What Does Equity-Centered Leadership Look Like in the Age of AI?

Shelia Burnette, Ed.D., thought she knew what artificial intelligence was good for. A principal at Hall-Woodward Elementary School in Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools, she had watched her staff use AI tools to generate materials and pull together resources, and she had done the same herself.

"To me, AI was a glorified search engine," she recalls. She saw it as a faster way to find what she was already looking for and put it together more succinctly.

Then, a few sessions into piloting an AI tool specifically created for school leaders called Gladys, Burnette decided to explore a problem she had been wrestling with as a leader: how to guide difficult conversations about equity with staff members in a way that felt specific to her school context. The exchange that followed was interactive, personalized, and probing. 

"That's when I realized the power of AI," Burnette says. "It became more of a think partner, a processing partner, and in some ways, a critical partner, because it raised questions that I had not thought about in my practice."

Her verdict: "Game changer."

Burnette's shift from seeing AI as a tool that produces answers to embracing it as a partner that helps expand her thinking captures a broader shift underway as school and district leaders begin to move beyond questions of whether AI belongs in education and toward more complex questions about how it should be understood, governed, and used. AI is already showing up in schools. The leaders navigating it are asking not just what these tools can do for them, but what it means to lead well in a moment of rapid technological change while keeping equity at the center.

As AI becomes more embedded in schools, leaders are being asked to think not only about what the technology can do, but who it serves, whose perspectives shape it, and whether it could reinforce existing inequities.

Through the Equity-Centered Pipeline Initiative (ECPI), Wallace and its partners and grantees are exploring what the technology and the questions it raises mean for school leadership practice. The work brings together Wallace, 228 Accelerator, which is developing the Gladys tool, and the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), which is supporting professional learning and developing practical guidance for districts on the equitable and ethical use of AI.

According to Angel Miles Nash, senior program officer at Wallace, AI was not part of the original ECPI program design. The initiative has focused on building and sustaining equity-centered principal pipelines in participating districts. But as the initiative moved forward, Miles Nash began thinking about sustainability, one of the initiative’s aims, and what could help carry the work beyond the life of the grant. That led her to explore whether a tool designed around equity-centered leadership could provide ongoing support to leaders and aspiring leaders in ECPI districts. The connection to sustainability, she says, is partly about the nature of technology itself.

“Technology is so malleable,” she says. “You can co-create tools that are responsive to the context of your grantee partners. In our case, our districts.”

That responsiveness has been critical to the ECPI work. Rather than creating a static product and hoping it would fit different districts, the organizations involved have worked together to respond to what leaders are experiencing and learning in real time. Miles Nash describes the collaboration among Wallace, 228 Accelerator, and CDT as a "three-legged stool," with each partner aware of and contributing to the others' work in support of ECPI districts.

"We want the equity-centered perspective to be available on the shoulder of every school leader," Miles Nash says. "Accessibility is equity. Responsiveness to context is equity."

From Product to Practice

Caroline Hill, founder of 228 Accelerator, believes many school leaders are still approaching AI primarily as a tool to consume or adopt, rather than as a science they need to study and understand.

“I think most school leaders are on the side of AI as a product, which means they’re looking at it through a lens of consumption, and the way the tool will help them do their work,” she says. “School leaders who are using AI see the power in making their work more efficient. Producing documents and analyzing data are completed with less time and effort. But I think we are just at the cusp of using AI to make leaders and teachers more effective. I think, though, we need to move school leaders to AI as a science.”

According to Hill, that distinction matters because AI is not just another classroom or administrative tool. It has implications for work, learning, community, and the relationship between schools and the economy students will enter.

“If we’re not able to help school leaders understand what is most important to learn now, then we could be doing a lot of the right things for an old world,” she says. “We could be preparing children for a world that no longer exists.”

Part of the challenge is that few resources have been built for school leaders specifically, says Elizabeth Laird, director of Equity in Civic Technology at CDT, who has spent years researching how schools use data and technology. When her team looked at what guidance already existed, they found plenty for state and district leaders and plenty for teachers.

"There does seem to be this gap for specifically what principals and school leaders need to know and do," she says.

At the same time, principals are starting from vastly different places. In one listening session with school leaders, Laird recalls, one principal said they did not know where to begin, while another was ready to demonstrate an avatar they used to communicate with parents in their native language.

“To have that in the same district, I think really exemplifies where principals are, which is all over the map,” Laird says. “Regardless of where you are, there is a need for foundational and fundamental guidance and tools on using AI.”

For Miles Nash, that unevenness is exactly why leaders need support now. Having spent two decades in education and education technology, she has watched schools repeatedly receive the last and least of what technology has to offer.

"Historically, I have seen education get the crumbs of technology," she says. Her concern is that the demands on school leaders inform their capacity to prioritize their own learning in varying ways. "Educators would be better served if we think about how to support their learning and understanding,” she says.

Hill believes that will require the systems that support school leaders to approach professional learning differently.

