ABSTRACT Leveraging racial sensemaking and constructive-developmental frameworks, this study investigates how school leaders implementing culturally responsive-sustaining education make sense of racism, and how their racial beliefs change over time. Given New York State’s mandate that educators implement culturally responsive-sustaining education, it made for an ideal site from which to recruit participants. Using survey, photo-elicitation, and narrative methods, I conducted a three-phase, qualitatively driven mixed-methods approach to my study. During Phase 1, 54 school leaders completed an online survey that gave insights into their culturally responsive school leadership practices and their racial beliefs. Quantitatively, the study leveraged the Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (CoBRAS) to measure school leaders’ racial attitudes. Anchored in theories of racial colorblind ideology, the CoBRAS is a validated and widely used survey instrument to measure racial attitudes as a function of racial colorblindness through three subscales: denial of White racial privilege, denial of institutional discrimination, denial of blatant racial issues. Descriptive statistics and independent sample t-tests were used to analyze CoBRAS data. During Phase 2, at the close of the online survey, four principals were invited and agreed to participate in 1-on-1, in-depth interviews to gain deeper understanding of their racial beliefs; how they drive culturally responsive-sustaining education at their schools; and who they are as people and as leaders. A total of 11 principal interviews were conducted with the four principals. During Phase 3, focus group interviews with principals’ school leadership teams (SLTs) added texture to how culturally responsive-sustaining education shows (or does not show) up at their schools. Three focus group interviews were conducted with two of the four principals’ SLTs. In total, the qualitative portion of this study draws on 14 interviews (11 principal-facing and 3 SLT-facing). All qualitative data was analyzed inductively through open coding, theme formation, constant comparison, and iteration. Findings highlight that school leaders mandated to implement culturally responsive-sustaining education can hold both race-conscious and race-evasive attitudes. Quantitative results show that some school leaders hold positions that both recognize structural racism and fail to recognize institutional discrimination and White racial privilege. Photo-elicited qualitative data reveal that race-evasive leaders often exhibit White nativist and cultural imperialist ideologies when they perceive that racial equity efforts are racist toward White people, or that the United States is being mischaracterized as structurally racist. Findings from in-depth interviews with the four principals identify racial learning change processes that animate racial literacy: what I term developmental racial learning streams. Further, despite their high racial awareness, these four school leaders struggled to operationalize racial equity efforts central to culturally responsive-sustaining education due to district and local community constraints. This emergent research underscores the necessity of designing social learning interventions that enable school leaders to align their racial beliefs with the goals of culturally responsive-sustaining education. This suggests that leadership preparation programs and professional development efforts should address school leaders’ feelings about institutional discrimination and White racial privilege early and often. This study advocates framing racial literacy as a racial learning process that changes over time, similar to social-emotional learning (SEL); all to better understand and support school leaders’ racial sensemaking, critical self-reflection, and implementation of culturally responsive-sustaining education.
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