Preparing and Sustaining Social Justice Educators

Preparing and Sustaining Social Justice Educators spotlights the challenging and necessary work of fostering social justice in schools. Integral to this work are the teachers and school leaders who enact the principles of social justice--racial equity, cultural inclusivity, and identity acceptance--daily in their classrooms. This volume makes the case that high-quality public education relies on the recruitment, professional development, and retention of educators ready to navigate complex systemic and structural inequities to best serve vulnerable student populations.

Annamarie Francois and Karen Hunter Quartz, along with contributing scholars and practitioners, present an intersectional approach to educational justice. The approach is grounded in research about deeper learning, community development, and school reform. Throughout the book, the contributors detail professional activities proven to sustain social justice educators. They show, for example, how effective teacher coaching encourages educators to confront their explicit and implicit biases, to engage in critical conversations and self-reflection, and to assess teacher performance through a social justice lens.

The book illustrates how professional learning collaborations promote diverse, antiracist, and socially responsible learning communities. Case studies at three university-partnered K-12 schools in Los Angeles demonstrate the benefits of these professional alliances and practices.

Francois and Quartz acknowledge the difficulty of the social justice educator's task, a challenge heightened by a K-12 teacher shortage, an undersupplied teacher pipeline, and school closures. Yet they keep their sights set on a just and equitable future, and in this work, they give educators the tools to build such a future.


About the Author

Annamarie Francois is the executive director of UCLA's Center X, where she guides the work of equity-driven educator preparation, development, and support for urban school communities, and is a faculty member in the UCLA Teacher Education Program. She has over thirty years of teaching, teacher leadership, and administrative leadership in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the charter school community, and UCLA's Department of Education. Francois is currently the University of California representative on the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, advisor to the California State University Center to Close the Opportunity Gap, and board president of the Center for Powerful Public Schools. She is an active contributor to national, state, and local networks working to develop models for equity-driven, student-centered, antiracist practices within educator preparation programs. Her public scholarship, teaching, and service support educator development, critical multicultural education and culturally responsive literacies, and transformative school-university collaboration. She received her BA from UCLA; her MA in higher education, administration, and supervision from California State University, Northridge; and her EdD in Educational Leadership from UCLA.

Karen Hunter Quartz directs the UCLA Center for Community Schooling and is a faculty member in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Her research, teaching, and service support community school development, teacher autonomy and retention, and educational reform. Quartz led the design team in 2007 to create the UCLA Community School and served in 2017 on the design team for a second site, the Mann UCLA Community School. She currently oversees a portfolio of research-practice partnerships at both schools, designed to advance democracy, inquiry, and change. She is recipient of the 2001 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association, the 2004 Outstanding Writing Award from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, the 2017 national Teacher-Powered Schools Initiative's Advancement in Research Award, and the 2017 Outstanding Professional Teaching Award from the UCLA Department of Education. She received her BA from Huron College, MA in philosophy from the University of Western Ontario, and her PhD in education from UCLA.