From leadership research to district action: Change in the Air: How Shifting Federal Guidance Related to DEI Influences Teachers’ Use of Culturally Responsive Practices

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. Proposed district actions are separate from the original authors’ findings and recommendations. Independent peer review of this guide is not asserted.

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Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: research-article. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

Culturally responsive practices (CRPs) (i.e., practices that affirm students’ cultural backgrounds) can reduce educational inequities, but these practices have yet to become normative within U.S. education. A national study of K-12 teachers conducted in late 2023 found that teachers’ use of CRPs depended not only on their individual moral frameworks regarding diversity (i.e., endorsement of multiculturalism and colorblindness) but also on their communities’ and administrators’ support for efforts to increase equitable educational outcomes among students (i.e., equity work). Since 2023, federal guidance has shifted, and educational equity work is now discouraged. We conducted a second national survey of K-12 teachers (N = 980) in early 2025 to examine whether contextual influences on teachers’ decisions regarding CRP use have also shifted in light of changes to federal guidance. While the 2023 study found that teachers with weaker multiculturalism beliefs were more likely to use CRPs when their administrators supported equity work, findings from the 2025 study revealed that administrator support only predicted greater CRP use when these teachers worked in politically liberal (but not conservative) communities. The shift suggests that recent federal policy changes have weakened the influence of district and school leadership on teachers’ decisions to use CRPs, particularly among teachers who are not individually inclined to use these practices. This study offers timely insights into teachers’ use of CRPs after new federal guidance on educational equity efforts and reaffirms that teachers’ practices are not solely shaped by their personal beliefs, but are instead responsive to the broader contexts in which they work.

Study methods

To examine whether and how changes to federal guidance regarding DEI in education shifted the influence of individual and contextual factors on teachers’ decisions to use CRPs, we leveraged two national surveys of using different samples of K-12 educators: the first survey was fielded in 2023, prior to changes in federal guidance regarding DEI, and the second was fielded between 30 January and 8 March 2025. Notably, the 2025 survey was launched 10 days after EO 14151, which outlined the federal government’s new stance on DEI, and data collection continued through several notable changes related to DEI within the Department of Education (see Figure 1 for a timeline of notable events related to changing federal guidance and research activities). The 2023 and 2025 surveys included either identical or comparable measures of teachers’ diversity beliefs (i.e., endorsement of multiculturalism and colorblindness), use of CRPs, perceived administrator support for educational equity work, and community political climate, allowing for an examination of whether and how the individual and contextual influences on teachers’ use of CRPs changed following shifts in federal guidelines. While standalone analyses of the 2023 survey are reported in a prior publication (Morman et al., 2025), the current paper integrates data from the same 2023 survey with data from the 2025 survey to conduct new analyses focused on exploring shifts in individual and contextual influences on teachers’ practices.

Limitations

By leveraging large national samples of different K-12 educators, this study provides further support for the notion that educators weigh a combination of individual and contextual factors when deciding which practices to use to engage their students. Both prior to and following changing federal guidance regarding DEI, educators self-reported responses indicated that they consistently looked to their administrators and communities to inform their practices, particularly when their individual beliefs about diversity differed from the prevailing beliefs within their communities. These findings, however, should be considered alongside the methodological limitations of this study. First, while we identified ways in which the individual and contextual influences on teachers’ practice decisions remained consistent or changed following changing federal guidance, the two samples reported in this paper include different individuals. Thus, at an individual level, it is unclear whether and how federal guidance has affected teachers’ decision making. It is also unclear to what extent our reliance on self-reported measures of key predictor variables (i.e., district and school support) and outcome variables (i.e., use of CRPs) may have introduced common method bias. Instead, the results should be interpreted through the diversity beliefs profiles, which replicated across both time points and suggest that teachers who hold certain constellations of individual beliefs about diversity are likely to respond similarly to the same contextual factors across time.

A 90-day district inquiry

Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
Days 16–30 · Design. Choose one school improvement question with teachers. Protect a short shared planning cycle, agree an instructional change and use a common rubric for examining student work. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
Days 61–90 · Decide. Review implementation fidelity, teacher time and independently scored student work against a recorded baseline. Examine access differences and competing explanations before attributing changes to leadership. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Kate M. Morman; Laura M. Brady; Cong Wang; Stephanie A. Fryberg. Change in the Air: How Shifting Federal Guidance Related to DEI Influences Teachers’ Use of Culturally Responsive Practices. Behavioral Sciences (2026-03-09). https://doi.org/10.3390/bs16030390

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.