8 minute read
INTERVIEW Muhammad Khalifa, Ph.D.
Photography by Harry Acosta 24 California School Business Winter 2022
Muhammad Khalifa, Ph.D.
Professor, author shares how culturally responsive leadership can liberate all learners
By Julie Phillips Randles
Muhammad Khalifa, Ph.D., didn’t launch his career as an executive leader in a wellappointed corner office. Khalifa began as a classroom teacher, standing in front of rows of Black and Brown students in Detroit. He’d spend breaks in the teachers’ lounge, where his colleagues were happy to use the water cooler to pass along advice about the students they shared: Jerome needed an attitude adjustment. Laquisha’s parents clearly didn’t care about her. Manuel needed to apply himself and stop expecting teachers to assign passing grades just for showing up in the seat.
And Khalifa, a Black man from a socially conscious family, found himself agreeing with these deficit views.
“Although I knew something about the challenges my students faced in their lives, I did not know about the historical practices and policies that schools perpetuated, where curriculum, pedagogy, programs and activities were not created with them in mind,” he told industry journalists in 2020. So Khalifa began studying educators who were breaking the mold, and found a mentor right in his own backyard.
Joe Dulin, a Black principal who led a 400-student urban alternative high school in Ann Arbor, allowed the young teacher to study his approach. That research put Khalifa in meetings with communities, and made him privy to intimate conversations with family, candid rap sessions and student conversations.
Today, Khalifa uses his position as a professor of educational administration and the executive director of urban and rural initiatives at The Ohio State University to help administrators and staff accept students for who they are, and to encourage teachers to make lessons relevant (hip-hop in the room? Go for it!) He has published four books and more than 50 other publications in some of the most highly rated journals in education. His most recent book, Culturally Responsive School Leadership, is a top seller and is being used in more than 100 leadership training programs worldwide. And he is currently writing a book on culturally responsive instructional leadership.
He is also the president of the CRSL Institute (Culturally Responsive School Leadership) in St. Paul, Minnesota, which helps administrators conduct researchbased audits of their districts to root out and eliminate systemic disparities.
Muhammad Khalifa, Ph.D.
Acceptance, servant leadership, advocacy, overlapping, nurture – all are daily words in Khalifa’s life.
“School leaders must be students of the histories of the communities they serve, including the traditional barriers to education that communities have faced. School leaders must also understand the historical context of the institutions they represent to these communities. But they shouldn’t stop there; they must, then, be able to translate this knowledge into effective leadership practices in their schools and districts,” he says of the institute.
The result is schools that liberate students.
CASBO sat down with Khalifa to get his insights on culturally responsive leadership and how schools can do better in this area.
What’s one thing you changed your mind about recently?
In this post-COVID space, I have changed the way I think about how educators should engage the communities they serve. I have for years advocated that educators and educational leaders need to spend time outside of their own
organizations and in the communities where families live. This allows them to more deeply understand, to grow trust and to more poignantly adjust the organization to meet diverse needs. However, recently, given the constraints of COVID, I was able to see the many unique ways educators used to engage parents and students that did not always include physical visits. So while physical visits are still valuable and necessary, the current times call for us to be more flexible in how we engage community spaces.
What’s your go-to mantra in hard times?
What is meant to hit us, will not miss. And what was meant to miss us, will cause no harm.
As a former educator and administrator, what historical practices and policies did you see schools perpetuate related to curriculum, pedagogy and activities that harmed marginalized students?
The erasure of marginalized students from the curriculum and pedagogy has been very harmful to marginalized students. This happens in a number of ways.
One is leaving them missing from the written curriculum itself. Another is having instructional practices that are not inclusive and that are far more beneficial to middle-class, white, suburban students. And third, the climate of the classroom context is often exclusionary and hostile toward marginalized students.
What unique leadership skills are present in culturally responsive leaders?
