Maurice Swinney speaking at a convening of educators and district equity leaders at the University Council for Educational Administration in 2022.
How can schools ensure all of their students achieve the best possible educational outcomes with limited resources and unique challenges facing different groups? That’s the question I ventured to answer as the inaugural chief equity officer of Chicago Public Schools. I'm a lifelong educator, with more than 21 years working in public education, so I’ve seen and experienced a lot of things over that time with regard to the needs and challenges of my students.
Some methods we've used to address equity issues in schools have worked well for some students, and not for others, sometimes closing educational gaps, and sometimes exacerbating them. This is a common predicament faced by educators, and it wasn’t until I came across john a. powell's work and began engaging in deep listening in communities that I found an approach that was responsive to the varying needs across student groups. powell is the architect of the Othering & Belonging Institute’s Targeted Universalism framework, which we ended up adopting in Chicago.
Targeted Universalism is a framework that sets universal goals but uses targeted strategies based on the circumstances of different groups to help them reach the goal. While TU can be applied to almost any field, I believe it has a particular strength in education due to the diversity of students' needs and backgrounds who are all sitting and learning together in the same classrooms. What I appreciated about Target Universalism is that it forces you to consider the needs of every group of students, and realize that in many cases their needs are in fact very different, even if they may not appear to be so.
Even before I learned about TU I understood that we needed to pair hard data with the stories we heard from our students. Looking at test scores and achievement rates alone doesn't come close to offering the full picture of what's happening with our students.
One of the ways we decided to address the disparate needs of the students was to work with a group of teachers to develop a classroom-based Targeted Universalism tool. The tool asks teachers to set an overall goal they want to achieve in their classrooms, and identify where different student groups are faring relative to that goal. The student groups they identified could be related to whatever categories they saw in their classrooms, including, race, gender, dis/ability, language, immigration, learning styles, enrollment period, and those with signs of trauma, among others.
Once the teachers identify the different groups and how they are performing relative to the goal, the tool asks them to develop tailored strategies for each group to get them to that goal. Teachers set a timeline to achieve their goals and monitor progress. The Equity Office focused on district-wide resource allocation and policy change while also recognizing teachers needed supports to ensure the needs of their students were being addressed.
With a school system that large you need data decisions over how big a slice of the resource pie each school gets. We used the data we gathered from each school to create equity indices and discover who needs more. It also helped us explain to people why some resources are going to particular schools and not to others. In some cases the schools that were generally performing better than others still had groups of students that needed attention, and that was taken into account when making decisions around resource allocation.
But as I mentioned, the numbers by themselves don't give you the complete picture. You also need to listen to the students to understand why they may be struggling, just like a doctor listens to their patients to understand what symptoms they're experiencing before arriving at a diagnosis. I’ve always valued deep listening, but my experience with TU sharpened that instinct by showing me how transformative it can be when systems center the lived experiences of student groups. TU didn’t make me a listener—it affirmed that real change comes when we ask more questions and resist the urge to assume what’s best for young people and their families. We listened to our students, asked them questions, took the information they gave us, and put it up against our district data in order to develop our district-wide goals.
One example that illustrates this is something I experienced several years ago when I was a school principal. I remember our black male students were performing very well, but the Latino students were not. We were fortunate at this school to be relatively well resourced at the time, so we may have been able to reallocate things to address this issue if needed. I invited our Latino students to lunch to tell me what was going on with them, and what they needed to improve their performance. I thought maybe they would say they needed more tutoring, or bilingual instruction, or maybe they were having issues with their teachers. But it turned out it wasn't about academic resources at all. It was about their sense of belonging.
Many of our black male students felt a sense of belonging through their participation in the school's football team. The team built community, connection, and support for them not just on the field, but in the classroom as well. Our Latino students observed this camaraderie among the black students through sports, but they didn't have soccer or in-school social structures that brought their community together in the same way. This was an eye opening revelation for me that couldn't have possibly been captured by looking at quantitative data alone. Looking at data alone would have told us we just need to offer more tutoring to our Latino students, and I think that would have been one of the worst mistakes I would have made, like a doctor ordering the wrong treatment for a patient. That's why we have to slow down, ask the right questions, listen to our young people, and be open to feedback we may not want to hear.
Teachers who used the TU framework saw both academic and social progress. Chicago has since regained academic ground, thanks to how schools and classrooms prioritized listening to build effective strategies to support young people.
I hope our approach to TU will inspire others around the United States to see that equity is possible and achievable in their school districts as well. It doesn’t mean the model we're using in Chicago is the only way to go about it. Every district is going to have their own challenges and opportunities based on their situations. It will be a learning curve for everyone, just as it was for us in Chicago. But if equity in education is a priority for you, Targeted Universalism is one path worth exploring.
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Dr. Maurice Swinney is the Chief Innovation Officer at Chicago Beyond, a national philanthropic organization that invests in people, and a lifelong educator with more than 21 years of public education experience.
