(Re)Imagining School Policy & Practice: Virtual Schooling
This Equity Digest is a call to action for school community stakeholders to: advocate for district adaptation of policies and practices to the online school environment; push for administrators and teachers to be proactive rather than reactive in these online spaces; and to encourage educators to shift the gaze from discipline, surveillance, and control toward the consideration of students’ rights, as well as meaningful access to, and participation in, a high-quality education. Specifically, school community stakeholders can serve as social justice actors (Lazzell et al., 2019) by advocating for equity for Black and Brown students during virtual/hybrid learning through the transformation of brick-and-mortar disciplinary policies and practices, disrupting the trends of increased surveillance of students and their families in their homes. School community stakeholders can push districts and educators to shift their emphasis from control of students to the implementation of strategies for online learning that attend to the diverse ways in which students learn and express knowledge (Coomer et al., 2020).