Who We Are

History

UM School of Education Equity Initiative Origins, 2020 - 2023

In January of 2020, Dean Dr. David Rock established a new UM School of Education strategic objective: To become a leader in education equity in our community and state. SOE Development leadership raised $350,000 from five private-sector donors and two education foundations to develop and support our equity initiative.

The Challenge we face

Historically, our system of Pre-K through 12th grade teacher preparation programs have not always adequately prepared our professional workforce to support underserved student populations. This issue has contributed to academic under-performance among lower socioeconomic and other student groups and has led to a persistent performance gap for student in Mississippi and throughout the nation.

Systemic Change

“All systems are designed to produce the results they achieve.” To become a leader in education equity, we recognized we must transform our own SOE culture, systems, and outcomes to help Mississippi schools and students achieve equitable performance results.

Our Vision

Education equity is about fairness, opportunity, and achievement for all students. Our UM School of Education is proud to be the highest performing school of education in Mississippi which positions us to champion efforts to achieve education equity at regional, state and national levels. We believe all students deserve to learn in inclusive, supportive and accessible education environments, regardless of their personal and social circumstances. We intend to create a model of education equity and excellence which inspires generations of teachers and school leaders to achieve equitable achievement for all.
Due to the interruption caused by a world-wide pandemic, our programmatic initiative re-started in the fall of 2022. UM SOE professor Dr. Sara Platt and SOE Development Officer Billy Crews did collaborative research with external education partners which led to some preliminary findings about education equity.

Education equity most simply defined is “each and every child gets what they need” or “ensuring students who need the most support, get what they need.”
Little demonstrated leadership exists in the equity arena in Mississippi and few models of success nationally are identifiable, providing our SOE an opportunity to provide significant leadership.
Equity is a systemic issue affecting various population groups including “children of poverty”, significantly limiting efforts to achieve “equality in education outcomes” for all children.

In the spring of 2023 implementation of our equity plan officially began under the leadership of Dr. Platt with three initial focus areas:

Focus internally on improving our SOE equity impact, better preparing teacher candidates to understand education equity and how to reach and teach all students effectively, especially children of poverty;
Develop a pilot equity initiative with the Oxford School District to demonstrate and learn how to address systemic performance challenges;
Host regional and statewide equity summits to share and focus attention on equity issues and improvements.

Father of Initiative

Billy Crews is responsible for the birth of the work we do and oversaw the project while it was growing from an idea to making tangible impacts on people.

Billy Crews

Billy Crews served as the development officer for the UM School of Education from 2015-2023. In this role within the School of Education, Crews attracted donors, investors and friends to support excellent performance, growth and the important impact of the School of Education on Mississippi.

A longtime proponent of public education in Mississippi, Crews is the former chief executive and chairman of Journal, Inc., a Tupelo-based media company, where he worked for 33 years. He served as Vice President of Teach For America-Mississippi from 2012 through 2014. Prior to that he briefly served on Tupelo School Board in the 1990s and has served on the Board of the Clarksdale Collegiate Public Charter School District from 2016 – 2023.

In the late 1970s, Crews oversaw the corporate investment of $1 million to place assistant teachers in the first three grades of the Lee County School System. This model initiative became part of the 1982 Education Reform Act which places assistant teachers in grades K-2 throughout Mississippi. In the late 1980s, he led the establishment of Mississippi’s first corporate-sponsored early childhood education learning center for employees’ children with five Tupelo businesses.

An alumnus of Ole Miss, Crews received his B.A. in political science from UM in 1978, where he was elected Associated Student Body president and was a Rhodes Scholar finalist representing the state of Mississippi. He and his wife, Catherine, reside in Oxford.