It is our great pleasure to be able to share this interview with Brandi Hinnant-Crawford, Associate Professor of Educational Research at Western Carolina University and author of Improvement Science and Education: A Primer. The interview was conducted by Stacey Caillier, Director of the Center for Research on Equity and Innovation at the High Tech High Graduate School of Education. This interview first appeared on the High Tech High Unboxed podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.
STACEY CAILLIER:
Brandi Hinnant-Crawford, I am so excited to talk with you. Just to give folks a quick introduction, you’re an associate professor of educational research at Western Carolina University. You have written a fantastic book called Improvement Science and Education: A Primer, which Gloria Ladson-Billings has given her stamp of approval, which is high praise indeed.
You are also a former English teacher and self-described data geek, who went on to become part of the Strategic Data Project at Harvard while you were writing your dissertation. You’ve been teaching master’s and doctoral students how to use improvement science to tackle equity issues in education. And you’ve even applied it to your own personal life. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today.
Can you share your identity markers, how they inform how you show up in the world and your work?
BRANDI HINNANT-CRAWFORD:
Absolutely. We all have so many identities, and I’m going to probably name more than what you’re used to hearing, but they are all core to who I am. So I guess, first off, I’m a Black cisgender woman. I am a Southerner, which matters, and you probably can hear the twang in my voice.
I’m a Christian, but I always like to clarify I believe in the liberatory Jesus and not the Jesus that’s trying to bind people. I’m also a millennial, one of the elder millennials. I like ’90s R&B and 2000s hip hop.
I’m a mom. I’m a twin mom. I’m an autism mom. And so those mom identities really frame how I see the world. And I move through the world as a plus-size woman, which has some things that come along with that.
All of these impact my knowledge and understanding of the world and particularly of the field of education. I was in school when white flight happened. I’m the daughter of an educator who was also an education activist. I grew up in an activist church. All of these things play a part in who I am and how I approach everything in my life.
SC
Thank you so much for sharing all of that with us. That’s really helpful. So how did you come to improvement science? And what was the appeal for you, or what felt new or different?
BHC
I first encountered the ideas that would push me towards improvement science when I was in the Strategic Data Project. We read an article by Hess and Fullerton called “The Numbers We Need” that prompted an “aha moment” for me. They were talking about “balanced scorecards” and how by the time we are looking at achievement data it’s really too late. What are the antecedents to those outcomes that we’re looking at?
Then, when I was hired at Western Carolina University, they were a part of the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate. It was a newly redesigned program, and they wanted improvement science to be a signature methodology. I was hired as a methodologist, so I had to learn it.
I started immersing myself in spaces that were teaching me about improvement science. And we got into the Higher Education Network (HEN) run by Louis Gomez and Paul LeMahieu, where they were trying to teach folks how to teach improvement science. So that’s how I got into it.
Then my first “aha moment ” where I realized this actually worked was when I did a personal improvement project as part of the HEN. I did it on academic productivity, because I was a brand new professor, and I needed to write. So I used the techniques of improvement science to identify what was hindering my writing, and I got to see that the problem wasn’t that I was “lazy,” the problem is all these meetings that I was having, that’s what was detracting from my writing time! Then, as my students began to employ improvement science more and more, and I got to see the different things happening within their schools and organizations, I said, “You know what? This really does work.”
Now, as I was putting myself in these spaces to learn more, I noticed in a lot of these spaces there weren’t a lot of folks of color. And my chair always said that, in the academy, the literature was very much like a conversation.
This means that as a scholar, you have to figure out who you want to be in conversation with. And the people who I saw myself in conversation with were not the same folks doing the improvement work. So I had to ask myself, “Is this the space I belong in? Or can I bring what I know from those other spaces to this space?” That’s what I’ve been trying to do ever since.
The other thing that really gripped me was that as people were defining problems and talking about root cause analysis, looking at the system, they were missing the elephants in the room: racism, classism, heterosexism. These are root causes to many of the outcomes we’re dealing with.
