Questions That Lead to Action: Equity Audits Motivate Teachers to Focus on English Learners' Needs

As chief of schools for Network 8 in Chicago Public Schools, Luis R. Soria was responsible for supporting, leading, and assessing the teaching and learning of nearly 30,000 students at 34 schools. Every five weeks, the district team generated an on-track report for the 27 elementary and middle schools in Network 8. This comprehensive report provided a routine way to follow each student's progress in reading and mathematics for grades 3 through 8. Data revealed that, across schools, a high percentage of English learners were off-track for 15 consecutive weeks. In addition to examining data for student learning trends, the schools needed a way to surface some of the less-transparent causes of educational inequity. In a leadership class taught by Margery B. Ginsberg at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Soria learned about the equity audit--an approach to inquiry that examines one or more aspects of a learning environment (community, district, school, classroom) related to opportunity gaps in public education. This article describes how Soria introduced the idea of the equity audit to one school, drawing on two resources: the motivational framework for culturally responsive teaching (Ginsberg, 2011) and the unpublished draft of an equity audit developed by the University of Illinois at Chicago Center for Urban Education Leadership.