Phd in Leadership and Change Admissions Application Essay

In Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority, Burrell questions, “So then why, after all this time, when calculating the achievement of the ‘American Dream,’ are we still ranked at the bottom of almost every ‘good’ list, and at the top of the ‘bad’ lists?” (2010, “Introduction”). The U.S. schooling system minoritizes (Harper, 2012) youth of color and other vulnerable students, disparately impacting their potential to thrive in school and beyond. Yet, most education leaders point solutions at individual-level practices and pedagogies rather than at institutional and structural-level causes of inequity. We have a leadership conundrum to solve. This admissions application essay in the form of a scholarly personal narrative (Nash, 2004) intersperses the story of my past with my evolving story as a social impact leader whose focus has shifted to empowering a new critical mass of Equity Influencers™ to create systemic change and equity in education. Antioch’s PhD in Leadership and Change can accelerate and enhance my trajectory toward that important change work.

Background and Impetus

My aspiration personally and professionally is to see my concept of an anti-racist education equation come to pass in my lifetime. I felt defeated after dropping out of my local EdD program due to traumatic life circumstances (fleeing an abusive marriage and losing my mother) while thriving on the job of a lifetime (global Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Director for a large, youth development nonprofit for which my travel prohibits face-to-face learning)—all while rearing my children. I feel at times that I do not carry the same confidence due to lack of credentials commensurate with my peers. I decided that I would not allow the marketable skills I had gained in my past coursework and the words I had written go to waste. A TEDx Talk, a book and a revitalization of my consulting firm would come of it all.

My TEDx Talk is also my story — the story of one minoritized girl (Harper, 2012) educated in the Midwest in the 1970s, the story of a teacher, the story of a mommy, and the story of an emerging social impact leader. Schools and school teachers have the potential to be brokers of hope and great equalizers. Born in the early 1970s, my peers and I were meant to inherit the promises of Brown v. the Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act. I was born prematurely to a teen, mentally-ill mom in the summer of 1973. On the next day, the othermothers in my hometown filed suit against the local school district for failing to deliver the promises of Brown versus the Board of Education—twenty years after it was decided for the rest of the country. They had to wait until I got here, I like to imagine.

Since first grade, I recall being interested in the differences between me and those unlike me. The integrated buildings I was bussed to were places of refuge and intolerance. We lived in extreme poverty. I loved school because books were there; I hated schools because I was misunderstood by my teachers and the children force-bussed to my neighborhood. Schools minoritized me, chose not to focus on my joys or assets, and made “my normal” feel incredibly abnormal. I am neither a “minority” nor a problem to be solved. There’s nothing minor about me or my experience. Though I lived through some adverse childhood experiences, I am not a label or a statistic. I never wanted to be tolerated, accommodated, pitied or coddled. I wanted to be understood and to have access to opportunity. I felt smart, but schools refused to see it or grow it. I wanted to thrive in STEM and become an ultra-sonographer. I wanted the adults in my life to conspire together for my success. I started speaking out against racism at about 16 years old through teen racial roundtables and a talk show on the radio. I decided that schools could be spaces for racial healing, so I decided to become a teacher.

I chose teaching as a career believing that with integrated education as the great equalizer, all forms of racial discrimination outlawed, and our right to vote and other basic rights secured, we would thrive. This is not true for far too many of my peers and their children more than 60 years later. Teaching while Black was hard: working twice as hard to get half as far, explaining Black students’ failed test-taking and low proficiency and why Black boys were suspended frequently, but also reminding teachers that pitying and coddling Black students solved nothing. As a young professional, I tried to fight racism one student and educator at a time. On my leadership journey, I have learned that systems minoritize people to control their potential. Yes, schooling as a system is a mechanism for control and a maintainer of the status quo. It uses socially created lies of inferiority to minoritize certain students: those who are not wealthy, White, straight, able, etc. It exacerbates difference by exemplifying deficits.

Seven years in, I left teaching plagued with questions: Despite the 40s to 60s fights for educational civil rights and legal remedies, is the United States where those who led the efforts imagined it would be? How could we have created this dire condition in education where this many Black students are at the bottom of every positive school ranking — the worst — and at the very top of most negative school metrics — the best at being bad? How does the community collaborate with teachers to implement an anti-racist education equation? We start by mobilizing a critical mass of influencers: youth, families, teachers, community members, business stakeholders, policymakers, funders and others.

In 2006, I started a consulting firm called READY Nationwide, National Remedies for Equity & for the Achievement of Disenfranchised Youth. I want to do more than single-client contract work, “sit and get” workshops, and keynote addresses. My focus has shifted to empowering a new critical mass of social impact leaders committed to creating equity. In equity, diversity, and inclusion work, we tend to focus on individual-level fixes—for internalized and interpersonal oppressions. We should continue that. Self-determinism and self-efficacy are vital. We must also commit to cross-sector collaboration for fixing or creating new policies and practices to repair the systemic-level brokenness of schooling—institutional and structural oppressions. We must create a new narrative and be change agents at both levels.