So even as we were methodically naming problems, we weren’t naming these oppressive structures within our society. I was like, “Well, come on y’all, we’ve got to call a spade a spade!” Those were things that I wrestled with. And before I became a proponent of improvement science, I was like, “This has to be a part of improvement work.”
SC
Definitely. I loved in your book how you so clearly walk people through the tools of improvement. But you’re very clear on how we use the “five whys” because we have to get to the roots. Any time you do the five whys deep enough, you’re going to get into oppression of some kind. So you’ve got to keep digging and asking those whys until you get to the actual roots.
BHC
You really do. The way improvement is framed in the current discourse in education is that improvement comes from Deming. And so even in the epilogue of my book, I talk about how I overheard some colleagues saying, ”This is a white man’s way of thinking.”
And I just want to say, Walter Shewhart and W. Edwards Deming and Gerald J. Langley and Anthony Bryk, I thank all of those men for the work they’ve done in making improvement science a kind of discipline. But these men don’t own improvement. Improvement has been around forever.
And that’s why in my primer, I really started with that idea of science and looking at those Islamic foundations. Like I said, I’m Black. So I’m the descendant of enslaved people in this country. And most of those folks came from West Africa. So I feel a connection to West Africa.
In Ghana, the Akan people use Adinkra symbols. And hwemudua is an Adinkra symbol that translates to “measuring stick”, and it’s about quality. Quality in life improvement, but also in production. So these things of course predate Shewhart and Deming.
These things belong to everybody. And I think, just because certain scholars have been elevated—and their work is good, I’m not tearing them down—but it makes other people think, “Oh, that’s not for me.” But they don’t own it, even though they’re writing about it. It’s not just theirs.
SC
Brandi, thank you for saying that. I feel like your book is all the way through an argument for that. It’s like, improvement science is for everyone. It’s democratizing the whole process.
So I have to pivot a little bit and talk about your book, because I have to tell you that I discovered your book, because it was on a colleague’s desk. And he had it actually opened to your epilogue, which is titled “Why Does a Black Girl Endorse Improvement Science?” And I read that epilogue, flipped to the first chapter, and immediately started texting faculty in our master’s program that this is the book we’ve been waiting for.
I think I wrote to you, and I was like, ”I’m doing cartwheels reading your book. It’s so accessible, so full of concrete examples. And it makes such a compelling case for how folks can use improvement science for equity and educational justice!” And I just want to know, how did you come to write this, and who were you writing it for?
BHC
I guess I had three audiences in mind. The first is my students, people who are brand new to improvement science.
I told my colleagues, “Yo, I really want to do a primer.” Because we have to start somewhere. And we need something that the students can pick up, that has definitions in it, so that someone who’s never heard of it before can pick it up, read it, and be like, OK, I understand what’s going on. Because some of the way we were piecemealing from other texts, students were still walking around, like, “So I don’t understand what exactly I need to do.” So that was my first audience.
The other audience really came to me from a conference at the University Council for Educational Administration, where several folks were presenting on improvement science. I was not a part of the presentation. I was just in the room. And someone asked the question, “Well, how does this work with equity work?”
To me, it was so very clear, but the nods and the questions of, “Yeah, how do we pair this with equity?” made it clear that it was not clear to everyone else in the room. So that’s the second audience, I wanted to show, “OK, this is how these two things go together.”
And then the third was for improvement “experts.” And I’m not saying that my primer teaches them anything about the improvement process. But I think my primer challenges them to use a critical lens and to really think about the process of improvement.
We think about the outcomes of improvement and making sure we have an equity- or justice-centered outcome. But also, how do we make sure we have an equity- and justice-centered process? So those are the three groups I was trying to hit with what I was writing.
SC
That was one of the things that struck me about the book: how clear you are about how it’s not just the outcome, the process itself has to be equitable. Can you say a bit more about the distinction between the two for you? What does an equitable improvement process look like for you?
