Implementation of Anti-Racist, Anti-Oppressive Strategic Plans and Policies in School Divisions: An Organizational Improvement Plan

Across Canada, many school divisions’ recent and emerging strategic plans are equity-focused and marked by the discourses of anti-racism and anti-oppression. These documents identify the systemic practices as the root cause of the persistent educational inequities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous learners and among intersectionally dominant and marginalized students. These practices issue from and adhere to the systemic logic(s) of intergenerational settler colonialism in Canada. Typically, while these documents clearly articulate core principles and end goals, they leave the “how” – the corresponding procedural tools of strategic plan actualization and policy implementation -- up to systems and system actors. \nMany school divisions have chosen an ideological implementation approach (Matland, 1995) which begins with immersing school-based and division-office administrators in anti-racist, anti-oppressive professional learning. While qualitative data reveals that this approach yields positive results for the first two stages of Thomas Guskey’s model (2008) for evaluating professional development, it does not (yet) extend to identify specific division and school-based structures, processes, and collective efficacies which will reliably produce the policies’ intended effects in the lives of diversly diverse student bodies. \nTwo significant barriers to anti-racist policy implementation have been identified: first, the resistance of internal and external stakeholders to a decolonial framing of the issue and its (re)solution; second, the challenge of determining the policy structures and instruments required to effect the systemic change these documents describe.\nThe methodology the researcher chose to investigate and respond to this problem of practice is an Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP). The purpose of this research was to develop an OIP which mitigates the barriers and forms of resistance common to ideological implementation efforts and provides procedural tools to meet the specific demands of decolonial organizational change. \nThe result is twofold: the System of Tools for Equitable Schools, grounded in the principles and practices of culturally sustaining, justice-oriented pedagogy, and a three-year Organizational Improvement Plan for schools and school divisions, grounded in the critical action research paradigm and consistent with adaptive and distributed models of educational leadership. The OIP’s theory of action positions educators’ collective practices, not their beliefs, as the starting point of decolonial organizational change, and, furthermore, posits that changing patterns of inequity at the classroom level is the key to “closing the gaps” at the school and division levels. \nThe plan describes how the entire staff of educators and administrators will engage in iterative cycles of critical action research as they implement The System of Tools for Equitable Schools over a three year period. The plan can be implemented in a single school, a group of schools, or an entire division. The goal of the research and intervention design in this dissertation is to evaluate the potential of a process approach (Matland, 1995) to accelerate systemic change in decolonizing school divisions.

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