Giving Compass' Take:

• Caroline Hill explains how 228 Accelerator aims to scale equity in schools by rewriting the narrative around students and teachers to break stereotypes and norms. 

• Is this approach in line with our best understanding of increasing equity? What does 228 Accelerator need to accomplish to be considered a success? 

• Read more about increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in education. 

I was interested in having you tell our audience about what you're doing.

The new venture is called the 228 Accelerator. And the name was really conceived when I read this report called The Ever-Growing Gap, and it said the average black family would take 228 years to achieve wealth parity with white families. And for Latina families, it would be 84 years. This is just an indicator of the injustice that's experienced by the most marginalized and excluded in our communities and our society.

We need to think about ways to accelerate this social equity throughout our entire school system—and the way that we think and design educational experiences for students.

But on a practical level, how does that work?

My hunch is that it's our individual interactions—like our relationships with each other—that plants the seed for inequity to fester. So we can look at the relationships between students, and the relationships between teachers, and the relationships between teachers and students, and students and content. Then we need to redesign them towards the desired outcomes, codify that and then figure out how to make that into scalable nuggets—policies, practices, and models. Then we stand a chance of being able to spread more equitable institutions.

What would your first cohort of people look like? What kind of skills would they be learning?

I think first it's learning a common language and fluency around equity, diversity, and inclusion. I think we have very different understandings and definitions of privilege and oppression, of racism. So first we need to establish a common language. And then learning some listening structures because that is the first step in establishing relationships. Can we listen to each other?

Read the full interview with Caroline Hill about trying to scale equity in schools by Jenny Abamu at EdSurge.