Shane Safir - Street Data: A Next-Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and School Transformation

Street Data calls upon readers to flip the dashboard from a focus on big data to a focus on the voices at the marginsthose learners and their families who have been most affected by deep-rooted systemic inequities. When we listen closely to these voices with curiosity, courage, and humility, we gain a greater understanding of the meaning and root causes of these inequities, as well as how they can be addressed in ways that transform and heal. Policymakers and educators at every level of the system need this book to forge a path to genuine equity.

Linda Darling-Hammond
Professor Emeritus at Stanford University and
President of the Learning Policy Institute

For far too long, education leaders have implemented reform strategies without engaging and centering those most impactedthe students. Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan provide an energizing, anti-racist, actionable framework that centers the voices of the most marginalized students as the experts and co-conspirators that we need to create an education system worthy of their brilliance. Read this, share it, and be a part of ushering in this new normal of street-level data to unlock racial justice in our schools.

Taryn Ishida
Youth Organizer and Executive Director
Californians for Justice

With Street Data, Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan have built a conversation more than a framework, wherein students, their communities, teachers, leaders, and systems are interconnected parts of a family unit. As a professor and psychologist, I found myself drawn to the works human and family-centered focus. Throughout the work, these are linked to an emphasis on building approaches to the art of teaching grounded in listening, making and holding room for all members of the learning family, and setting goals and evolving approaches that begin with the student as their core. Safir and Dugan are engaging us all in a critically important conversation, where the data we gather and share around learning spaces is shaped and centered on the voices and beings of students. It is family systems-centered teaching and learning. It is holistic, and it is necessary.

Napoleon Wells
Assistant Professor of Social Sciences
Claflin University, SC

Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan have given us a vivid and immensely readable account of what public education could and should be. Rather than quick fixes, the book is rich with real-life examples and immediately actionable equity practices that educators and leaders can use to tackle root causes. The authors have also issued an unspoken but clear challenge to all of us who care about childrens learning and development: What if policy decisions were anchored in the lived experiences of students, their families, and their educators? Their call to action is clear and urgent: we must reverse-engineer and radically reimagine our resources, policies, and practices to support the broad conditions in which students can authentically thrive, and most particularly students who are the most marginalized by the current system. The vision of educational justice laid out in the book will not be more widely practiced if we simply rely on individual teachers and principals to push forward alone into the headwinds. It must be supported at systems and state levels, so that it becomes the rule and not the exception.

Sophie Fanelli
President
Stuart Foundation

Street Data issues an urgent, timely provocation to listen to, honor, and be informed by the experiences, wisdom, fears, and aspirations of children and families who have been forced to the margins by our schools and institutions. Rich with stories that affirm our shared humanity and connectedness, Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan offer a humanistic approach and practical guidance for embedding love, equity, curiosity, and courage in our efforts to manifest learning spaces where every young person learns, develops, and thrives.

Safir and Dugan call on us to free ourselves from old constructs about data for improvement that are rooted in Whiteness as normative and, instead, model ways to integrate concepts of wholeness, justice, deep culture, personal mastery, and agency into our school transformation efforts. This book is an important contribution to all of us who are working to create a world that works for all of us.

LaShawn Rout Chatmon
Executive Director
National Equity Project

In this absolutely path-breaking book, Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan use the concept of street data as an entry point to a fundamentally different paradigm for schooling. Foregrounding listening, understanding, and loving over counting, measuring, and classifying, Street Data illustrates what it would truly mean to develop a humanizing and liberating approach to school transformation. Startlingly fresh in its prose, clear in its convictions, and moving effortlessly between theory and practice, we can only hope Street Data will mark the beginning of a new and different era for American education. A spectacular book!

Jal Mehta
Professor of Education
Harvard Graduate School of Education

Old systems are crumbling before our eyes as new ones are being built.