Jeanette Chien
Educational equity is one of seven major areas Jeanette Chien oversees as a deputy superintendent in the San Diego County Office of Education. So when she learned about the USC Rossier DEI certificate program, she helped recruit a dozen team members, as well as senior leaders from several of the region’s school districts, to join her in the inaugural cohort.
During the intensive eight-month course of study covering critical topics such as federal civil rights law and social identity constructs, Chien, who earned an educational doctorate from Rossier in 2004, was especially interested in “building the capacity of my team to really understand equity and how that plays out in districts.”
She said the ability to combine theory and practice has been a major benefit of the program. The faculty includes scholar-practitioners such as USC Rossier Professor of Clinical Education Christina M. Kishimoto, an expert on education policy and equity who has led school systems in three states, including Hawaii where she was state superintendent of public instruction.
Kishimoto’s ideas about change management led Chien to reflect on how she could better lead her staff to plan and implement equity initiatives. At a time when schools are struggling to address pressing concerns of opportunity and access – and fulfill new mandates, such as California’s requirement for high schools to begin offering ethnic studies courses in 2025 – effective leadership is more important than ever.
“I realized that we can’t bring about change without building the capacity of the team to understand the what and the why,” Chien observed. “It sounds like a no-brainer, but I think delving deeply into the concepts around change management really helped me think about my strategy so that I’m not imposing change on my teams without them really understanding the reasons behind it.”
The experience of collaborating on solutions with leaders from around her region has been rewarding.
“We need each other as allies,” she said. “The opportunity to work in groups and teams to address equity challenges has been super beneficial.”