At PBISApps, we believe in the importance of implementing effective, efficient, equitable, evidence-based, inclusive systems and practices to support an entire schoolwide community. Students, staff, teachers, administrators, families, and community members all deserve the opportunity to participate in learning spaces where everyone can be authentically themselves.
For anyone implementing PBIS, equity lives at the center of your implementation. It isn’t an add-on feature. It’s embedded into every system, every practice, and every data point. Lately, as I check my newsfeed and algorithms, the word “equity” comes up a lot and not always in the positive ways I’d expect. Because equity is so integral to PBIS, we need to define what the word means.
Defining Equity in Education
The Center on PBIS shares that equity in education is “when educational policies, practices, interactions, and resources are representative of, constructed by, and responsive to all people such that each individual has access to, can meaningfully participate and make progress in high-quality learning experiences that empower them towards self-determination and reduce disparities in outcomes regardless of individual characteristics and cultural identities."
That’s a long sentence. Let’s break it down.
- Where does equity work happen? Everywhere! Specifically in the policies, practices, interactions, and resources in educational spaces.
- What does equity work entail? Co-creating spaces where everyone sees themselves represented and everyone gets the support they need.
- What are the outcomes of equitable educational spaces? Everyone has access to high-quality learning and they progress in meaningful ways.
- Why do we pursue equity? Because everyone deserves to feel empowered and self-determined regardless of their individual characteristics or cultural identities.
A student’s access to the classroom is an indicator of educational equity, so it’s super valuable to know which students are excluded more often than others.
Attempting to define elusive concepts like “equity” can be hard to do, but it’s critical. As one group of researchers suggests, “When we use the term ‘equity’ without specifying more clearly what we mean by our use of the term in a particular context, at a particular time, for a particular purpose, we risk misleading ourselves and others about the values for which we stand.”1
In this sense, the work of equity matters more than the word.
If we are to implement equitable solutions, we need ways to measure exactly what our students need. That’s where data come in handy.
Measuring Equity
According to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), there are seven domains supporting student success throughout their K-12 education.2 One of these is equitable access to supportive school and classroom environments…a subject near and dear to our PBISApps hearts. In their report, NASEM says students “need physically and emotionally safe learning environments, with a range of supports that pave the way for them to succeed by addressing their socioemotional and academic needs.” Guess what can help you know which students might need more support? Mmhmm. Data.
To measure student access to supportive schools and classrooms, NASEM recommends evaluating disparities in:
- school climate
- discipline practices
- socio-emotional and mental health supports
We’re talking about using data to look for spaces where your students experience school differently.
Continue to ask yourselves as a team, “Do we have an inequity problem?” If you do, get curious about why and start coming up with some solutions.
Because of that, you’ve got to couple your climate and discipline data with student demographic information like gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, grade level, IEP, and English Learner statuses so you can evaluate disparities between and across groups.
Questions to Ask of Your Data
When teams sit down to look at data through an equity lens, it helps to have a starting point for the conversation. The Center on PBIS has a resource to guide your team through a problem-solving process for identifying inequities in your data.3 In it there are a set of four questions. (We added a bonus fifth question from Dr. Ruthie Payno-Simmons, Associate Director of the Midwest and Plains Equity Assistance Center, which we agree every team should ask every time they make decisions.)
- Do we have an inequity problem? You need to know something about the data you’re looking at, specifically what the criteria are for success. Maybe your state or district has a goal identified, or there are local norms establishing those criteria. Anything below that goal indicates a potential problem you’ll want to look at more closely.
- If we have a problem, why is it happening? Dive into your data to develop a precise problem statements and identify vulnerable decision points.
- What should we do about it? Create an action plan targeting those vulnerable times throughout the day.
- Is our plan to improve equity working? Come back to these data and evaluate whether your solutions had the impact you intended. If they do, keep doing them. If not, it’s time to switch it up.
- Bonus question: Who is at the table when we make decisions about our school systems? Evaluate the systemic equity in your decision-making process. Are all voices in your schoolwide community represented around the table? Whose perspectives are missing?
Ok, did you write these questions down? Great! Let’s look at some graphs related to school climate and discipline practices.
Measuring Equity in School Climate
One way to understand how students experience your school is to ask them to evaluate your school’s climate. The National School Climate Center (NSCC) defines school climate as “the quality and character of school life.” It’s the way a building feels when you walk into it. It’s the way students talk to each other. It’s the way adults support each other and the way they work with kids. When a school has a positive school climate, everyone feels engaged, respected, and safe; everyone succeeds.
The School Climate Survey (SCS) is a suite of five surveys to measure student, staff, and family perceptions of school climate…and it’s available for free on PBIS Assessment.
Included in the survey are demographic questions that make it possible to see what specific student groups think about the way your school feels. Let’s say your high school team asked students to take the SCS and you generate a report that looks like this:
The average total score for school climate broken out by race/ethnic groups shows most groups score it just below 3 out of 4 possible points, with the exception of our Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander students. Students who identify in this group scored school climate around a 2.5 out of 4.
If this was your team’s report, do you notice any inequities? Why do you think Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander students experience school climate less favorably than other students?
Measuring Equity in Discipline Practices
Practices like sending students to the office, suspensions, and expulsions exclude students from class and reduce their opportunities to learn. A student’s access to the classroom is an indicator of educational equity, so it’s super valuable to know which students are excluded more often than others.
Your school’s discipline data offer the perfect opportunity to evaluate how your discipline practices affect specific student groups. The Center on PBIS’ data guide for teams recommends using three metrics to measure equity outcomes in your discipline data:
- Risk Index: How likely will a student from a given group receive an outcome?
- Risk Ratio: How likely one group will receive an outcome compared to another group
- Rates by Group: The total number of exclusions per student within a given group4
You can calculate these on your own (The guide gives you those formulas), or you can take advantage of the Equity Report built into the Schoolwide Information System (SWIS) to calculate them for you! The three calculations work best together, but for now, let’s say your team generates the Risk Ratio graph and it looks like this:
This report compares each student group’s Risk Index to the Risk Index of all other students in the school. A Risk Ratio of 1.0 means the risk for both groups is equal. For our school, we see that Black students have 2.07 times the risk of receiving at least one referral as all other students.
If this was your team’s report, would you say there’s an inequity problem? Why do you think Black students in your school are twice as likely to be referred than other students?
Enacting change can be challenging, but you can’t do it if you don’t look at the problem. Be sure the data you collect can be broken out by student demographic groups. Intentionally look at your climate and discipline data within these student groups to see whether your systems and practices affect students differently at your school.
Continue to ask yourselves as a team, “Do we have an inequity problem?” If you do, get curious about why and start coming up with some solutions. One graph by itself won’t show you a full picture. When you combine that graph with other data sources and what you know about your schoolwide community, those data inform the larger story and compel us all to create more equitable spaces where everyone thrives.
1 Levinson, M., Geron, T., & Brighouse, H. (2022). Conceptions of educational equity. AERA Open, 8, Doi. 10:1177/23328584221121344.
2 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Monitoring Educational Equity. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25389.
3 Center on PBIS. (2023). Discipline disproportionality problem solving: A data guide for school teams Center on PBIS, University of Oregon. www.pbis.org
4 Center on PBIS. (2023). Discipline disproportionality problem solving: A data guide for school teams Center on PBIS, University of Oregon. www.pbis.org