SBP: Creating change in education systems: Can leadership-level inclusion training reduce achievement gaps?

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The U.S. is more racially and ethnically diverse than at any other time in the nation's history. Yet achievement gaps continue to separate racial minority and lower-income students from White and higher-income students. Research designed to reduce these achievement gaps largely focuses on student characteristics, such as motivation, belonging, and performance. The resulting interventions often aim to change the way students engage with the school context. However, eliminating achievement gaps may require more than changing individual students. It may require changing the prevailing social norms and beliefs that undermine racial minority and low-income students' success. This project examines how school leaders might be trained to build culturally inclusive and sustainable learning environments. The goal is to shape the beliefs that schools and teachers hold about diverse students and the practices they use to engage students from different racial and social class backgrounds. These culturally inclusive changes in the learning environment are expected to improve racial minority and low-income students' academic outcomes by fostering a sense of belonging and positive beliefs about learning.This project uses a district-wide intervention to create cultural change within schools. The intervention focuses on teaching educational leaders to understand and validate multiple cultural ways of being in their schools and classrooms, such that all students feel that they belong and are capable of succeeding in school. Educational leaders will learn to change their school cultures by attending week-long workshops that provide theoretical and practical information about engaging cultural differences in educational contexts. The workshop curriculum has been piloted with educators and works to bridge the gap between empirical research and real-world classroom experiences. The curriculum reflects research-based understandings of how culture influences cognitive development, motivation, and emotional expression. It also offers concrete strategies for applying empirical knowledge in educational settings. The research examines how this intervention shapes a) the policies district and school leadership enact; b) the classroom cultures teachers create and the practices they use with diverse students; and c) students' psychological and academic outcomes, particularly among racial minority and low-income students. Teaching institutional leaders to understand and validate diverse cultural backgrounds is expected to improve minority and low-income students' educational experiences and reduce racial and social class achievement gaps.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.