Jeffrey Moore, reflects on how hosting an equity visit in his former district supported him in integrating his work on equity and instruction:

[At Freehold] We were in the home stretch of hosting our own equity visit—an examination of access, opportunity, and inclusion practices for students receiving special education services. Prior to the visit, we had spent weeks crunching data on our problem of practice. We had made logistical arrangements for classroom visits in several schools. It had been a large program to arrange. Unfortunately, as we prepared for the equity visit, some of us drifted into the same frame of mind that we occupy for other types of accountability-driven tours, like state monitoring and accreditation visits. I found myself in danger of treating the equity visit like something to complete, something that would not live past the moment of saying our goodbyes and the visitors pulling out of our parking lot. It began to feel like something separate from my daily work.

Then, the day arrived. We took tours of classrooms. We discussed our data with visitors. In the closing events of the day, we received feedback in the form of questions from our visitors and then sat in a fishbowl as a district team to openly reflect on that feedback. The questions were challenging, in that they had pulled at deep roots of our practice—deeper than anything we had anticipated. I felt overwhelmed and dizzy from the feedback. We had somewhat approached the equity visit as putting on a show, but the visitors had dug out our assumptions about special education and inclusion, and they laid them bare, belly-up.

I heard myself saying: “There’s too much to do.” And I heard Larry Leverett [a design team member] say: “Jeff, when you do equity work, there’s always too much to do.”

–Jeffrey Moore Superintendent, Hunterdon Regional High School District, former director of curriculum for the Freehold Regional High School

“Learning to Throw Stones at Goliath”