Unconscious Bias in Schools: A Developmental Approach to Exploring Race and Racism

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Tracy Benson. Dr. Tracy Benson is a professor of educational leadership at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a former public school teacher and principal. He's the author, with his co-author Sarah Fireman, of Unconscious Bias in Schools, a developmental approach to exploring race and racism, which we're here to talk about today.

[00:38] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:40] SPEAKER_00:

Tracy, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:42] SPEAKER_01:

Great. Thank you so much for having me today, Justin.

[00:44] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I'm excited to speak with you about this because I think it's a potentially uncomfortable topic, but one that we need to talk about. What is unconscious bias and how does it operate in schools? Give us a little bit of an overview, if you would.

[00:57] SPEAKER_01:

So there's a lot of definitions out there about implicit bias, unconscious bias, racial bias, things of that sort. And so our definition for the purposes of our book is unconscious bias, unconscious racial bias is learned beliefs and attitudes and stereotypes about a particular race that result in harmful or preferential treatment of members of that race. And so one example, one example that I think really exemplifies how unconscious bias shows up in school is there was a study that was conducted a few years ago. about how teachers rate students on a particular essay. So what the structure of the study was, was that the researchers gave a panel of teachers, white and black teachers, a panel of teachers a poorly written essay. And along with the essay, they had a description of who the student was.

[01:45]

So if they were their name, and if they were black, white, or Latino. And so the teachers were supposed to rate the essay, give it a grade, and also give feedback on the essay to help the students improve their writing. But what the teachers didn't know is that there was no student. This essay was written by the researchers. And what the researchers found is when they got the essays back after the teachers read them over and gave comments was that they found that if the student was white— the teachers graded the essay more harshly and gave them more comments on how to improve the essay. So it gave them a lower rating and gave them more comments on how to improve.

[02:21]

However, if the writer of the essay they thought was Black or Latino, they gave them less critical feedback, more positive feedback, and a higher sort of rating. And so what this tells us, so you think about the results of the study, is what this tells us is it's how expectations works its way into the classroom. So by giving the students of color a higher grade and less critical feedback, this is telling them that your core work is up to standard. That this is the best you can do, hence you deserve a higher grade. And so it's sort of a learned helplessness in terms of teaching them that core work is good, while the white students get more critical feedback in a lower grade telling them that you can do better. My expectations of your level of knowledge is higher than the students of color.

[03:07]

And so this is very innocuous, and unless you look for it, you would never see it. But we talk about how the achievement gap comes to be. This is one of many examples about how racial bias works its way into schools and school buildings that then creates a different, even in the same classroom, a different educational experience between Black students, white students, and Latino students.

[03:27] SPEAKER_00:

It strikes me as such a small slice of a student's education that as a teacher, yeah, you might not even notice that you're doing it. You almost certainly wouldn't notice that you're doing that, but multiplied by a thousand or multiplied by 5,000 times of doing work, turning work in, interacting with teachers, the cumulative impact on students is very visible. And you are a high school principal, is that right?

[03:51] SPEAKER_01:

Correct. Yeah, I was a high school principal. And I was also a middle school AP. And when I thought about this study and how it could apply to the context of a middle school. So if you have to think about, so I'm glad you brought up about, if this happened once, maybe it's not so bad. But this happens every assignment over time, over the course of of a child's career in K-12, you've actually produced the achievement gap through this very practice.

[04:13]

But I wanted us to think about it in terms of like the gateway years. And so like the transition years from fifth grade to sixth grade and eighth grade to high school. And so if we think about this practice taking place in an elementary school from K through five, and then these lowered expectations for students of color and these higher expectations for white students, when these students then transition to middle school, and the middle school may be actually equitable and everyone's held to a high standard, these students of color have already learned that poor work is great because they've been taught to do substantive work. And then in sixth grade, you could see a large gap in terms of performance. And the middle teachers are none the wiser. They just think that black and brown students just can't perform as well.

[04:52]

And so that's another aspect of this during these transition years where this very phenomena could then produce disparate outcomes during the transition times.

