DEVELOPING A MEASURE OF RACIAL EQUITY: THE ‘AWARE BELIEFS’ SCALE FOR SCHOOLS

Structural racism persists in our schools and continues to create barriers to achieving racial equity in education. Organizational change efforts are needed to confront these barriers at the school level. These efforts should focus on two problems: 1) the existence of the “culture of Whiteness” in schools, and 2) the academic and emotional harm it poses to Black children. These experiences speak to an underlying set of beliefs about race held by individuals within the organization. School social workers who apply an anti-racism lens can confront structural barriers and offer innovative strategies for assessing organizational change by targeting beliefs about racial equity among their colleagues in school settings. The Assessing Workplace Attitudes toward Racial Equity Beliefs (AWARE-b) scale is designed to assess individual beliefs about racial equity in school settings. This study operationalizes the concept of racial equity work and proposes beliefs about racial equity as a construct that can be measured using the AWARE-b scale. The recommended steps for scale development, item pool generation, expert panel feedback, pilot testing, and analyses of items were used in this study. The pilot sample (n=140) included adults ages eighteen and older and school personnel, including teachers and non-teachers, who currently work in a P-12 school campus setting in the state of Texas. The items were evaluated using an exploratory analysis known as principal axis factoring. There was good factor structure, internal reliability, and construct validity for sixteen items (α = .93) indicating racial equity beliefs as the underlying construct. Limitations and recommendations for future study of the AWARE-b scale, along with the implications for school leaders and school social workers are discussed.