BHC
Absolutely. First of all, it’s those two questions I ask in the book. The first one is, who’s involved? So when you think about who is involved, you’re thinking about process, and involvement requires so much.
And it’s not always easy, because those of us who are “learned” and know about improvement go in thinking, “Well, hey, I have the tools to fix X, Y, and Z.” And a lot of times, the way it’s presented is, we go and we get this information from the users, and then we go about and fix it. Uh-uh. No.
The users have more to give you than just to help to define the problem, and you need a significant amount of humility in the sharing of power for the improvement process to be equitable. You have to recognize that the people who may not have your training or your degrees may have the definition of the problem, as well as the ingenuity to develop the right solution. And giving that up is hard for folks.
The other piece is this real critical reflection, and this is also hard. Because it is a lot easier to look at data than it is to look in the mirror and see how you might be perpetuating injustices or oppressions within the process by dismissing certain voices. And so when you want to focus more on a data point than the voice of the person whose data point that is, that makes the whole process jaded. And in many ways, it invalidates it.
To really improve with equity, you’ve got to be focused on who’s at the table, not just when you’re defining the problem but throughout. How is this data being communicated, so that everybody around understands it? Don’t just throw up a bunch of regression outputs or propensity score matching or whatever it is you’re using, and then don’t break it down so that other stakeholders around the table understand.
So that’s what I’m really pushing at.
It is all about honoring all voices from the beginning to the end, from problem definition, from seeing the system. Because people from different perspectives see different parts of the system. You’ve got to have a multiplicity of voices throughout.
And you’ve got to be intentional about giving minoritized and marginalized voices space and power, especially when there is a perceived power differential. And if you don’t do that, you can’t have an equitable improvement process.
SC
Thank you so much for that. Is there a particular project you’ve been involved in or helped support that stands out as doing a really great job of attending to an equitable improvement process?
BHC
I would like to talk about one I’m involved with now. We’ve not used the term “improvement science” as a part of this project, but from inception, the voices of parents, students, faculty—and when I say, faculty, I mean, faculty at the PreK-12 schools—have been on an equal playing field with the principal investigator and the faculty from the universities.
I’m not the principal investigator, I’m just part of it. So I don’t know if they were quite ready to talk about it. But the synergy and the magic that happens in that space is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
And the way the folks in the K-12 schools are leading the rest of us and the way we listen and attend to what they’re saying is really beautiful. And it’s so eye-opening.
I guess it shouldn’t be eye-opening and groundbreaking. It should be common sense, but the way they know their schools and their communities and their knowledge about context so supersedes my knowledge about methods and someone else’s knowledge about curriculum. And so while we’re there as supporters, that support comes secondary.
And I think it’s all about what you believe about the people that you’re serving. If you really think they have the gifts and the talents and the assets within them to address these things, then you can release some control. But, do we always believe that? I’m not sure.
I know that’s very nebulous and not a lot of specifics. But I will say, this project is about implementing a new curriculum in a really large place. And the curriculum, in some aspects, it’s still being designed.
And it’s all about children in the margins. But those children, those parents, those teachers and principals, are at the table: they are the ones leading this work. And the faculty, the experts, so to speak, we’re just there to support. It’s beautiful.
SC
Thank you for sharing that. Something that you write beautifully about in your book also is the need for anybody who’s engaged in improvement to be very user-centered and asset-based. And you talk beautifully about how we can fall into this trap of deficit ideologies. Can you say a bit about this trap and how you support folks, or even your students, in avoiding it as they’re engaging in this work?
BHC
First of all, it’s hard. Because we have grown up being taught certain things about certain groups. Whether we want to believe it or not, the way we’ve been socialized has conditioned us to think certain things about certain groups of people.
Let’s say you are trying to facilitate an improvement project. Even if you are cognizant of deficit perspectives, that doesn’t mean that everyone on your team is. Elsewhere in the book, I wrote a chapter with two of my doctoral students called “Teaching Improvement Science for Educational Justice.” We lay out a four part framework for teaching folks improvement science in a way that helps them deal with this.