[05:00] SPEAKER_00:

It's so interesting and also kind of insidious that that happens even when people are conscious of their potential bias in one direction, like they're thinking, you know, oh, I don't want to judge my students of color more harshly. And in the example that you're giving us here, the cumulative impact of that, maybe well-intentioned desire to not be punitive to students of color is actually resulting in, as you said, a different educational experience, lower expectations, and internalizing the idea that lower quality work is actually better than it is, and that leads to an achievement gap. Wow.

[05:39] SPEAKER_01:

And so that's the positive bias, in terms of You know, maybe we have sort of sympathy because we have this bias in our mind, a construct of maybe your background or like your home environment. We want to be more goodwill towards you. And then hence, unintentionally, we have lowered expectations for you. And this is, I think, a lot more widespread than we think. But when we talk about having high expectations, this is what it means. Right.

[06:03] SPEAKER_00:

So Tracy, at the beginning of chapter one of the book, both you and your co-author Sarah share examples from your experience working in schools of noticing a problem. Sarah noticed students were engaging in side conversations during class and commented on that to her African-American students and didn't comment on it to her white students. And you noticed a similar pattern in the hallways where, you know, you'd be encouraging students to get to class, say, you know, move along, class is about to start. saying that to African American students, but not so much to white students. How did that come to your realization and what was your reaction when that was brought to your attention and brought to Sarah's attention?

[06:45] SPEAKER_01:

I'm glad to bring that up because I'm an African American male. And we got to understand that we've been raised in a highly racially biased society. And we are exposed to racially biased messaging throughout our time. So even if you're a person of color, and I'm a person of color, it's not like I have not been raised in a highly racially biased society. where we see white preference in terms of images on TV, actors, actresses. We get highly racially biased messages through media.

[07:11]

We even get it through our family group about who our parents have in our social group, who they invite over. And so we're primed with this messaging throughout time about the preferred racial group, which is the white racial group, over the course of our lifetime. So even people of color are exposed to it, and we develop our own levels of racial bias against people of color. So this does happen, and it happens because we're raised in the same society. And so when it came to the situation with the student in the hallway, I hadn't noticed that I'd been doing this. And so one of the rules at our school was to clear students from the hallway in between classes because they had smaller hallways.

[07:46]

We had 1,000 students. We got to keep the students moving so they can get to class. So I made a point to be in the hallway between every period. Regardless of what I was doing, I dropped my things. during the four minutes of passing time. And so one of the things that we would do is we would clear groups of students that were congregating in the hallway, along the hallway by their lockers.

[08:03]

And so I wanted to lead by example, so I was doing this frequently to keep students moving. And so one day a student, who I knew very well, asked me why I was clearing the black students and not clearing the white students. And most of us as educators, we talk about this in our book, that if you feel like you're being called racist, then you get defensive and say, no, I'm not racist. I couldn't be that racist. But being a person of color who has experienced racism, I was like, you know what? I'm going to check it out to see if this is actually happening.

[08:30]

And that's the first step of investigating racial biases. Once it comes to our attention that something could be biased, we need to then investigate and not just deny. And so I spent the next week just standing in one spot and watching teachers. Because I was the example. This was the expectation. I was the example.

[08:46]

The white teachers were not moving the white students along. What they're doing is passing congregating white students to get to the black students first and then going back to the white students. And this is producing a very racially hostile environment in our hallways. And so I talked about it with our leadership team. And I had to also remind myself once I noticed this pattern is to then remind myself every time I went into the hallway, because this is how deep racial bias is. It's so, so automatic to remind myself that correct the behavior, not the student.

[09:15]

And I would say that to myself between every passing period after that. So what I would do, I would walk down the hallway and clear students and with the often groups of white students before I would get to the students of color. And often once I got to the group of students of color, they're already gone. Because they had seen that I was correcting the behavior and not the student. And they saw me coming. And I know in their minds, they're like, oh, my gosh, you know, Dr. Benson, he's clearing white students now.

[09:37]

We got to get out of here. Right. But what this also produced in the white students is a sense of a sense of like, why are you clearing us? You know, we are we've never been cleared before from the hallway. And so when we implement this practice, we now are being equitable. And to the white student, the equity felt like oppression.

[09:55]

It felt like we are now being targeted. We're now being treated differently. And what we were producing, actually, if we didn't attend to this practice, what we were producing is more racially biased beliefs within our students. And just by those actions in the hallway, we were teaching students, especially white students, that they had privilege. Because they saw us clear in the back students, but they had privilege to stand in the hallways. And what we were teaching our black students as they are to be seen as, you know, in groups, especially in groups, that you're to be seen as either criminal or up to no good, even if you're just congregating.

