STATE ACTION FOR EDUCATION LEADERSHIP PROJECT (SAELP)
LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE AGENDA
MARCH 14-15, 2005
UNIVERSITY OF OREGON, EUGENE
DAY TWO: TUESDAY MARCH 15, 2005
CULTURAL COMPETENCE, DIVERSITY, AND STUDENT SUCCESS
Kikanza Nuri Robins and Randall B. Lindsey
Objectives
 Introduce the four tools of cultural proficiency
 Integrate CP with concepts of leadership
 Plan for use of tools and information with their teams
9:00 am
Introductions, Expectations
Power Points: What is Cultural Proficiency?
Activity: Examples along the Continuum
BREAK
10:45
Activity: Making Room at the Table
What are your particular challenges?
What next step will you take?
The presentation this morning is based upon the work of Kikanza Nuri Robins, Randall B. Lindsey and
their colleagues.
1. Randall B. Lindsey, Laraine M. Roberts and Franklin CampbellJones. The Culturally Proficient
School: An Implementation Guide for School Leaders, Corwin Press, 2005
2. Randall B. Lindsey, Kikanza Nuri Robins and Raymond D. Terrell Cultural Proficiency, A
Manual for School Leaders. Corwin Press (1999, 2003)
3. Randall B. Lindsey, Kikanza Nuri Robins and Raymond D. Terrell Facilitators Guide for
Cultural Proficiency, A Manual for School Leaders. Corwin Press (2005)
4. Kikanza Nuri Robins, Randall B. Lindsey, Delores Lindsey, and Raymond D. Terrell. Culturally
Proficient Instruction, A Guide for People Who Teach, Corwin Press (2001) Second Edition in
Process.
5. Kikanza Nuri Robins, “Working for Justice,” Horizons Magazine, (January/February 2004)
6. Randall B. Lindsey, Delores B. Lindsey and Kikanza Nuri Robins, “Culturally Proficient
Counseling,” in C.D. Johnson and Sharon K. Johnson (eds.), Student Support Programs for the
Future, Greensboro, NC: ERIC/CASS, Spring, 2002.
7. Kikanza Nuri Robins, "Culturally Competent Libraries," California State Library Foundation
Bulletin (January 1994).
[PLACE POWER POINT HANDOUTS HERE]
EXAMPLES ALONG THE CONTINUUM
CULTURAL PROFICIENCY
CULTURAL COMPETENCE
CULTURAL
PRE-COMPETENCE
CULTURAL BLINDNESS
CULTURAL INCAPACITY
CULTURAL
DESTRUCTIVENESS
MAKING ROOM AT THE TABLE
Becoming culturally proficient means more than increasing the number of people of different
ethnic groups around the table. It is about everyone having access to the table and voice once
seated at the table. One of the ways to explore this idea is to look at how you came to your
various tables of influence or privilege.
Describe or name the various
tables at which you sit:
Table 1
Table 2
Table 3
Getting There
YES
NO
YES
NO
YES
NO
YES
NO
YES
NO
YES
NO
YES
NO
YES
NO
YES
NO
Did you create the table?
Were you invited?
Did you lobby to be there?
Was there an organizational
system in place for getting you to
the table?
At the Table
Some people can get near the
table but are never allowed to sit,
or they sit without ever being
recognized. Do you have a
recognized seat at the table?
Do you have a voice at the table?
Are you comfortable speaking
and making suggestions at the
table?
Do you have influence at the
table?
Do you feel silenced?
Sharing the Table
Have you silenced others?
Have you created space for
others to be empowered?
Is there room for others at the
table?
Have you squeezed others out?
Have you watched silently as
others lost space at the table?
Discussion Questions
1. Getting to the Table
a. If room was made for you at the table, what were the circumstances?
2. At the Table
a. If you were silenced or felt isolated, what were the circumstances?
b. If you felt you had a seat but no voice, what were those circumstances?
3. Sharing the table
a. How can you make more room at this table, as an individual? …as a body?
b. How do the barriers to cultural proficiency relate to this discussion?
4. How do the experiences described in your groups reflect entitlement, power, or
privilege?
5. What did you learn as you discussed your answers to these questions?
6. What will you do individually/organizationally as a result of what you have learned?
7. At what tables do your students seek to sit? How do you help or hinder their presence
and activity at these tables?
ENTITLEMENT AND PRIVILEGE AS EDUCATION HISTORY1
Randall B. Lindsey
Interim Dean, School of Education, California Lutheran University
At the dawn of the 20th century, a comprehensive education was an opportunity not available to
most citizens. In one century, our country has progressed from offering a comprehensive public
education to a small portion of the population to making public education available to most
people. As the 21st century begins, the promise and the possibility still exist, but the promise is
unfulfilled. Well-informed educational leaders may be the linchpins of our democracy, serving
our citizens in ways not envisioned by our counterparts a century ago.
During the last century, as this country matured, greater access to a comprehensive public
education resulted from economic and legal pressures. The economic growth of the country
demanded an increasingly better-educated workforce. However, women and people of color had
to rely on judicial and legislative actions in order to participate fully in public education as a
means for gaining entry into the economic mainstream of our country. School desegregation,
Title IX, Public Law 94-142 are examples of legislative and judicial steps used to gain access to
educational opportunities.