The first part is called explicit instruction. Explicit instruction is used to teach people things they wouldn’t learn on their own. And you have to recognize that people are not going to learn about deficit ideology unless they are oriented to or being pushed towards things that talk about it. So there has to be some grounding in critical scholarship before you even begin the improvement process.
The next step is anticipation. So what we have people do is come up with their ishikawa diagrams and anticipate, as they would do this with the group, what other things people might put up there. And then highlight and point out everything that is deficit oriented.
And then comes the homework. If you know you are about to do something about first generation college students, and you know someone’s going to say they were underprepared in high school, then the homework is to go find the literature that combats that. Then when that comes up, you have the information already to speak back to those deficit notions. That’s the preparation piece.
Then the last piece is to go on out and do it. You still got to do it. And as you do it, don’t expect yourself to be perfect.
It’s also important to reflect on the process. What happened? What came up that you didn’t anticipate? How could you do it differently next time?
But it gets you in that process of thinking about whatever it is you are wanting to do, whether you’re wanting to help Black boys, or you want to help deal with discipline or whatever it is, you need to know what those ideas are to begin with.
And then you need to be prepared to speak back to people if you want to prevent the process from going down a rabbit hole of, “Well, it’s their fault, because they don’t do X, and they’re not motivated, and their mamas don’t care.” If you don’t want all that to come up, you’ve got to be prepared to speak back to it, and not just from your gut and your feelings. You need to have some hard facts and data.
SC
I love that. I want to read that article now. It reminds me so much of what we know about good teaching too. You introduce a concept, you spotlight and anticipate common misconceptions, you then have a plan for addressing those misconceptions. As they arrive, you’re on the lookout for them. So you can catch them. That’s just good teaching. I love it.
BHC
It is. And improvement science is all about learning together, so you have to consider that problem-definition point, where deficit ideology can be so rampant, as a teaching moment, and to be prepared.
SC
Yeah. I have to quote just a little snippet from your book. Because this is also why I think the questions that you brought up earlier are so important. You write in the first chapter of your book, “Throughout this text, I will ask you to keep in mind two parties who are necessary for improving for equity: who is involved with the improvement process, and who will be impacted?”
And you say, “Can you use improvement science to make a process more efficient while maintaining the status quo? Absolutely, but that’s not how I hope you will use it.” It’s really hard to stick to your deficit ideologies, when you have the folks that you’re serving in the room doing the work alongside you.
BHC
It is. I use this fake example of a couple doing the five whys about what was wrong with their relationship. And if one goes and does it all by themselves, everything is the other person’s fault. But if both of them are there, the outcomes and the answers become very different.
Now, there are examples when that’s not always the case, because people, like we talked about with socialization, have internalized different oppressions. And you can go to a marginalized group and find individuals in that group who blame the group for their own marginalization. It happens.
But if you’ve got multiple perspectives from that group, you will have some internal checks and balances. So it’s all about who is involved. That is so, so very critical.
SC
Yeah. I love it. You also write that you have often seen two extremes of unfruitful activities in schools: the adding on of interventions that lead to initiative fatigue or the premature abandonment of interventions that could produce improvement.
And you talk about a particular administrator who says, “we tend to do this ‘adopt, attack, abandon’ approach,” which when I read, I was like, “Oh my gosh. That’s so true.” I’ve seen that in so many places.” Can you say just a little bit about why these extremes happen?
BHC
First of all, there’s a lot of reasons why these things happen. One, practitioners are human, and when every week it’s something new, folks begin to roll their eyes. My dissertation was about how teachers saw their place in policymaking. And I remember one of the teachers saying, “You know, I figure out whatever the buzz word is this week. I throw it in there, and then I close my door and do my thing, because I don’t have time to keep up with X, Y, and Z.”