[10:23]

So just by this innocuous practice of targeting black students over white students, we were actually teaching racial bias. So it was our job as a school to roll back and make sure we were being equitable.

[10:33] SPEAKER_00:

So Tracy, you say in the book that as educators and particularly as white educators, many people are fearful of this binary of racist or not racist. And people will work very hard to put themselves on the right side of that binary saying, well, I'm definitely not racist. And I want to make sure that that's clear to everybody. But you say it's a little bit more complicated than that, that that binary is not quite how reality works. Tell us what that racist, non-racist binary is all about?

[11:03] SPEAKER_01:

We find that this is the single greatest barrier. I mean, there's several barriers to talking about racism very openly and about how we've all been affected by it and perpetrated within society and within our jobs. And so the binary is a barrier that we sort of hold in our mind and say, either you are a good non-racist, that we have no racist beliefs, or you're a bad racist. And these are polars, right? And if you're a good non-racist, that you're good-natured, you are open-minded, you're progressive, and most of all, you are not racist, right? And if you're in this category and you were having conversations about racism, especially with white people in a multiracial setting, what often happens is that white people are often so caught up with being seen as this good non-racist that it actually inhibits learning, that we've all ingested racism, we've all ingested racial bias, and we really need to talk about how that plays out and the thoughts that we have in our head.

[11:59]

But being caught in the binary and wanting to be seen as and thought of as a good non-racist, we spend so much time protecting that image that we can't learn. And moreover, we also then look at those who are the bad racist as people who are bad, who are ill-intentioned, who are irredeemable, who have racist thoughts, and they're not learners. And so by creating this dichotomy, we then create a space where we can't think and we can't learn together. So to replace that good non-racist, bad racist binary, we need to think of everyone on a continuum of racial identity development, of learning how racism plays out in society and understanding that we have all ingested racism over time and that it plays out in our actions, often unintentionally. And the more we see each other on this continuum, the more we can see each other as learners. Because I know in my experience, before I understood this concept as a principal, and I know I was guilty of it, that when we would have our equity trainings and talks about race and racism as a faculty, there were often some teachers who were just closed off.

[13:00]

They said, I have nothing to do with this. It doesn't pertain to me. I'm colorblind and I don't see color. And I don't want to talk about this anymore. And I saw them as sort of ignorant and irredeemable and not learners, as in this bad, racist category. But in order to really help them learn, I needed to see them on a racialized continuum, on a racial identity development continuum, where they're very, very early on in their understanding that just by claiming to be colorblind, which is not true, I mean, that's another barrier that no one is colorblind.

[13:32]

We see color. We may not understand the implications of being of color in society. And we may aspire to be colorblind. We may aspire to say we want everyone to be treated the same. We call us a skin color. But unfortunately, that's not where we are right now.

[13:47]

And so we have to see folks who think that they are colorblind on a continuum. That they need more time, effort, energy, and just conversation to learn that race is real and race affects people in very real ways. And to break that binary, that good non-racist, bad racist binary, break that binary and look at us more on a racial identity development continuum.

[14:10] SPEAKER_00:

So there's this idea of purposeful, intentional racism. And that's something that as educators, across the board, we distance ourselves from. Everybody agrees it's wrong to be racist. But there's also this implicit or more kind of unintentional or even kind of clueless way that bias plays out. And I'm interested in some of the cognitive roots of that. a lot of the ways our brains are wired does not reflect our best thinking about how to best relate as humans, but it instead reflects very old ideas about kind of our in-group and creating safety for our group and seeing everyone else with suspicion and seeing everyone else as dangerous.

[14:55]

And in the book, you say that there's kind of a cognitive shortcut that our brains are wired to take when it comes to seeing people from another group. Could you take us into that a little bit?

[15:05] SPEAKER_01:

So from 1619 until 1865, slavery was legal in this country. That means we could treat black people as subhuman. Dogs today have more rights than black people had back during slavery. Black people could be sold, could be tortured, could be raped, and could be killed without any sort of recourse during this time. That's the mentality of people in society for 246 years. I want to repeat that, 246 years.