However, access did not guarantee a quality education. It is only recently, and often due to the
pressures exerted by judicial decisions and legislative actions that schools have begun to address
the needs of diverse populations. The accountability movements that are in place in federal and
state initiatives expect, for the first time in our history, that all students, irrespective of their
cultural backgrounds, will achieve a standards-based education. As controversial as these
initiatives may be, they stand in a long line of modern educational initiatives. The most
prominent of these initiatives was the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (1954) decision that
led to school desegregation. Desegregation efforts since the 1960s have been preoccupied with
the thorny issues of physical access to school campuses and have only recently become involved
with both the input and output of the educational process. Pre-K–12 schools have experienced
segregation, desegregation, and integration, and still struggle to provide an effective education to
all sectors of society. Today’s school leaders are in a unique position to become advocates for all
children and youth to receive a comprehensive education, and to help build communities that
affirm goals of academic and social success.
During the latter part of the 20th century, terms such as diversity and multiculturalism describe a
complex society that had always existed but rarely acknowledged by the dominant culture. These
changes are pushing us beyond unquestioned acceptance of the prevailing view of early 20th
century white male scholars who predominated in establishing the policies and practices of
American public education (Sheets, 2000; Bohn and Sleeter, 2000). The achievement gap is the
lingering evidence of historical inequities and a persistent challenge to educational leaders.
1
The following passage served as the basis for Randy’s presentation at the January, 2005 meeting of the California
Staff Development Council. The passage is excerpted from The Culturally Proficient School: An Implementation
Guide for School Leaders, Thousand Oaks, CA.: Corwin Press, 2005 and was co-authored by Randy and Laraine M.
Roberts and Franklin CampbellJones.
Once people understand the concepts of entitlement and privilege, they must also have the will to
make the ethical and moral choices implicit in such an understanding. One of the common
denominators for all systems of oppression is that people lose rights and benefits due to
discrimination against them. Privilege and entitlement occur when rights and privileges denied to
one group of people accrue to others, often taken for granted in unrecognized and
unacknowledged ways. As an example, if you cannot vote because of your skin color and I can
because of mine, functionally I have two votes-mine and the one denied to you. Similarly, if I
have access to an enriched educational experience that involves higher-thinking skills and you
are stuck, year-after-year, in low-level drill instruction, I will be better prepared than you to
perform well on any measure of academic success placed before me.
In the language of Cultural Proficiency, moving from being culturally precompetent to being
culturally competent entails a shift in thinking. A component of this shift in thinking is to understand
the concepts of entitlement and privilege and their relationship to systems of oppression. Racism,
and other forms of oppression, exists only because the dominant group benefits from the continued
practices. Culturally competent educational leaders shift their thinking and are intentional in
understanding not only the negative consequences of oppression, also, the benefits of those same
systems.
We must become the change we want to be (Gandhi, 2002). Mahatma Mohandas K.
Gandhi’s words let us know that we are at the heart of creating the world we envision. It requires
a personal transformation that leads to dismantling systems of oppression, such as racism. This
necessarily involves the deconstruction of power in both personal and institutional forms. Weick
(1979) holds that organization is a myth and that, most ‘things’ in organizations are actually
relationships tied together in systematic fashion (88). In other words, we invent social
organizations through our interactions with one another. Cultural destructiveness and cultural
proficiency are similarly invented ways of organizing our social interactions. The choice is ours:
we can continue to perpetuate historical racism and inequity, or we can lead our organizations to
historical levels of effectiveness and achievement. It’s all invented – a human invention is
created by those within the system called school (Zander and Zander, 2000).
The transformational leadership behaviors of culturally proficiency exist within the
context of our moral authority as educational leaders. To make the shift from culturally
proficiency is to recognize the dynamics of entitlement and privilege; to recognize that our
schools contribute to disparities in achievement; and, to believe that educators can make choices
that positively affect student success. Cultural proficiency requires a leadership perspective that
involves an inside-out approach to personal and organizational change. Culturally proficient
leaders redefine education in a democracy to be inclusive. These leaders focus on
inequity/equity, regardless of who is benefiting from the current status. They focus on
confronting and changing one’s own behavior to learning from and about new groups to the
community, rather than how to change and assimilate members of target groups. Culturally
proficient leaders expect criticism from influential people, and they operate in school districts by
keeping centered on the moral value in our work as educators.
Coming to grips with privilege and entitlement is not without risk. The risk comes in
questioning the process of public schooling and the institutional structures, policies and practices
that shape the learning processes in schools. Understanding privilege and entitlement and
questioning the systems that support them requires countering the legacy of history that has
provided us with an educational system that is designed to educate some students and not others.
Therefore, the hard question becomes: How have I benefited from the privilege and entitlement
accorded to me as a result of my skin color, gender, social class, sexual orientation, age, and
experience? (Tatum, 1999; Kovel 1984).
References:
Bohn, Anita Petra & Sleeter, Christine E. (2000). Multicultural education and the standards movement: A
report from the field. Kappan, 82(2), 156-159.
Cross, Terry L. (1989). Toward a culturally competent system of care. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown
University Child Development Program, Child and Adolescent Service System Program.
Cross, Terry L., Bazron, Barbara J., Dennis, Karl W., & Isaacs, Mareasa R., (1993). Toward a culturally
competent system of care (Vol. 2). Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Child Development
Program, Child and Adolescent Service System Program.
Gandhi, Mohandas K. (2002). Available http://www.mahatma.org.
Kovel, Joel. (1984). White racism: A psychohistory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ogbu, John. (1992). Understanding cultural diversity and learning. Educational Researcher, 21(8), 5-14.
Sheets, Rosa Hernandez (2000). Advancing the field or taking center stage: The white movement in
multicultural education. Educational Researcher, 29(9), 15-20.
Tatum, Beverly Daniel. (1999). Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria? New York: Basic
Books.
Weick, Karl E. (1979). The social psychology of organizing (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw Hill.
Zander, Benjamin & Zander, Rosamund Stone. (2000). The art of possibility: Transforming professional
and personal and personal life. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard Business School Press.