Opening Doors ─ An Implementation Template for Cultural Proficiency

Sixty years ago, the landmark Brown versus Board of EducationSupreme Court decision brought a legal end to segregation in our nation's public schools. However, in spite of the demise of Jim Crow laws and the "separate but equal" doctrine, our system has all but failed our growing population of children of color. In fact, public schools are more segregated than ever, fewer resources are provided to the disadvantaged students who need them most, and achievement gaps continue to be our status quo.

Although most educators now concur that the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 was failed policy, one of the few positive outcomes was the federal requirement to disaggregate achievement data by race/ethnicity, income level, and linguistic diversity. By engaging in what Corwin author, Ruth Johnson, calls "peeling back the layers of wallpaper to reveal the cracks beneath," a painful truth was revealed: most of our schools suffer from persistent inequities that limit opportunities for large populations of our students.

"Cultural Proficiency" addresses these inequities through an "inside-outside" process. Individuals engage in deep self-examination to uncover their beliefs and biases with respect to race, income level, language and other variables of difference. They then turn their attention to "outside" factors such as school and district policies and practices that block opportunities for underserved students and their families. The objective of cultural proficiency is to move individuals, schools, and system along a continuum that ranges from "cultural destructiveness" to cultural proficiency. Corwin has published 15 books on Cultural Proficiency and currently sponsors a complete program including consulting services, national and regional institutes, and a range of digital products.

A hallmark feature of Cultural Proficiency books and products is the use of (hypothetical) composite cases that are loosely based on the authors' consulting experiences across North America. The proposed title is unique in that is based on the work of an actual district (Ventura U.S.D.) that has engaged in deep implementation of this work. In the authors' words, VUSD is

a diverse unified school district to which the reader throughout the U.S. and Canada can relate. It is a district that continues to experience demographic change, educator turn over, mandates,funding issues, and ever-burgeoning achievement challenges among many other real world realities. As the authors, we describe VUSD’s experience, recognition and self-disclosure as an illustration of ‘Inside-Out’ growth processes followed by reflective journal and professional learning dialogic opportunities for the reader.

Using the metaphor of ‘Opening or Closing Doors’ the reader will be guided through reading, reflective and dialogic processes to learn what it is like to dive into an intentionally crafted vision that gives rise to a shared mission that, in turn, provides a set of guiding principles. School leaders use the guiding principles to shape and inform decisions, no matter how mundane or expansive, and to gauge if the decision intentionally or unintentionally impacts students’ access to learning. In VUSD leadership and decision making are mindful of equity considerations and are intentional in opening, not closing, doors to students and their communities.

In essence, the book is designed to provide a "template" for implementing the principles and practice of Cultural Proficiency across a system or an individual school. It will be the first published book by Trudy Arriaga, the recently-retired Superintendent of VUSD and Corwin CP Consultant.