And it is a humanness, and I get it. The thing is, we are always looking for the next silver bullet, especially when it comes to teaching kids. And this might not be popular, but we know how to teach kids. We do. We do.
SC
Say it, Brandi!
BHC
Gloria Ladson-Billings told us how to teach kids. Then it’s been remixed and reformatted. Gholdy Muhammed has told us how to teach kids in simple, clear, accessible terms. So we know what we need to do.
And so there’s that piece. We also know what needs to happen in schools to make them good places for kids. It’s known. It’s not a secret. But as we churn out something new, oh, here’s the new shiny package. Go do this.
And there’s the other shiny package we’ve only been working with for a little bit. It doesn’t mean that the old one didn’t work. And the shiny package might work differently at Hennet Elementary than it does at Crawford Elementary. And so we need to take the shiny package, if that’s what we’re using, and we need to say, “OK, this didn’t work well. Let’s figure out what the problem was with it. Now let’s massage it and try it again. So now I know this. And you know what? Little Johnny, who’s in my class, is telling me what worked for him and what didn’t.”
So the reason we have this adopt, attack, abandon situation, is impatience. And of course, there is genuine urgency here: we can’t wait for folks to figure out how to teach kids to read 10 years from now. Because what does that mean for the kids right now?
So with that urgency, I get why you want to attack, and then abandon something that isn’t working like you’d hoped it would. But maybe instead, we should be adapting it and making whatever it is responsive to the context that we’re working in. And so it happens because people are human and urgency is real. And it also happens because there is money to be made in making a new shiny thing. Let’s be real.
And also because of external pressure, people feel like they don’t have time to be innovative, or to tweak anything, or to change it and see if it works. Because trying something is risky in a society that is really driven by accountability and outcomes.
SC
I’m with you. I feel like so much of our collective journey at High Tech High has been, how do we create a context where adults can actually take risks in service of better education for students? It’s really hard to create that kind of risk-taking culture, where people feel like they have permission to try things, fail sometimes, learn from that, adapt it to make it better, and really listen to kids along the way, and not get distracted by all the other stuff.
BHC
Right. Also in my dissertation, I had a teacher who told me, “Yeah, I learned all of this good stuff, things to try in my classroom. Then when I got employed at this particular school, this was the culture. My scores weren’t looking like other people’s scores. I abandoned it and moved to test prep, because people are human. And job security and things matter.”
And so we’ve made it such that we don’t really trust teachers as professionals to be able to take this thing and make it work for them.
SC
I’m not sure that this question directly follows, but I really want to ask it. And then I’m going to come back to something that you just said.
In an earlier conversation, you mentioned that there had been some valid critiques of improvement science and that you’d like to see the field respond to those critiques, not just argue about them, but actually do things differently. Can you share a little bit about what are some of the critiques that you’ve come across? And what would that actually look like to you, to do differently, not just debate?
BHC
Yeah. As I said earlier about who you want to be in conversation with, I’m still reading those people that I want to be in conversation with. And a lot of times, those are the folks who really see improvement science as more of a problem than a tool for equity.
And every time I read it, part of me feels like, “Oh no.” But then I also have to read it with, “Yeah, well, you’re right.” And so how does improvement science maybe need, I don’t want to say a makeover, but maybe to really think more about that equitable piece in the process?
I’ll just tell you a couple of the critiques that I’ve heard. And these are all paraphrased, but these are all scholars that I really admire. First, Colleen Capper, in her book on organizational theory for equity and justice, talks about improvement science being part of the structural, functional epistemology, where it’s all concerned about effectiveness and regulation and maintaining the status quo.
And depending on which improvement text you’re reading and how you read it, there is this idea of understanding what your baseline is, paying attention to variation, and figuring out whether you’re trying to get back to your baseline, or are you trying to move everything up? This can sound like a status quo argument. So I get it. I can’t argue back against that.
