Building Equity Bridges is a partnership between Cambridge Public Schools and the Cambridge Education Association. Through this collaboration, we seek to bring the following principles to life:
- Document and elevate the voices and expertise of students, educators, and families. Root causes of inequity can be found at multiple levels, from systems to schools to classrooms -- and stakeholders at any level have essential information about all levels.
- Proactively cultivate trust -- especially among people from marginalized communities -- so that students, educators, and families are willing to share their authentic lived experiences within an inequitable system.
- Share power so that the stakeholders who are most impacted have agency to steer this work. We believe students, educators, and families must be engaged as “partners” in the “collective investigation of a problem”1 -- not simply as research subjects whose experiences will be studied by others.
- Proactively engage students, educators, and families from marginalized groups.Their voices and expertise are particularly important for this work, since they are often “living with the failures of [our] systems… [and] creating adaptive solutions to them.”2