

In the end, as we reflect on what we have learned when we ask equity questions in studies of school reform, we are left with much work to do. That is, we see various instances of deep-seated belief systems that undermine efforts to create more equitable schools and systems. We need to address these beliefs if reforms are to have a meaningful impact. We have also learned that equity-focused reforms that seek to disrupt school patterns of reproducing inequalities must involve close attention to political and power dimensions. Attending to context and how educators co-construct reform to fit their circumstances is also essential. We still struggle with scaling school reform from one school to many. We also see how compliance-oriented systems can stymie improvement efforts and influence how students are labeled in schools as an unanticipated consequence. Moreover, as teachers advocate on behalf of their students, equity concerns can raise ethical questions as well. And not surprisingly, educators encounter emotions in reform that are at once individual, social, and political. This discussion of lessons is by no means exhaustive, and it would not surprise those who have documented the inner workings of school reform with respect to equity. But it is especially important to be mindful of these lessons now, as we try to reimagine schools of the future.

Despite the many obstacles, I still feel a sense of hopefulness, to use bell hooks’ (2003) words, that perhaps we can reinvent school systems in ways that support the talent and well-being of all young people. As we emerge from a global pandemic and schools attempt to engage in fundamental change, what might be the role of education researchers? Asking equity questions will be important, but shifts in the way we do our work will also be essential if we are to play a constructive role. These shifts will allow us to accompany our critiques with hope and a quest for solutions.

In considering how education researchers might think differently about their work moving forward, I focus here on several areas: research-practice partnerships (RPPs), training the next generation of scholars, and building bridges across various domains. As I explain, focusing on each of these topics is important if we are to make significant headway, both in understanding the intersection of equity and educational change and in gaining traction on the challenges I have outlined.

In recent years, I have shifted much of my work to the domain of RPPs, which is one form of more engaged research. A growing community of scholars are involved in these partnerships. RPPs have gained considerable attention and support from notable foundations, including Spencer and W. T. Grant. Important publications have documented the characteristics of well-functioning RPPs and proposed ways to evaluate their effectiveness (Farrell et al., 2021; Henrick et al., 2017; Penuel, Riedy, et al., 2020). We are also increasingly learning about how RPPs operate “on the ground,” as researchers, practitioners, students, and community members join to address pressing educational problems (e.g., Cobb et al., 2013; Cohen-Vogel et al., 2016; Penuel, Farrell, et al., 2020; Weddle et al., 2021). Why might RPPs offer hope in the pursuit of equity and educational reform? In addition to the issues that I described earlier, the disconnect between research and practice provides one answer as to why some educational practices have persisted despite strong research bases documenting their ill effects.

Although not a panacea, RPPs offer a partial solution. For a number of years, several colleagues and graduate students and I have been involved in an RPP with a local school district (Wishard Guerra et al., 2020). We have had a long relationship with this innovative district and have regular informal interaction with district and school administrators, co-lead councils, and participate in strategic planning, among other activities. In keeping with the tenets of RPPs and the recommendations of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2022) report on the future of Institute of Education Sciences, the research we are undertaking in the district is oriented around their concerns, not ours. A current priority in the district is improving early elementary education. We built our project around teachers’ pressing questions in this domain. Teachers had questions about a wide range of issues, including how they might best support the learning of students from multilingual families and how trauma in the community is affecting students’ learning and well-being. The nature of RPP work offers hope and promise in addressing equity concerns in real time, in ways that more traditional research models may not. In collaboration with the teachers, our team codesigned a project to better understand students’ development across school and home and, importantly, to use this knowledge to improve education for young children in the district. A key component of this work is a Teacher Researcher Collaborative, a monthly meeting with educators in which we jointly make sense of data gathered in the project and consider the pedagogical and policy implications (Datnow, Wishard Guerra, et al., 2023; Wishard Guerra et al., 2020).