Similarly, Sonya Horsford, Janelle Scott, and Gary Anderson talked about improvement science leading to a culture of quantification and contrived collegiality. And so, they say, at best, it might be leading to some learning culture, but that’s at best. Because often, it doesn’t, and that’s when people put more emphasis on the data than on the voices. That can easily happen.
And then Megan Bang talks more about design-based research and research-practice partnerships. But she talks a lot about the power dynamics in the process. And she says, despite wanting to be user-centered and whatnot, what tends to happen is the experts do the designing. And the other people are in the room just so that they feel okay about it.
And then recently, Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan, in Street Data, begin chapter four talking about how improvement science is trash. And I’m actually going to quote them. They say, “The tendency to oversimplify improvement and seek incremental change instead of deep transformation makes it a mismatch for equity work.” And one of the first things they talk about is the PDSA cycle and how planning comes two steps before studying. And nobody has asked the people who it impacts anything.
And so when I read it, I said, “See, for a lot of folks, that’s the impression of improvement science.” It’s this thing where we’re coming in, we’re going to quantify everything, we’re going to run some tests, and then based on what the tests tell us, we’re going to do the next thing.
And they miss the process of letting the folks closest to the problem come in and be an integral part of the work. The folks closest to the problem who have the most intimate knowledge are the ones who should be leading the improvement work. You might be an improvement science expert, but you are serving as a facilitator and letting other folks who know about the problem and who you trust have the ingenuity to come up with the solution take the lead.
And I think the way improvement science is often packaged, it seems like that’s not what it’s about at all. So what I would like the field to do, one, is to be a lot more clear about what we mean when we say, “plan,” and be a lot more clear about what it means to be user-centered. And user-centered doesn’t mean just interviewing these folks, it means these folks are a part of the team. They have agency and power and voice in everything we do from what types of data we look at to what decisions we make after we look at that data. And sometimes, I wonder, “Am I describing something different than improvement science?” Because other people clearly don’t see improvement science the way I do.
And then I get this idea—Audre Lorde said that you can’t tear down the master’s house with the master’s tools—and so I get the idea that a lot of people look at improvement science as the master’s tools. Right? But my question is, “Is it the master’s tools if they’re in my hands? Or are they now my tools?”
And so I struggle with the way improvement science is often read so narrowly. And that is, in a lot of the literature, the way it’s elevated. You do this. You do this. You do this. You do this.
But in those steps, I think especially if we are trying to be equitable in our process, it’s a lot more complicated and more complex than that. And if we’re, like I said, humble enough to let the folks who know the most lead us, improvement science can be transformative.
SC
Brandi, you are singing to my heart right now, because I also, for the record, was a hard sell on improvement. And I think sometimes the hard sells are the most passionate folks, in part because when I was introduced to improvement, I was introduced to it in a way that I see a lot of people enacting now where you just go straight to the PDSA cycle. It felt like improvement was just doing a bunch of PDSAs.
And what I loved about your book was that it made it so clear that that is one piece of the process that is very far along the road. You need to do all of the figuring out what is even the problem that you’re trying to impact. What is at the root of that problem? What is the system that’s creating that problem?
Learning from everybody and collaborating with everybody in that system. So that when you get to the place of identifying ideas you want to try and learn about, they’re grounded in that understanding of the system and the problem. And it can be transformative if you do all of that stuff, because you’re literally rethinking the system and deconstructing it purposefully. But if you go straight to the PDSA, then it can be just tinkering at the edges.
BHC
That’s it. I give credit to Anthony Bryk, Paul LeMahieu, Louis Gomez, and Alicia Grunow, for their book, Learning to Improve. If you really look at all those principles that they lay out, they’re not stealth. When you learn something else about the system, you have to change what that system map looks like. Your theory of improvement should reflect the knowledge at that moment. But when it’s packaged as, “Hey, run through these cycles,” that’s not accurate. The PDSA doesn’t show up until chapter eight.
There’s so much you have to do before you get there. And I think the way it has been introduced to people, they’re missing that. And as they go out there, and they’re like, “OK, we’re going to do this cycle.”
