Equity depends on practice—what we actually do and say—not just what we profess.
Education in this country has never been equitable. The founders of the common schools in the mid-nineteenth century professed that education would be for “all students,” yet their project served only white students, simultaneously building systems to exclude Black youth and extinguish Native people’s culture and language (Brayboy, 2026; Ewing, 2025; Givens & Ison, 2022).
Our common accounts of the origins and aim of public education distort these histories. Furthermore, those stories fail to account for the role that schools have played in upholding and perpetuating a racially stratified and hierarchical society to this day (Ewing, 2025; Givens & Ison, 2022). For example, the contemporary suspension rate of Black girls is more than twice that of white girls for the same infractions (Epstein et al., 2017), underscoring the role played by teacher discretion. Research that probes why Black and Latiné students are half as likely to be assigned to gifted and talented programs as white students makes visible the impact of teacher subjective judgment (Grissom & Redding, 2016). In these and myriad other cases, we see the long hand of history that has systemically excluded Black and Brown students.
I begin here because looking from this broad sociohistorical perspective matters for deeply understanding the roots of everyday practices that sustain those patterns. Everyday practices matter. Uprooting harmful practices requires systemic understanding and intentional effort. So does learning to enact new practices to advance equity.
Our work at TeachingWorks is premised on a view that teaching has power, and that power can either reproduce inequity or intentionally disrupt it.
In our efforts at TeachingWorks to identify, decompose, and then, more recently, revise the high-leverage practices (HLPs), we faced two dilemmas. One was whether to integrate equity throughout the practices, or explicitly name specific equity-focused practices. And a second was how to specify practices to make visible what doing them looks like and entails, and yet make clear that their enactment depends on context and judgment.
Should equity be integrated throughout the practices, or should specific equity practices be explicitly named?
In our revised set of HLPs, we have managed this dilemma by doing both: by naming specific equity practices and by continuing to highlight how to advance equity through each HLP.
Two new practices are specifically about equity. Attending to identity in interactions with students and families focuses on the importance of one’s own and others’ identities throughout all aspects of the work. Acknowledging competence focuses directly on broadening what counts as “competence” and who is positioned as competent. Each of these matters for naming and disrupting persistent inequitable patterns in practice.
How can we balance the need to specify practices so that we make visible what doing them looks like and entails and yet make clear that their enactment depends on context and judgment?
This question is a tough one. If we do not specify what a particular practice looks like in action and what it takes, we risk leaving it as a mere aspiration or belief. But if we specify, we run a different risk—that of scripting a kind of work that is itself nuanced and contingent, reliant on discretion and judgment.
Take, for example, leading a group discussion. Group discussions provide opportunities for students to learn to listen to others, engage in collegial disagreement, and work collectively on ideas—all practices crucial to content learning and to civic discourse in a democratic society. The reason to hold group discussions is rooted in these commitments.
Without care, however, group discussions can marginalize some students, prioritize particular points of view or the voices of particular students, and reinforce students’ negative perceptions of their peers as less competent. Leading a discussion in which everyone’s voice is heard, where different people’s contributions are valued, and where the discussion advances the purposes of learning takes more than commitment. It takes both skill and judgment. It takes content knowledge and the capacity to see each student and their ideas. It takes seeing all the discretion involved in teaching and moving in ways that advance equity rather than impede it.
The TeachingWorks high-leverage practices are fundamental components of classroom instruction. But like any resource, how they are used, and the ends to which they are put, matter immeasurably. Even with the specification and explicitness with which we have named and decomposed the HLPs, judgment matters. Tone of voice matters. Relationships matter.
We have balanced between leaving practice at the level of belief and aspiration, on one hand, and creating the misleading impression that practice can be scripted, on the other.
Teaching matters. And teaching, exercised with care and nuance, can disrupt longstanding patterns of racial hierarchy that permeate schools and classrooms in taken-for-granted practice. Teaching works.
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For more information on the high-leverage practices and how they can be used to advance equity, see our newly published report, High-Leverage Practices of Teaching.