We as researchers have the tremendous privilege of learning alongside our K–12 partners, whom we do research with, rather than on (Abrego, in press; Heron & Reason, 2006). We must be consistently attentive to the power dynamic involved with our positionality as university researchers. A critical element of RPP work is to gather data on the RPP itself and how it is functioning. There are challenges such as analyzing data in a timely manner so it can be shared with our partners. Meanwhile, teachers rightly consider an urgent problem as something that needs to be addressed imminently in their classrooms (Datnow, Wishard Guerra, et al., 2023). Moreover, continually finding funding to support a durable partnership is an ongoing issue because timelines for proposal review often do not cohere with the imperative to be attentive to local needs. Working in an RPP requires the flexibility to pivot, as it did in the pandemic, to attend to shifting conditions. It also requires the ability to work at multiple levels of the system as we consider how to scale our efforts.Although RPPs offer some important hope with respect to equity, there is more to do on this front. We would be wise to learn from our colleagues who are using decolonizing methodologies and engaging in community-based participatory research (e.g., Abrego, in press; Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Campano et al., 2015; Smith et al. 2018). Above all, our research needs to support communities, not extract from them.

If we are to shift the paradigm to engaged forms of research, in which researchers partner more closely with practitioners, policymakers, and community members to address equity issues in educational change, we will need to consider how we train future scholars. Many of us were not prepared to do this kind of work and made the shift after our careers were established. PhD programs in education historically have focused on training future researchers who conduct research in ways that are separate from their participants. The knowledge of how to form and sustain long-term partnerships, organize research around practitioners’ interests, and generate products that are useful beyond a researcher audience is not typically part of PhD education. That said, many of our students come to us as former education practitioners who fought for social justice, and some have experiences and skills that are assets in RPP work, such as community organizing, political advocacy, and leading change. What might it look like for PhD programs to not only value and nurture these skills but also actively recruit for them in the ways that we more routinely look for prior research experience?

At the University of California, San Diego, we are attempting to train the next generation of scholars in a different way in a relatively new PhD program we call “Transforming Education in a Diverse Society.” In this program, we attempt to model for students how to work side-by-side with community members. There are more than a dozen current active RPP projects that students can engage with, with a range of partners, including schools, districts, policy and community groups, and colleges. One facilitating factor is that the department has had long-standing positive relationships with local school systems. Many of these systems are engaging in innovation, allowing for the exploration of myriad models of educational change and an opportunity for collective transformation within a region (Clarke et al., 2022). The work is not limited to the region, however, because faculty and students are also involved in partnerships in much more distant locations. Our hope is that our students will take this engaged model of research with them when they graduate and relocate in other communities across the globe, adapting the lessons on how to do engaged research that has national or international significance.

Although training students for education research that authentically engages people in communities provides hope in terms of the pursuit of equity, it is not without its challenges. The reward structures in universities, in some cases, have yet to shift to support this kind of work. The extensive time required to initiate and support partnerships may not always be recognized. It is incumbent on those of us who train the next generation of researchers to pave the way, to model how to publish this work, and to invite junior scholars to participate in field-building activities, such as edited volumes and journal special issues. The Foundational Handbook on Improvement Research in Education (Peurach et al., 2022) is one such example, and it includes a particular focus on the implications of equity.

If we are to achieve hopefulness with respect to equity and educational change, we need to examine not only how and with whom we are doing the work but also the theories and disciplines we draw on. Within AERA, a large and complex organization, education researchers are often siloed in their subfields. This serves as a barrier because the knowledge needed to understand educational change that centers equity is not nested within a single subdiscipline. In a recent article, my former and current students and I call for bridging work within our scholarly community (Datnow, Yoshisato, et al., 2023). In particular, we argue that it would be useful to link scholars who have knowledge on educational reform with scholars who have knowledge on how to create more equitable, anti-racist, and decolonized spaces for learners. Although many educational change scholars are deeply concerned about promoting equity, a serious consideration of what it would take to create, scale, and sustain the anti-racist and decolonial educational practices that many in the field have called for has typically not been a focus. These scholarly communities rarely intersect. Researchers in these different domains do not occupy the same spaces at this conference, nor do they often collaborate within their institutions. As my colleagues and I argued:

A failure to connect these knowledge bases would constitute a missed opportunity to bring transformative changes, those that confront traditional power relations around race, class, and gender, to a larger number of individuals and organizations engaged in the educational process. However, increased knowledge sharing between scholarly communities will only go so far. We must extend collaboration into communities. (Datnow, Yoshisato, et al., 2023, p. 35)

Moreover, we need to extend our examination of educational change beyond the formal structures of schools and systems. As the young people we are focused on supporting often move fluidly between formal and informal spaces of learning in our communities (Zollinger & DiCindio, 2021), our research should cross those domains as well.

Linkages across knowledge bases need to happen not only within the field of education and with our partners but also beyond it. Many education researchers represent different disciplines. However, we do not often extend outside the social sciences. It is quite likely that some of the solutions to vexing educational problems, such as the overlap between health and education disparities, are found at the intersection of typically distant disciplinary communities. We must find ways to cross disciplinary boundaries and form bridges with scholars in other fields so that we can address equity issues in a more multifaceted way. Yet there are numerous challenges to cross-disciplinary collaboration, including publishing in different venues and seeking funding from different sources. Although many universities recognize the importance of interdisciplinary work, their infrastructures may not yet fully support it. Cross-disciplinary hires are notoriously challenging, and faculty pursuing research across units can bump up against bureaucratic constraints. If over time, the structures and cultures of our professional worlds allow us to work together more dynamically across disciplinary boundaries, we may have more success in finding solutions to some of the equity issues we encounter in education and in society more broadly.

In addition to building bridges across disciplines, we also need to cross international borders if we are to provide hope that we can achieve equity. The United States has historically been internally focused in its search for solutions to educational problems. Education researchers in the United States often focus mainly on the work of other U.S. researchers, with limited attention to international scholars in our syllabi and publications. Whereas some other countries regularly invite experts from beyond their borders to provide insights, this does not happen as often in the U.S. Meanwhile, it is quite clear that the knowledge needed to address equity concerns in education does not lie exclusively within the United States or in any one country. During pandemic school closures, educators and policymakers were paying close attention to what was happening around the world as education systems navigated those difficult circumstances. The time is now for us to build on this momentum to bridge international boundaries and learn how systems across the globe are reimagining education to serve the needs of all students and support their holistic development, as Vicki Park, Donald Peurach, and James Spillane, and I documented in a report written in anticipation of the United Nations Transforming Education Summit (Datnow et al., 2022). As we engage in this cross-national work, it will be important to examine how systems around the world define equity and how equity concerns are centered in their change efforts.

Emerging from a global pandemic, our lives, our institutions, our communities, and our research sites have profoundly shifted in ways we have not yet fully documented. During this period, we have also witnessed increased energy to address persistent systemic racism. However, I fear we are at risk of slipping back into long-standing routines. We must continue to press for racial justice and also fight for those who continue to be disenfranchised as a result of their native language, national origin, gender, and/or sexual identity. However, as bell hooks (2003) explained, if all we do is critique, we take away hope and empowerment. What new equity questions must we ask? How do we embed hope in our research? This is an auspicious moment to root our struggle in hope; we have an opening to do things differently. At the same time, we are in a fragile moment in education in the United States and in many places across the globe. We are struggling to recruit and retain teachers and administrators, and many students are in need of significant academic and socioemotional support. Our systems will need to shift significantly to enable schools to be places where young people and educators can thrive. To be useful partners in solving these pressing problems requires that we, as researchers, look deeply at how we do our work. We need to consider not just how we move research forward but also how we push the field forward in policy and practice. Our work needs to do more than validate. It needs to empower us and our partners toward a new and different future.