Present and Vision

Post-graduation, I imagine me and my national team of consultants coaching community coalitions of influencers from all identified sectors through a well-designed process to conspire for children, mobilize together and create lasting change. I began branding this notion using my story and started encouraging everyone to become Equity Influencers™ during my TEDx Talk. As a self-proclaimed social impact leader, it is important to me to have answers when people ask what qualifies me to teach others how to lead equity work. This year I started the process of trademarking what it means to become an Equity Influencer™ for people who choose to do equity, diversity and inclusion work, but want to enhance their understanding of core concepts and their leadership/management of systemic change projects.

Equipping adults to address inequity and advance social justice has always been a priority throughout my professional journey. I have spent almost a quarter of a decade working as a youth development specialist, certified teacher, nonprofit executive, university program coordinator/adjunct professor, community organizer, public policy advocate and volunteer for several organizations and initiatives locally and nationally. As a volunteer, I am leading a regional implementations of My Brother’s Keeper (Obama Foundation) and Let Her Learn (National Women’s Law Center) in the Omaha Metro area—both efforts prioritizing racial and gender equity.

As a full-time employee, I am currently the global Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Director for FIRST—For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology—a New Hampshire-based nonprofit serving 107 countries that offers accessible, innovative programs to motivate young people to pursue education and career opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), while building self-confidence, knowledge, and life skills. I lead its STEM equity initiative to design and implement strategies that will not only improve the diversity of K-12 program participation but will also embed inclusion within the FIRST organization and field implementation. A thought leader in this space, I am a nationally-sought speaker and have contributed to Education World, Scholastic, Medium, and the FIRST Inspire blog. I provide opportunities for major corporations like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Boeing, John Deere, Amazon and others to demonstrate their commitment to social responsibly and diversifying the STEM talent pipeline through funding sponsorship, employee engagement and more.

Organizational change is never easy. Currently, FIRST lacks diversity and must improve inclusion, and it has expressed a commitment to bringing its programs to those who would benefit most. For my first three years, I was silo-ed as a single-person department. This was doable, but not feasible. My role has been to close gaps through cross-departmental and cross-programmatic projects which requires the management of ad hoc cross-functional teams and the art of managing sideways across key decision points and stakeholders. “In contrast to change management—which is an outside-in process with a focus on structures, systems and processes—change leadership is the inside-out element of meeting the change challenge” (Dinwoodie, Pasmore, Quinn, & Rabin, 2015, p. 2). Leading the people side of change is not an easy feat, especially for leaders like me who are “read as” traditionally marginalized and lead from their collectivist orientation.

The next story reflects my understanding of “leadership and change” in equity, diversity and inclusion work. I vividly remember the moment that my second attempt at securing budget to add staff got rejected. The emailed words stung. Thoughts about my own internalized inferiority as the only Black woman in senior leadership haunted me. Was I being “othered,” was my idea bad, or was I mis-reading the situation? This incident was coincidentally occurring at the same time as my colleagues and I were writing about thriving and leading in predominately white spaces (Escayg, Butler, Webb, Murray, & Henderson, 2019):

Over time, the Black women were able to read the dominant cultural codes of their institutions, yet were marginalized within these spaces as Black women. The Black women were ‘othered’ by their institutions through policies and practices that marginalized them on a daily basis” (p. 18). 

Parenthetically, I was asked to submit a sample with my Antioch admissions application. While I know solo-authored samples were preferred, the aforementioned chapter is the most recent example demonstrating my writing ability and conceptual thinking skills. The portions of the work within my scope of responsibility included: Theoretical Frameworks (Critical Race Theory, Black Feminist Thought, and Counter-Storytelling), Discussion and Analysis, and the Conclusion.

Wrapping up my story, I felt othered and misled by the no answer. I had seen a pronounced number of new staff members added daily, yet I was expected to carry one-fifth of the strategic plan alone. I have become increasingly skilled at creating brave spaces (Arao & Clemens, 2013) for me and others to call out problematic issues while charting positive paths forward, so I expressed my concern—to be confirmed as “the angry Black woman” ultimately. Despite successfully, single-handedly implementing structures, systems and processes, yet unsuccessfully presenting justifications for adding headcount to the Equity, Diversity & Inclusion department, I knew I had to become crafty about addressing the people side of change: adding human capital and distributing leadership.