[15:33]

You can treat black people as subhuman. And then 1865 was the end of slavery, but that wasn't the end of legalized oppression. There was legalized segregation. There was legalized discrimination in terms of jobs and things of that sort. And so from 1865, and if we count 1965, the civil rights movement, if we count 1965 as the end of legalized subjugation of black and brown people from 1619 to 1865, that's 335 years. And so if you take in 1965 up until 2020, which is this year, that's just 56 years that we've actually abolished legalized oppression.

[16:12]

But that mentality and those structures and those beliefs maintain. So it's gonna take more than 55, 56 years to overcome the over 300 years of legalized oppression and racism in our country. And it's gonna take conversation, purposeful actions, purposeful policies to right the ship. And so when we talk about sort of the shortcuts, this is where the mentality comes from because the residuals from this legalized oppression, these hundreds of years of legalized oppression, residuals still maintained in our society that manifest in every profession. And so in professions such as business, we know that people of color, there was a study that people of color, even if you are highly qualified, if your name is signifier that you're a person of color, employers are less likely to call you back. We also know in law enforcement that if you're a person of color, this is a study that took place out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, that if a police officer can identify you as a person of color, when you're driving a car, they're more likely to stop you than they are a white occupant.

[17:14]

And this is interesting in this particular study is that they studied stops during the day in terms of the race of the driver. And it was racially disproportionate. But then they studied the same stops at night when the police officer couldn't see the race of the occupant. And it was the same. There was no racial bias because you can't see the brown skin. And then in a most trusted profession, medicine.

[17:36]

There have been study after study about the racial bias in one of our most trusted professions, Madison, that shows that doctors have a bias towards black people. One case being that doctors actually believed, and this was a recent study, that black people have thicker skin than white people just because of racial bias. You know, that doesn't it's nonsensical, you know, skin is skin is in different colors, but they actually believed and they also believe that black and brown people have a higher pain tolerance than white people. So they are less likely to prescribe black and brown people pain medication for the same ailments of white people. And so this racial bias has worked its way throughout every aspect of our society. And so what we need to understand is it's going to be in our subconscious mind, unless we consciously pay attention to how it manifests itself and how we act out.

[18:27]

So when we talk about the concept of impact over intent, because you mentioned that, we all intend to be good, you know, unless you are an espoused racist, then you, of course, you intend to be a racist. But if you're not, you intend to be a good natured non-racist or an anti-racist. But we have to pay attention to the impact of our actions, because if we intend to be this particular person, we also have to understand that we've ingested racial bias. We have to pay attention to the impact. How does it play out in terms of our actions and how students, especially in schools, students perform in relation to how we act towards them?

[18:59] SPEAKER_00:

I remember as a young educator and having some of these conversations in professional development in my school in Seattle for the first time, realizing that many of my colleagues had been alive in the time period before the Civil Rights Act, that the March on Washington happened in the lifespan of some of my coworkers, and realizing that I, as a fairly young person, had kind of thought of Jesus and Gandhi and Martin Luther King as kind of contemporaries, you know, and that was all ancient history and good thing we took care of that a long time ago. And, you know, and not realizing that, A, you know, some of these legal barriers and legalized forms of discrimination were actually quite recent, but even those that weren't quite as recent have an ongoing impact and an ongoing legacy.

[19:49]

And I wonder if we want to talk just briefly about real estate and geography and those impacts. I was recently in St. Louis for a conference. And if you've been to St. Louis, you know you can see the redlining and the impact of redlining, even though supposedly it ended a long time ago, very starkly in terms of real estate and geography. What have been some of the big...

[20:13]

legacy or big, you know, continuing forms of baggage from those legalized forms of discrimination that, you know, that it's all too easy for us to put into ancient history, but we're not that ancient.

[20:25] SPEAKER_01:

Right. I'm glad you asked that question because it's just so pervasive, you know, and you can think of any industry or any sort of social construct and racial bias is there just because of the nature of how we were constructed, the legacy of racism in our country. And so you talk about the legacy of redlining. And so we have to understand about how that directly affects schools, all right? And so it still goes on today that in a particular neighborhood, if you have, you know, the 100 percent white population, that is typical that the property value maintains because it's property that's considered to be desirable. You know, it's a white community.

