Tangipahoa Parish School System partners with Panorama for surveys given to students and teachers; promotes changing curricula to align with district’s equity plan

On June 3, 2021, the Tangipahoa Parish School System published a district equity plan called “Critical Consciousness, Equity & Inclusion: Blueprint for Progress.” In the plan, the school district lists five keys to ensuring a “high student performance”:

• Shared Purpose: Core Values and a Focus on Critical Consciousness, Equity, and Inclusion (CCEI)
  • Shifting to an explicit naming of CCEI work and values — and adults being accountable for meeting goals and exemplifying Core Values
    
• High Quality Curriculum: Rigorous, Inclusive, and Critically Conscious
  • Shifting to build educator capacity to make difficult content accessible to all students and to use technology strategically
    
• Culture: Anti-biased, Purposeful Cultures with Strong Relationships
  • Shifting to actively promoting student, family, employee, and community wellness in addition to academics
    
• Talent: Recruit, Select, Capacity-building, and Accountability
  • Shifting to ensure educators and all staff reflect the diversity of our community, exemplify CCEI, and that we attract and retain the best team
    
• Procedures: New Processes and Partnerships Aligned to Core Values
  • Shifting key processes to take a strengths-based approach to keeping students safe and learning

The equity plan has a section for each of these five areas. In the section for “Shared Purpose,” the school district states that it aspires to promote “critical consciousness by embracing equity and inclusion.” In an effort to achieve this goal, the school district will remove “existing barriers and promote honesty in examining our implicit biases that prevent us from exhibiting our Core Values.” The equity plan has the term “critical consciousness” described as “empowering individuals (students, staff, and other stakeholders) to recognize racial and other inequities and to ‘be the change’ they wish to see in their community.” The school district will be “selecting core and supplemental curricula” that are aligned with its equity plan.

In the section for “High Quality Curriculum,” the equity plan explains that “curricula and supplemental materials that are culturally-competent and reflect the racial, ethnic, socio-economic, gender, and diversity of students promote inclusivity and increase academic success for all children.” The equity plan further explains that the school district has already “incorporated complex and diverse texts that support the state shift of being inclusive and advancing the Louisiana State Standards into the core curriculum across all grade levels and content areas.”

In the “Culture” section, the equity plan states that the school district will implement Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) “seamlessly in the school day to ensure all adults in our schools focus on equipping students with personal success factors.” The equity plan also announces that the school district has partnered with Panorama as a “survey and data collection partner.” The equity plan states that students and teachers will take online surveys so that the district “can gather actionable data to prioritize support for students and teachers.”

In a strategic plan document for 2021-2025, the school district explains that it will cost approximately $20,000 to “reevaluate the use of SEL curriculum that we use (Character First) and SEL Assessment tools (Panorama) in order to ensure full alignment to our equity vision of providing a culturally inclusive, anti-biased, and anti-racist approach to learning and assist schools with providing a dedicated SEL time in their schedules.”

The school district’s website promotes Panorama surveys to students and teachers with documents of the questions that are asked. In a survey for students in the third grade through the fifth grade, students are asked the questions “What is your gender?” and “What is your race or ethnicity?”

In the survey for students in the sixth grade through the twelfth grade, the following questions are asked:

• How often do teachers encourage you to learn about people from different races, ethnicities, or cultures?
• How often do you think about what someone of a different race, ethnicity, or culture experiences?
• How confident are you that students at your school can have honest conversations with each other about race?
• At your school, how often are you encouraged to think more deeply about race-related topics with other students at your school?
• How comfortable are you sharing your thoughts about race-related topics with other students at your school?
• How often do students at your school have important conversations about race, even when they might be uncomfortable?
• When there are major events related to race, how often do adults at your school talk about them with students?
• How well does your school help students speak out against racism?
• What do you wish your teachers knew about your experiences of race, ethnicity, or culture at school?
• What is the most important thing your school can keep doing to support students of different races, ethnicities, and cultures?
• What is your gender?
• What is your race or ethnicity?

In the survey for teachers and staff, the following questions are asked:

• How often do school leaders encourage you to teach about people from different races, ethnicities, or cultures?
• How often do you think about what colleagues of different races, ethnicities, or cultures experience?
• How confident are you that adults at your school can have honest conversations with each other about race?
• At your school, how often are you encouraged to think more deeply about race-related topics?
• How comfortable are you discussing race-related topics with your colleagues?
• How often do adults at your school have important conversations about race, even when they might be uncomfortable?
• When there are major news events related to race, how often do adults at your school talk about them with each other?
• How well does your school help staff speak out against racism?
• How can school leaders help you better learn about, discuss, and confront issues of race, ethnicity, and culture?