The Equity Audit as the Core of Leading Increasingly Diverse Schools and Districts

This chapter positions the equity audit as the primary equity practice in schools, providing insight for both educational leaders and those that prepare them. Since that time, scholars have engaged in a variety of inquiry and development projects involving equity audits, many seeking to expand the focus of equity audits or to more explicitly define the methods used to conduct equity audits and to make the best use of equity audit results. Schools emerged as mission schools that leveraged the state mandate and equity audit process to strengthen the equity work they were already doing. Educational scholars have long employed the methods of equity audit. Moreover, achieving educational equity requires that school leaders have the knowledge and skills to understand educational inequity, to identify its causes, and to transform practices and conditions in schools