Cultural quantification and contrived collegiality, especially when you have people at the table, but you don’t really want to hear what they say. They’re just in the room, so you can check it off. That’s what happens all the time on school improvement teams. You have a parent there, but you’re not really interested in what the parent has to say. I’m trying to do something different here.
And I hope I get other people on board to do something different with me. My children’s middle names are Elizabeth Freedom and Elijah Justice. Everything about me is rooted in justice.
I wouldn’t touch improvement science if I didn’t think it could lead to justice. Because I don’t have time for nothing else. I’m clear about what my purpose on this earth is. And I don’t have time to just be playing around with stuff, but people don’t see it that way. And I’m trying to change what it means or to reconceptualize improvement to center justice.
SC
Brandi, that’s the perfect segue to my last question for you which was, in your epilogue, you write about the need to push for systemic changes while identifying immediate changes we can make right now. And that’s not an either-or.
You also call on the words of Ella Baker, who said, “We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.” And you write, “The fight for justice is iterative and continuous, but iterative does not mean slow or stalling. It means constantly renewing the strategy to get to the goal faster.” And I know that in our previous conversation you said, you’ve been thinking a lot about critical pragmatism. Can you share what that means to you and why you’re thinking about it right now?
BHC
Absolutely. First of all, I would like to say, when I think about my North Stars in improvement, they are folks like Septima Clark, Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker. They’re strategists. And strategists aren’t always the people whose name is in lights.
This week, we’re celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Wouldn’t be no King without Ella, Septima, and Bayard. It just wouldn’t happen. But the strategists are constantly re-evaluating the strategy to move closer to that aim or objective.
Now, when I say systemic change and what we can do right now, and I don’t know if I use this in the epilogue or not, but the thing that comes to mind is state sanctioned violence against Black people. Yes, I want some criminal justice reform. I want accountability for policing. I want these things, and I’m going to vote based on those interests.
I’m going to organize based on those interests. I’m going to march based on those interests, because I want that systemic change. At the same time, I’m going to tell my son and my daughter, when you encounter the police, this is how you behave. When you encounter the police, you can’t get an attitude, ’cause Black people, our skin makes us dangerous.
I’ve told my baby, “You’re cute right now. But when you hit puberty, you’re going to be scary to people, and it’s not fair. It’s effed up, but it is what it is. And my job as your mother and someone who’s trying to protect you is to give you some tools to deal with that situation when it comes, while I’m also over here marching and voting and organizing and doing whatever with the police.” Or in some cases, those folks who are doing research on how Black children and children of color are seen as less innocent. So it’s a both-and.
I want all of this systemic change. But if my kid is pulled over before that happens, I want them to have something they can do and hold onto to try to stay safe in that moment. And it’s like what teachers say in classrooms, “Yeah, I want the curriculum to be different. Yeah, I want X, Y, and Z to happen, and I’m going to do things, I’m not going to just say I want them. I’m going to conscientiously work towards those things. But at the same time, when I close my door in my classroom, I’m going to do what I think all the children deserve. But I’m going to do it for the 30 that I have control over.” And that’s what improvement science is to me.
I am all for people who are like, “burn down the establishment. Let’s start over.” Okay. But while we are starting over, these kids right here who can’t read, what are we going to do with them? I’m sorry. It’s really that practicality piece.
And maybe I’m shortsighted. Maybe I am not courageous enough to just focus on the system. And then maybe that’s not my assignment. Like I said, I’m a Christian. I believe we all got an assignment. Maybe my assignment is to focus on what we can do right now while it’s other folks’ assignment to focus on the big stuff and for me to back them up when I can.
But critical pragmatism is this idea I’ve been wrestling with. I’ve used it. I use it in the book. I used it in the chapter about teaching improvement science for educational justice. And I’m trying to write a piece just delineating what it means to be a critical pragmatist. Because that’s how I’m describing myself.
