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In this introductory article, we offer a theoretical overview of racial equity and provide the rationale for pursuing an issue related to racial equity in leadership education. We also make the case for examining marginalized institutional contexts as a step toward advancing racial equity in postsecondary leadership education.

The September-October 2021 issue of the Hastings Center Report highlights the important topic of allocating scarce critical care resources during the Covid-19 pandemic. The article by Alex Rajczi and colleagues urges that policy-makers use public reasoning, not private reasoning, when developing triage policies. We completely agree. We show how the allocation framework we developed as private scholars, the "Pittsburgh framework," has been supported by public reasoning. The article by MaryKatherine Gaurke and colleagues criticizes rationing based on maximizing life-years saved and mistakenly claims that our framework recommended this approach. We explain that our framework never contained such a criterion but instead included a more limited consideration of near-term prognosis. In December 2020, in response to emerging data and important criticisms, we modified our framework to further strengthen equity. We are committed to improving allocation guidelines during crisis standards of care through reflective discussions and debates.

This article examines higher education as a vehicle for leadership development and discusses the historical evolution of different institutional types. Through the lens of access and equity, the traditional leadership narrative can expand to critically examine how these different institutional types advance racial equity in leadership education.

This issue highlights leadership development approaches within institutional contexts that have not been well represented in leadership education research. As the first publication in the field to address racial equity through the lens of institutional type in this way, authors were given the challenging task of laying a conceptual, historical, and empirical foundation for readers in the absence of a robust body of literature. What follows is a synthesis of themes observed across each of the articles, concluding with implications for inclusive leadership research and practice.

This study examined the relationships between school-level school climate and race differences in student grades, accounting for school sociodemographic composition. We found that schools with more positive school climates had smaller race differences in student self-reported grades. The moderating effect of school climate remained after accounting for the sociodemographic composition of the school and students’ own perceptions of climate at their school. This moderating effect was confounded by school grade band (i.e., elementary, middle, or high) since perception of positive school climate was lower in middle and high schools than in elementary schools. Despite the difficulty of disentangling school climate from grade band, the findings suggest school improvement strategies focused on school climate may promote racial equity in academic outcomes. School practitioners’ efforts to improve the school climate may also contribute to racial equity in academics.

This article examines the role of evidence-based decision making in social equity, with a particular focus on local government. It offers an assessment of the past, present, and future of such efforts by engaging themes from Matias Valenzuela's article based on King County, Washington. King County is one of more than 70 local governments that are members of the Government Alliance on Race and Equity, a growing national network of governments using an evidence-based approach to achieve racial equity. In general, previous social equity measures have focused largely on measuring the extent to which disparities exist. More recently, tools and resources have become available to assist local governments in designing and evaluating their approach and performance in reducing social inequities. Future evidence should include more standardized measures to benchmark success, provide comparative analysis, and better support the identification of best practices.

Frances Harriet Williams was an unsung social equity pioneer in the field of public administration. Long before the Minnowbrook I Conference convened in the 1960s to discuss the importance of fairness in the provision of public services, Williams successfully promoted values of social equity and racial fairness within public administration scholarly and practitioner communities. Raised by progressive parents in the South, Williams was the only high-ranking African-American woman in the federal government during President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration. She was directly involved in leading the Office of Price Administration to a staff that was at least 13 percent black when the rest of government was no more than 1 percent black. This work was the focus of her 1947 article in Public Administration Review, the first publication on racial equity to appear in the field's flagship journal. Her efforts and accomplishments undergird many of the ideals and practices that constitute the concept of social equity in public administration today.

Multiracial families are uniquely affected by racial dynamics in U.S. society. Family therapists must be prepared to meet the needs of this growing population and to support racial equity. This article includes an overview of literature related to being multiracial and offers a framework for working with multiracial identity development in therapy. A critical conversation approach to working with multiracial identity is shared along with case examples. The authors' experiences developing the model via a practitioner inquiry group are highlighted.

In 1965, when affirmative action officially became part of the national consensus to achieve racial social justice, it was based on the compelling justification of establishing equality and remedying the effects of past discrimination. Since then, there has been a slow but steady shift from "equity " to "diversity " as its rationale. The shift has had a negative effect on achieving the original goal of racial equality. The diversity rationale has permitted parallel procedures to evolve that provided majority students with an even larger differential advantage than that conferred on minority students by affirmative action. In addition, we continue to have massive segregation. Minorities are concentrated in second level schools in urban areas, while whites are concentrated in higher quality institutions in the educational suburbs. It is without factual or legal foundation that whites can argue that they (relative to minorities) are the victims of discrimination through unfair and unequal educational policies and practices that determine access to higher education.

There is much to appreciate in the article of Renner and Moore (2004). They do an excellent job of describing the current state of post-secondary education in the United States with respect to issues of ethnic/racial diversity. They illuminate the differential opportunity that exists currently, with most selective institutions still predominantly white while students of color are overrepresented at two-year colleges. And they describe a number of mechanisms that help account for continued differences in college access. Finally, they are correct in asserting that from a social justice perspective, arguing for diversity is meaningless, while arguing for equity makes perfect sense. Despite the wealth of information, however, the approach proposed by Renner and Moore will not provide a path toward their goal of equity. Shifting from the benefits of diversity for all students and the “compelling interest” that goes with it to the unfairness of inequity that disadvantages students of color will be counterproductive for several reasons. The first is that the shift would give up the only legal precedent for affirmative action. The U.S. Supreme Court in its University of Michigan decisions Gratz et al. v. Bollinger et al. and Grutter v. Bollinger et al. has affirmed the “compelling state interest” argument of Justice Powell in accepting diversity, while they have refused to recognize historical bases of inequality as a rationale for ongoing preferences (e.g., Alger, 1998). That is, the courts have disallowed information about past systematic patterns of discrimination as not germane. Their perspective has been that discriminating against white applicants today to make up for past discrimination against students of color is discriminatory, and