[20:58]

You have if you have mostly middle income people there, you typically have well-resourced schools because the property value is at a certain rate. And you can even have taxes at like 3 percent. in order to give to schools and still maintain. If you have a house value of like $200,000 on an average, you know, 3% of that is what? It's $6,000. And so anyway, so, you know, if you have this type of community, it's typically a desirable community where folks want to live and you have well-resourced schools, opposed to if you have a community that's predominantly Black.

[21:26]

And this is considered to be a non-desirable community because of racism. And Black, white people simply do not want to live around Black people because there's a stigma that Black Communities are dangerous. They have drugs. They have, you know, unwed mothers. They have, you know, there's a stigma there that we believe that if we have a predominantly black and brown community, that is dangerous. But that is not true.

[21:45]

But that is something popular in a popular sort of collective psyche. But you think about in terms of like non-desirable communities and then the property value. That means that if someone moves out of that black community, is it desirable for someone to move in? It's often someone, the middle to high income, white people do not want to move into that area. So you have someone else that moves in, regardless of their socioeconomic class, you move into a sort of a lower desirable neighborhood. And if you think about sort of the lower property value being, okay, maybe $80,000 on average.

[22:15]

All right. And if you take the same 3% tax rate to fund the schools, that gives them what? That's $2,400 if you have a tax rate of 3%. But opposed to the other neighborhood where you have a tax rate of 3% with a property value of $200,000. It gives them a lot more money in order to spend on their school. So this is how schools are underfunded.

[22:38]

is because we base school funding still off property value and property taxes. And that is a legacy of racism in our country because we realize by redlining and preventing folks of color to move into desirable areas and then keeping property values from going down when people of color move in, we then underfund schools. And then we have this problem where we have schools that have less resources, they have higher teacher turnover rates than schools that are well-funded. And so that's one of the legacies, one of redlining of residential segregation, but two, how those vestiges continue to affect the way we educate our kids today.

[23:15] SPEAKER_00:

You know, that redlining, the limitation on where banks would write mortgages and just saying, you know, like all of this area that we've outlined in red on the map here, we're just not going to write mortgages in that neighborhood. You know, even though legally that was ended, you know, a few decades ago, the impact is absolutely still there and will continue for some time.

[23:36] SPEAKER_01:

And we know in any city, like I live in Charlotte, I'm originally from Milwaukee, and contemporarily we still see gentrification at high rates. We still see shifting of populations based on race. In Charlotte right now, in our uptown area, that historically black area, since Charlotte is growing so quickly, we have developers that are coming in and building new houses, new tenements, and then raising the price on the properties so that you can move in middle to high income white people, driving up the property taxes for the surrounding black and brown people, then making it unaffordable and pushing them out. And you can see it any city you go to, whether it's Charlotte, whether it's L.A., whether it's Chicago, this is a common pattern that's a legacy of residential segregation that continues to, one, affect black and brown people very specifically, and it also affects tangentially the schools in which we send our students, send our kids.

[24:28] SPEAKER_00:

So as educators, we find ourselves in the middle of a lot of different forces, historical forces as far as legalized discrimination and patterns of housing segregation. We find ourselves dealing with biological wiring in our brains to be predisposed against people who look different from us. And yet in the middle, we have this opportunity, this space of opportunity as educators to actually stop and think and say, OK, there are these big forces that maybe are beyond our direct ability to control. And there are these predispositions or biases built into our wiring that affect our thinking, that affect our decision making. What is the space in here that we can control as educators? And what are some of the actions that you urge educators to take to become aware of and to respond effectively to those implicit biases?

[25:23] SPEAKER_01:

We depart from the idea that implicit bias has anything to do with race. The reason we call it unconscious bias is because we believe this is learned behavior. That I think there is science behind about being... less amicable to some people that, you know, I mean, other things are maybe animals or bears, you know, things that we are implicitly wired to be afraid of, you know?

[25:50]

But in terms of like being less, amicable to folks because of their skin color, we depart from that train of thought that it's wired in. We believe that unconscious bias has been learned and it can be unlearned. And it's not anything inherent to who we are as people. Now, in terms of like where to find it in schools, so we say that in order to find it, you have to look for it. Where there's smoke, there's fire. So there's a disparate outcome in terms of student achievement or in terms of school attendance or positive behavior support.