In the same spirit of innovation as we require from the students we serve, I turned this story of discouragement into one of impetus and launched several pilots: 1) an Equity Action Planning Project (EAPP), 2) the Designing STEM Equity Fellowship, 3) the Allies & Influencers Program, and 3) two Advisory Committees, to name a few. The EAPP training experience provided all four programs and every departments (Marketing, HR, IT, etc.) with the training required to have an ED&I Liaison who would lead to the development and implementation of action plans developed during the workshop over an 18-month period. Not only did I land a phenomenal contract consultant to my team, but I also gained partial time equivalence of 10 staffer liaisons. Also, I raised corporate sponsor funding to design and staff the Designing STEM Equity Fellowship—a leadership development program. Our inaugural, full-time Fellow has been a powerful asset. The Allies & Influencers Program empowers 11 inaugural, regional field Allies with the tools they need to provide support to over 100 field Influencers on specific racial equity, gender equity and disability inclusion projects. Lastly, I launched a 15-member ED&I Advisory Committee and a 9-member inaugural Youth Advisory Committee to be my thought partners in the work. I am no longer a department of one. I no longer allow internalized inferiority or external factors to deter me.

Building proper infrastructure and programming for this new department as a remote employee working from my home office is an important accomplishment professionally. I have been able to leverage the skillsets accumulated while taking on volunteer community initiative leadership roles, client consulting, trainings/event presentations, part-time adjunct work and oter work-at-home projects over the past years. I mention this to explain my deep time commitment to community mobilizing, training and education. I also mention it to highlight my solid capacity for project management/accountability and my ability to use an array of tools and technologies to perform optimally. I have the capacity to initiate and self-direct my learning; what is lacking now is the opportunity.

As doctoral student in the PhD in Leadership and Change program, I want to give my undivided attention to this research and thought leadership journey toward what it means to be an Equity Influencer™. I intend to answer Ospina and Foldy’s (2009) call to action focused on how “emphasizing the collective dimensions of both race–ethnicity and leadership may yield context-rich leadership research, and contribute to the goal of exploring the ‘how’ of leadership” (p. 877). For future in-depth study during the individualized curriculum portion of this program, I want to do more research on anti-racist, anti-oppression frameworks and leading community mobilization efforts for education reform. I want to 1) identify historical efforts pre-Brown versus the Board of Education through the multicultural education era and into current day reforms, 2) build a solid conceptual framework and theory of change based on research I have already begun in leadership development/support of equity, diversity and inclusion work, and 3) demonstrate how this approach differently adds value to my chosen field.

This PhD program will also enable me to become a more effective professional and principled leader in my full-time work and with my consulting clients. I want to codify common challenges and position my future team of national Equity Influencers™ and the community coalitions they support to overcome them including: 1) understanding of why community mobilization efforts and social change efforts fail, 2) enlisting non-education leaders in the work to leverage their influence, 3) grappling with the realization that some educators and community leaders have already believed socially-created lies about students of color and how this biases their decision-making, and 4) pushing past leaders’ tendency to address the visible symptoms of inequity at the individual level (internalized and interpersonal inequity) rather than fixing the systemic-level brokenness of education (institutional and structural inequity).

“For several decades, educators, policymakers, and parents alike have posited theories… leveled charges of racism…meanwhile, the numbers haven't budged,” (Burrell, 2010, p. 163). Rarely can one bad teacher or even one failing school take blame for pervasive, historic academic gaps. Equity Influencers™ can, however, intentionally redress systemic level, socially-created ideologies of inferiority about Black students and mitigate deficit-oriented decision-making that both place these students at a disadvantage (Harper, 2012). Armed with the requisite level of hope, education, experience and visibility, I am renewed with excitement about how the education system can help more students of color thrive in school and in life. This imperative work can generate new or improved theoretical models, can influence and reform education policy and practice, and can open doors for a new critical mass of leaders who grasp the significance of this systemic-level work and who apply new leadership mindsets and methodologies. I believe Antioch’s PhD in Leadership and Change opportunity will offer me a powerful, incubated experience, and I embrace the opportunity.

References

• Arao, B., & Clemens, K. (2013). From safe spaces to brave spaces. The art of effective facilitation: Reflections from social justice educators, 135-150.
• Burrell, T. (2010). Brainwashed: Challenging the myth of Black inferiority. Hay House, Inc.
• Dinwoodie, D., Pasmore, W., Quinn, L., & Rabin, R. (2015). Navigating change: A leader’s role. Center for Creative Leadership. White Paper, 1.
• Escayg, K.-A., Butler, A., Webb, D., Murray, T., & Henderson, S., (In press, 2019). Narratives of resistance: The experiences of Black women as leaders, teachers, mothers, and academics. In R. Jeffries, (Ed.), Queen mothers: Articulating the spirit of Black women teacher-leaders. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.
• Harper, S. R. (2012). Race without racism: How higher education researchers minimize racist institutional norms. The Review of Higher Education, 36(1), 9-29.
• Henderson, S. (2017, October). Shelley Henderson—Is schooling a mechanism for racial control? [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMdT5do66Ck
• Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
• Ospina, S., & Foldy, E. (2009). A critical review of race and ethnicity in the leadership literature: Surfacing context, power and the collective dimensions of leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 20(6), 876-896.