Stuck Improving: Racial Equity and School Leadership

An incisive case study of changemaking in action, Stuck Improving analyzes the complex process of racial equity reform within K-12 schools. Scholar Decoteau J. Irby emphasizes that racial equity is dynamic, shifting as our emerging racial consciousness evolves and as racism asserts itself anew. Those who accept the challenge of reform find themselves "stuck improving," caught in a perpetual dilemma of both making progress and finding ever more progress to be made. Rather than dismissing stuckness as failure, Irby embraces it as an inextricable part of the improvement process.

Irby brings readers into a large suburban high school as school leaders strive to redress racial inequities among the school's increasingly diverse student population. Over a five-year period, he witnesses both progress and setbacks in the leaders' attempts to provide an educational environment that is intellectually, socioemotionally, and culturally affirming.

Looking beyond this single school, Irby pinpoints the factors that are essential to the work of equity reform in education. He argues that lasting transformation relies most urgently on the cultivation of organizational conditions that render structural racism impossible to preserve. Irby emphasizes how schools must strengthen and leverage personal, relational, and organizational capacities in order to sustain meaningful change.

Stuck Improving offers a clear-eyed accounting of school-improvement practices, including data-driven instructional approaches, teacher cultural competency, and inquiry-based leadership strategies. This timely work contributes both to the practical efforts of equity-minded school leaders and to a deeper understanding of what the work of racial equity improvement truly entails.


About the Author

Decoteau J. Irby is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he teaches and advises in the College's Urban Education Leadership program. His academic research explores how equity-focused school leadership improves Black children's and youth's educational experiences and outcomes and appears in journals such as Urban Education, International Journal of Multicultural Education, Studies in Educational Evaluation, Educational Administration Quarterly, Equity & Excellence in Education, Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership, Urban Review, and Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk. Outside of his academic life, he enjoys spending time with his children and partner, playing guitar, traveling, and writing songs and short stories.