[26:20]

Racially, that means there's bias in the system. And so one of the courses that I teach every year is called Supervision of Instruction. And during two weeks of that course, we specifically focus on race and gender bias in the classroom. And so this is one area that anyone can implement tomorrow. And so what I have my students do, and I do a side-by-side observation with them, is go into a classroom and do an observation just on the differences between gender and race. So they pay attention and they sketch out the gender and race of the students in the classroom.

[26:52]

And we focus on just teacher attention, whether calling on them a cold call, calling on them if they raise their hand, and if a student just calls out, right? And I have students do this because they're not used to sort of doing observations and they haven't had the opportunity to do it through a racial lens. What I found, at least 95% of the time, if not almost 100% of the time, that there is race and gender bias in every classroom. That if we have to rank the hierarchy of those who are paid more attention to, either being allowed to call out without being redirected, or if they're being called out with a raised hand, or if there's a cold call, across the board have been white males. So we preference in our everyday, if we don't pay attention to our bias, white males. And the next come white females.

[27:34]

And then we have females of color, And then we have males of color with the lowest on the list being black males. And so across the board, every semester, we have found that there's a race and gender bias in the classroom. And what we need to do is that as administrators is pay attention towards racial gender bias and bring it to the attention of the teacher and develop a system to mitigate this bias, whether that's by having the teacher implement one of those popsicle stick systems where you pull it out with the student's name, or we do a system where you just go across the row or down, doing some sort of systematic thing to mitigate that bias. Just like I had to remind myself when I went into the hallway every period to not just focus on students of color, but focus on the behavior. We have to do that as classroom teachers. And the second area is school systems.

[28:24]

So bias works its way into systems. And so this was a situation where I was actually at a school doing a side-by-side with one of my students. And we'd walked by a positive behavior support board where they had designated students of the month. And I believe it was November when I visited the school. And so they had August, September, October, November up on the board along with the students' pictures. And walking into the school, I got a sense that it was a highly diverse school.

[28:48]

In fact, that there are mostly what the minority race population was at. And so when I walked by the board, I just happened to see that up on the board where the students were all white for every month. So there were four students and every month they were all white students. And I wonder, like, how does that happen in a school that has that white whites are the minority? And so I asked my student about the demographics of the school and she told me, yeah, we're mostly black and Latino school. And I pointed out the positive behavior support board and said, why are these all white students?

[29:17]

And so I left it on to her to address this with the principal. But I said, that's probably an issue because this is probably not random. It's probably an issue of racial bias. So she talked with the principal and came back to class in December, and she wanted to tell me what they had done. And so what they had done is totally missed the boat on the point of me addressing that. In December, what they chose to do was to pick all students of color for students of the month.

[29:45]

They picked two Latino students and two Black students and put them up there because the principal felt guilty. They're like, how could we do this? Let's just do a quick fix and put up the students of the month as students of color. But what really should have happened is they should have investigated the system in which produced this outcome. Like, how is it that in a school where maybe 20% of the students are white, all the students of the month are white? And so in going to that area, that uncomfortable area, they're able to solve a more systemic issue rather than just a technical, let's do December just to right the ship.

[30:21]

And so that's one example about how if you look at school systems and there's a racial discrepancy, we need then to look at the system and investigate how the system is producing that outcome.

[30:33] SPEAKER_00:

Let's talk more about data, if we could, because I feel like intuitively we're not going to find these things. We're not going to realize them in our own practice and in our own patterns. Right. In so many of the examples that you shared, we've had to look at data or we've had to have data brought to our attention by someone else in order to really realize what was going on. I remember the story about classical music auditions at orchestras, that there was an overwhelming overrepresentation of male, you know, kind of first chair musicians in leading orchestras around the world. And efforts to correct that imbalance, classical musicians are pretty evenly distributed among men and women, but the senior positions were overwhelmingly going to men.

[31:21]

And it wasn't until they decided to do blind auditions and put up a curtain and actually prevent themselves from having that information about who was auditioning that that imbalance started to be corrected. What are schools doing to make themselves aware and then continue to give themselves the data about where this might be occurring and be able to initiate some of that inquiry?