I don’t want anybody to be like, “Oh, she’s an improvement scientist, and so she’s with the structural functional epistemology.” That’s not who I am. Don’t put me in the box with that.
And so I’m trying to define in some ways a new space for myself and how I see myself. So I’m going to read to you my working definition of critical pragmatism.
A critical pragmatist, i.e. me, is someone who seeks practical or context specific and applicable knowledge to disrupt unjust systems. So it’s all about disruption. They extend the pragmatic question of what works by also asking what is just. They evaluate the merit of practical knowledge by its ability to ameliorate the plight of the marginalized.
Their critical lens constantly reminds them that they possess knowledge only in community. I don’t have the answers. Only in community do I possess any knowledge. And that they only create improvement through authentic and reciprocal collaboration.
And then I’ve got some ideas about what it takes to be a critical pragmatist. One of them is seeing the world through a critical lens. And that takes being grounded in critical scholarship. And I was telling a group of doctoral students that, just like Michael Apple said, as a scholar, you can’t throw out elite knowledge.
If you’re going to be a scholar activist, you got to use what you have been exposed to to bring about change. And you should figure out how to make that kind of elite knowledge accessible to the communities and the constituencies that you serve. So it’s about seeing.
It’s also about critical reflection and recognizing no matter how you’re oriented, or no matter where you think your heart is, we all got work to do. And you’ve got to look in the mirror and say, “You know what? That meeting or that team I was facilitating today, so-and-so was trying to speak and I spoke over them. Or I moved to the next agenda item before their point was made. How can I be different? How can I stand in solidarity with and in service to different groups who might have oppressions that are different than my own?”
So I think there’s a lot that goes into what it means to be a critical pragmatist. And like I said, I’m fleshing these thoughts out in my own brain, but it’s what I’m aspiring to be. I tell people all the time, I’m a liberation slash womanist theologian. I’m a scholar activist.
I’m a critical pragmatist. All these things are aspirational. All of these things I’m trying to constantly be good enough to live up to those titles. And I feel the same way about being a critical pragmatist, but I’m trying.
SC
Brandi, this was such a gift. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and passion with us. Are there any final thoughts that you want to share?
BHC
Yes. As I said, I’m a Christian. And so sometimes I feel like you need to end with a benediction or a call to action or something. And so I just talked about this whole critical pragmatism piece and how it’s aspirational. And I would challenge everyone to aspire to it as well.
There is so much work to be done, and we’ve all been given gifts. And we need to put what we’ve been given to good use. So if that is being a critical pragmatist and you think that’s part of how you can employ your gifts, I would urge you to join me in this fight and help me to reconceptualize improvement as really being about the work of justice.
And then the other thing I would say is about all my 1,000 identities I shared with earlier. Bring who you are to the work of improvement. Who you are matters. Where you situate in the world, where you sit, your perspective has a unique view of the system.
Don’t crush down this identity or that one. We need everybody at the table to undo and disrupt and dismantle some of these structures that keep so many of us down. And so I would ask anybody listening to link arms with me and join the fight.
Capper, C. A. (2018). Organizational Theory for Equity and Diversity: Leading Integrated, Socially Just Education. Routledge.
Hess, F. M., & Fullerton, J. (2010, February 18). The Numbers We Need: How the Right Metrics Could Improve K–12 Education. American Enterprise Institute. https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/the-numbers-we-need-how-the-right-metrics-could-improve-k-12-education/
Safir, S., & Dugan, J. (2021). Street Data: A Next-Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and School Transformation. Corwin Press.
Scott, J. T., Anderson, G. L., & Horsford, S. D. (2018). The Politics of Education Policy in an Era of Inequality: Possibilities for Democratic Schooling. Routledge.
Spaulding, D. T., Hinnant-Crawford, B. N., & Crow, R. (Eds.). (2021). Teaching Improvement Science in Educational Leadership: A Pedagogical Guide. Myers Education Press.
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