What Equity Officers See as Their Challenges

As a school system leader during the last decade, Lisa Williams has realized that one impediment to making real change in schools is a lack of time for leaders to reflect on their work and how it affects students and educators.

As the chief equity officer for Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools for the past year, Williams lists her major goal as “building collective consciousness because you can’t change what you can’t see. And when you have to do 1,001 things … you can’t be creative enough to do something different. We need to recognize that the pace at which we work is part of the problem.”

Williams is part of a growing group of equity officers hired by school districts across the country to help identify disparities within and across their schools. Their charge is profound: Dismantle systems of oppression and create new processes in K-12 education that center the needs and experiences of minoritized students.