[31:47] SPEAKER_01:

I think that at least the school districts I work with are on their way to sort of looking at the data in ways through a racialized lens. I think those who are principals and work in leadership today are apparently, I think, aware of racialized differences in terms of the high level data. Maybe it's attendance, maybe it's discipline, maybe it's the high stakes testing that there are racialized differences. Now, the work that I do with school districts, we look at more of the micro data and we go into exactly investigating where racial bias exists. Point in case, I'm working with a school district right now where they had a higher than normal disproportionate rate of in-school suspension for students of color. And so they wanted to implement strategies in order to mitigate this.

[32:33]

But before we implemented some sort of pocketed program or some sort of practice, we need to get down to the micro data in terms of who are these students exactly? And when we talk about black students, are these black male students? Are they black female students? We need to get down to the grade level. Is this happening at any particular grade level? And then we need to get down to the particular behavior.

[32:55]

Like what is the behavior written on, on, on the, um, the referral that students are getting suspended for? And then what is the response from the administration in terms of, are they giving students of color harsher consequences for the same behaviors of white students? Or are we writing students of color up for behaviors we're not writing white students up for? So this is the micro data that we need to look at before implementing any particular high-level program. And so in this particular case, what we found It was defiance in the hallway that a majority of the black male students were getting written up for. And so then we took a look at what time of day is this happening?

[33:33]

Like, why is it in the hallway these students are getting written up for this at such high rates? And it was during the end of the day. It was during dismissal time. And so black male students were getting written up at high rates at dismissal time for defiant behavior in the hallways because of this crowd mentality near one of the bus exits. And it was actually, it was a handful of students who were getting written up, but it really driven up the numbers. And so when we paid more attention to put it in systems to really control all students in this area and make sure all the students were saved, the teacher, the one teacher who was there was the one writing up the majority of the students.

[34:09]

We gave the teacher more help. And so by implementing a system that targeted at this particular behavior in this particular area, we're able to bring down the, we didn't completely close it because there were other areas, but we're able to shave it down by 75% by looking at microdata. And without looking at microdata, we often go wrong by implementing some overarching sort of plan to solve a system that we don't quite understand. And so in terms of my work, I encourage schools and school districts to look at the micro data to understand exactly where the bias is coming from and then correcting that system.

[34:41] SPEAKER_00:

And you call that root cause analysis, I think.

[34:43] SPEAKER_01:

There you go. Root cause analysis. Yes. We often don't do that. I mean, because I was a principal and we have a lot to do, a lot on our plate. And we want to have a quick fix and a quick solution.

[34:52]

And we don't often spend the time understanding the problem. to a level that we can implement a very sort of laser-like focus and really targeted intervention because we just have so much going on. And I understand that. And at the same time, we need to understand that the more time we spend up front understanding the problem, the more effective the solution is going to be.

[35:10] SPEAKER_00:

So Tracy, if you could wave a magic wand and get all school leaders everywhere to give more attention to one particular action that they could take, what would that be? What would your top recommendation for school leaders who, you know, who buy what we're saying here, who are compelled to do something? What would be your top recommendation?

[35:31] SPEAKER_01:

Oh, I mean, hire a specialist. That's by far and wide. The folks who end up working with me are folks who've been through trainings that don't produce any outcome. There are a lot of box programs in terms of understanding the consciousness and awareness raising around racial bias or racism in the school is one aspect of the work and the work that I do. But then the transition is, and the reason we wrote this book, is that we then need to transition to like, what do we do? You know, good intentions are great.

[35:55]

They're fantastic. It makes us feel good. But now we have to, we then transition those into specific action. And what I've experienced in the last few years when I've been working with, as a school leader, and then when I've been working with schools and school districts, is that we often need support and help in implementing any given program to reduce disproportionality. Because most of us are, you know, and including myself when I was a principal, I was just, I didn't have the skills and dexterity to do it right. And I did rely on an outside provider when I was a principal, even though it was someone that cared very much about racial equity.

[36:26]

And that I was very committed to improving the lifetime outcomes for my students of color. I did not have the skill and ability to lead a school that way. Because even though we may intend well, we're often at a point because a lot of us haven't taken courses either in our undergrad years or undergrad course or even on doctoral courses. that give us the skill and ability and knowledge to really address racial bias in a good way. So hire somebody, work with them, put the time, money, energy, and resources towards really attending to these issues, and you'll see the outcomes that we all seek to have for our students of color.

