21st Century People Power: Building a Movement for Educational Equity in Massachusetts

Abstract

The Education Trust is a national policy and advocacy nonprofit dedicated to closing opportunity gaps and expanding achievement for historically underserved students, particularly children of color and children living in poverty. After 2015, Ed Trust launched a strategy to support state advocates in forming equity coalitions. The Massachusetts Education Equity Partnership (MEEP), founded in Fall 2018, was one of the state equity coalitions born out of this strategy and was where I completed residency. This capstone examines how advocacy and movement-building in the education sector can serve as an antidote to the widespread anxiety and hurt currently impacting the United States. I joined Ed Trust and MEEP in July 2019 and was charged with managing MEEP’s membership and coalition dynamics, creating systems that ensured internal equity and facilitated advocacy, and reimagining MEEP’s vision and strategic plan to meet its goal of securing educational equity in Massachusetts. My work in the field drew from social movement theory, community organizing, and literature about teaming. In putting research to practice, my residency revealed that in order to spark a statewide movement for educational equity in a state that has not experienced one in the modern era, education advocates must (1) learn to organize and mobilize communities, (2) practice effective teaming and organizational ambidexterity, (3) orchestrate small wins that lead to larger ones, and (4) capture and be responsive to the national zeigeist. These learnings compel The Education Trust to revisit its state strategy and how it supports state equity coalitions to truly form a national movement, and it invites the education sector to reimagine family and community engagement and reassess how the sector responds to successes and perceived failures. In turn, we realize that building people power is the balm we can leverage to fight societal and educational injustice.