Culturally responsive leaders must lead institutions in ways that affirm the learning, cultural assets, relationships and other educational needs of Indigenous, Black, Brown, ELL and any other marginalized students.
Such leaders must learn how to engage communities in non-colonizing ways, and must allow community discourses and concerns to take precedence in the relationship (not only schoolrelated issues). When determining the needs of marginalized students, they must use data, with special emphasis placed on community-based data (student voices, Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) data, equity audit data, etc.). If leaders only focus on school-produced data, they will always arrive at the same conclusions.
Culturally responsive leaders must also find ways for these community voices and experiences to shift all leadership and system-change processes within the organization. So while it is important to discuss and tackle equity-oriented data head-on, it is also necessary for hiring, recruitment, retention, goal-setting, professional development, coaching and mentoring, curriculum development, professional learning community work, community-engagement and other leadership work to all have culturally responsive measures with measurement/evaluation/accountabilities embedded throughout these tools and processes.
What specific actions create congruence in moving from knowledge to action?
I encourage districts to have culturally responsive leadership training in conjunction with equity audits. Equity audits allow organizations to know their strengths, weaknesses/gaps, how they might prioritize equity reforms and where they should start.
Since so much money is spent on making sure teachers are culturally responsive, leaders are often left behind. So even with a powerful tool like an equity audit, which literally can be a road map for how to chart the equity journey, the
Muhammad Khalifa, Ph.D.
leaders may not have the capacity to carry it out!
That’s why we recommend both. And we also recommend Community Participatory Action Research (CPAR) and YPAR projects, so that the research can be continuous, even beyond the equity audit.
One service you provide is performing school district equity audits. What are you looking for during these audits?
Our equity audits are unique in a number of ways when compared to other models the industry.
For one, we seek and include all stakeholder voices, not only that of the board, executive leadership, principals and teachers, but also of families and students. Secondly, our surveys and interviews are all grounded in scholarship. This allows us to take up the personal journeys and interpersonal relationships, but also to push far beyond that, into understandings about how reforms can take place at the system level. From our research, we already know the most common causes of inequities in schools and districts, so our researchoriented tool removes the guesswork and speaks directly to the needs of districts.
And of course, all of our equity audit reports come with a separate recommendations report, and can even be followed up by Culturally Responsive School Leadership (CRSL) coaching.
You’ve said that school leaders can be influential in their communities when it comes to advocating for cultural responsiveness. What steps can they take? What does that look like?
The biggest encouragement is for leaders to learn from communities, and only after that, be advocates for community-based causes. This is necessary because trust and rapport is a necessary component to CRSL schooling.
Because of the harsh histories around schools, it’s up to leaders to actually take the onus, and to lead and establish a relationship with the communities they serve (Yes, ALL OF THEM). If you cannot establish this, you will never be seen as credible.
I have seen this happen most directly when leaders show up in their communities’ time of need. To advocate for community-based causes may seem daunting or unreasonable for many leaders, but that is how education has always
(historically) happened in many marginalized communities.
You’ve mentioned equity teams as key to supporting cultural responsiveness. How should these teams be structured and what is their role?
Equity teams should be given power to improve schools and should not merely be there to allow administrators to say that they have one. Equity teams should be well-versed in the current equity data, as well as the reforms that the district or school have chosen.
Students and parents should be influential on the teams, but they should never be burdened with the work. Principals must be modelers of the work, and equity teams should be a safe place for them to lean into the work.
Equity team members should rotate on and off, so that capacity grows horizontally in the organization. And equity teams must seek out nontraditional forms of data, and nontraditional reforms, so that they can enrich the equity journeys of the school in new and unique ways.
Where can our readers learn more about culturally responsive leadership?
There is loads of free information on our website (crsli.org), and the introduction to my widely read text on culturally responsive leadership is available for free on the Harvard Education Press website hepg.org/hep-home/books/culturallyresponsive-school-leadership. z z z
Julie Phillips Randles is a freelance writer based in Roseville, California.
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