[36:58] SPEAKER_00:

So Tracy, I'm thinking about a school district, maybe a high school principal or superintendent who realizes that they have disproportionality in their discipline data. I think there's a very real risk that if we just present that problem to staff and say, we really need to deal with disproportionality in our discipline data, that that will get reduced or misinterpreted as we need to lower our standards behavior-wise for whatever group we're suspending more often. We have all these kind of wrong ways of getting the results that we want to get. So as a person who works with school districts and schools on issues like disproportionality and discipline, what's a better way for us to approach that and think about getting closer to the vision that we have for equity?

[37:45] SPEAKER_01:

And I think that when we have an indicator that racial bias exists in one particular area, we need to recognize that it probably exists in more than one area. So if the symptom is that we have disproportionality in discipline, so what is the underlying cause? And then also, what are the conditions at the school that is feeding this particular outcome? Because we know that suspension rates can be informed by rates of attendance. Like if a student's not coming to school, very often they fall behind. They come to school, they feel behind.

[38:13]

Hence, they may end up being suspended more often than not. Or we could have a teacher that just doesn't have the appropriate amount of classroom management in a particular course in a particular time of day that has a greater critical mass of students of color in his or her classroom that could then result in higher suspension rates. So there's all these different areas where racial bias can originate. And we need to take a look at the symptoms and then do an analysis of the system. So in terms of my work, I usually get clients when there's some sort of a major racial event. In terms of cold calling, I get an email, we just had the N-word written out, scrolled on the wall of one of our bathrooms, it ended up in the paper, we need racial equity training.

[38:54]

Okay, good. Well, you have that written on your bathroom, but there are probably other areas that have made that acceptable for thinking that students can do that. And so my approach involves a 25-point diagnostic of where an analysis of the system, so we can surface all the areas where racial bias might exist. And then also we administer a campus racial climate survey, which most of us, most school districts don't do, because the greatest source of information comes from our students. The students experience our schools in very real ways. And if we ask the appropriate questions along racial lines, we'll get information that is probably the most clear information from students about the racial climate at our school.

[39:34]

And we don't do this, one, because it's not racial, campus racial climate. This is sort of a newer concept that we do at the college level, but I've translated that to K-12. And then, two, it can be threatening to adults. It's very hard for adults, you know, in terms of teachers and administrators and even parents to be like, what, you're going to ask my student about race? You know, we don't want to talk about that. But if we prepare school districts, in school districts that I've implemented this survey, we've gotten real back, real important feedback that we would never have gotten if we didn't ask parents.

[40:02]

students in terms of their experience of the schools along racial lines. And so I highly recommend that if there is racial disparities in any area of the data, that you do a sort of a deeper analysis of where it originates and also do a campus racial climate survey of the students because they have a lot of information from their experience that we don't have access to as adults.

[40:25] SPEAKER_00:

So the book is Unconscious Bias in Schools, A Developmental Approach to Exploring Race and Racism. So Tracy, if people want to learn more about your work or get in touch with you, where's the best place for them to find you online?

[40:37] SPEAKER_01:

So online, you can find me at tracyabenson.com. You can also find my book on Amazon and it's also available through Harvard Education Press. And of course, I'm a professor. So I'm at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. And I do want to be there as a resource because I recognize that in terms of this work, there's a lot of work to be done across a lot of school districts.

[40:58]

And there are a healthy number of racial equity sort of consultants out there. I don't consider myself to be a consultant. I'm a partner who's very dedicated to helping school districts move past The traditional methods of trying to address racial disparities in data, there's a better way, and there's a way that we can work smarter than harder. And what I want to leave folks with is that, and something we say in the book, is regardless of the amount of effort, time, and resources education leaders put into improving academic achievement of students of color, if unconscious bias is overlooked, improvement efforts may never achieve their highest potential.

[41:32] SPEAKER_00:

Tracy, thank you so much for your insights and for your time today and joining us on Principal Center Radio.

[41:38] SPEAKER_01:

Thank you, Justin. I appreciate you having me to talk about a very important topic.

[41:41] Announcer:

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