Toward a continuous improvement for justice

Abstract

In recent years, improvement researchers have sought to foreground equity in continuous improvement (CI) in efforts to better advance the position of Black, Brown, and other marginalized students in educational settings using CI. While we view these efforts as noble and necessary, we argue in this paper that CI has largely centered equity and pushed justice to the periphery. In particular, we argue that the field of CI in education has focused squarely on equity—what we define as reducing racial and other gaps in dominant outcomes. In so doing, CI has deprioritized justice, which we define as improving outcomes that center on the comfort, agency, and dignity of all students, but minoritized students (i.e., Black, Brown, LGBTQ+, disabled, multilingual youth, and working-class) in particular. In so doing, CI efforts risk upholding dominant schooling outcomes and accompanying practices that sort students into unequal categories, limiting the capability of minoritized students to reach their full potential, erasing and demeaning students' cultural wealth, knowledge, and identities, and restricting their access to rich learning opportunities. We argue for a continuous improvement for justice that: (a) confronts dominant outcomes rather than uncritically prioritizing them; and (b) aims to use its tools to create systems that prioritize outcomes that grant comfort, agency, and dignity to minoritized students and communities.