Harvesting the Garden of an Equity Audit

A joint district-university team in Syracuse, N.Y., sparks changes in access to advanced classes, athletics, drama and music extracurriculars

When our university-school district research team proposed to study the opportunity gaps that exist among students in the Syracuse City School District, the district’s chief accountability officer insisted on a particular stipulation. While he acknowledged the importance of sharing publicly any inequities we unearthed, he would sign off on the data-sharing agreement between the school district and Syracuse University only if the audit findings would lead to meaningful action benefiting students.

An equity audit is a systematic examination across practices in schools and a district to understand how educational equity is playing out — where gaps and greater equity exist.

We focused on access to advanced academic courses (including Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and college-credit courses), performing arts opportunities and athletics. This required disaggregating data by a range of demographic and identity markers (race, class, gender, English language learner status and special education). We see participation in these three areas as potentially contributing to successful student outcomes, and disproportionate participation in such opportunities as an indicator of inequity.

The audit, which took place during the 2016-17 school year, resulted in plenty of uncomfortable data, pointing to disparities in how the 21,000-student district was serving students by race, family income, disability and English language ability. In the 2½ years since we began the audit, we now are realizing the fruits of this labor. We adopted a metaphor of an urban community garden to help us understand the action around the audit.