“I think that we need to reimagine professional development,” she says. “Creating the conditions for people to learn very quickly is going to be very important because AI is technology that you study by using it. I think creating more space and tolerance for change and rapid innovation is critical. That can sometimes be hard if people feel constrained.”

Putting Equity at the Center

For 228 Accelerator and CDT, learning to use AI is inseparable from learning to ask who benefits from it, whose experiences inform it, and what risks it might create.

That is part of the thinking behind Gladys, which grew out of Hill's earlier work as a school leader and facilitator of race and equity training. Over time, she saw a recurring challenge: educators entered schools with very different experiences, knowledge, and levels of fluency in conversations about race and equity, yet they were expected to work together to serve diverse communities. Hill began asking what it would take to make equity-focused learning more personalized, accessible, and available when leaders actually needed it.

Gladys is intended to create a low-risk space where school leaders and educators can practice, reflect, and build fluency in equity-centered leadership. The tool has evolved from an online course to a chatbot and now to a more immersive AI experience, and school leaders in the ECPI districts have played an active role in shaping its development. During frequent virtual and in-person sessions, they have had opportunities to experiment with the tool, share feedback with Hill and her team, ask questions, and learn from one another about how they are using it in practice.

"I can't develop a tool intended for equity and justice if it's not created in a way that models equity and justice," Hill says. "I'm not assuming that we have all the answers, but I know that the more people that touch it and help us build it, we can create the answers together."

That collaborative approach has been central to Gladys's development. The tool is intended to help leaders grapple with difficult questions and test their thinking.

"The work has to be low-risk because no one wants to be ‘canceled’ or say the wrong thing," Hill says. "We don't have the whole story unless we are all sharing it and building it together."

The goal is not to replace coaching, supervision, or professional learning, but to give leaders a place to practice creative leadership—process their thinking, challenge assumptions, and prepare for difficult conversations.

"As a general matter, we're talking about really busy people who want to do the right thing," Laird says. "They just may not know what that is."

CDT is working to fill that gap through practical guidance, research, and policy work. In partnership with Wallace, CDT has been sharing what it has learned about AI in education and is developing a toolkit focused on how school leaders can advance its equitable and ethical use. The toolkit will draw on the experiences of ECPI school leaders and offer practical resources, including tools to help leaders communicate with families and assess whether their AI practices align with existing parameters.

According to Laird, an equity-centered approach requires leaders to hold two ideas at once. First, the benefits of AI should be available to everyone. As conversations about the digital divide give way to concerns about a potential "AI divide," leaders need to consider whether some students and communities have greater access to the technology and its opportunities than others.

At the same time, leaders need to actively look for ways AI could limit opportunity, particularly for students who have historically been marginalized. That means rejecting what Laird calls a false choice between innovation and safeguards.

"I worry and sometimes hear AI positioned as either you can focus on innovation and use it in lots of ways that benefit kids, or you can put in place guardrails that are just going to slow everything down," she says. "I would really encourage school leaders to reject that false choice."

The need for scrutiny is especially important because the pressure to adopt AI can outpace the information leaders have to make good decisions.

In CDT's research on more than 100 education technology tools that incorporate AI, Laird says the organization found little publicly available information about how tools should be used, when they should not be used, what data they were trained on, whether that data is representative of the students being served, or whether the tools had been tested for bias or efficacy.

"You can find very little out there about these AI tools," she says. "I think school leaders desperately need information that the edtech sector is not currently providing."

Burnette's experience underscores that message. While she had been introduced to AI tools and resources, she says she had received little training on how the technology itself works or on the risks leaders should consider when using it. CDT’s hope is that the forthcoming toolkits and resources can help fill this gap.

What Can School Leaders Do Now?

For leaders who may feel overwhelmed by both the promise and the risks of AI, Burnette's advice is straightforward: don't try to do everything at once. When a colleague is curious about AI but unsure where to begin, she encourages them to identify one area where they genuinely need support.

"What is it you most want to have help with doing?" she says. "Then try it in that area so it's safe."

At Hall-Woodward, Burnette has used AI for communication, analysis, brainstorming, and connecting research-based practices to challenges in her school. But she has also established boundaries. Staff use generic or fictitious information rather than personally identifiable student data, follow existing policies, and vet what AI produces for accuracy, clarity, and confidentiality.

"You create something, you vet it, and you have to vet it from various perspectives," she says.

Hill similarly urges leaders to become active students of the technology rather than passive consumers of whatever tool arrives next. That means experimenting and learning quickly, but also asking whether AI is actually the right solution to the problem at hand.

Her advice to leaders is to "become critical students and very critical consumers" and to ask: "Is this a real problem? Is this the best way to solve this problem?"

Districts have a central role to play, too. Laird says they should help evaluate tools not only for privacy, security and efficacy, but also for whether they align with a school system's larger vision for students.

"That's not just an IT job," she says. "Directors of teaching and learning should be involved. How are they trying to center and advance certain practices, and do these applications of AI further your vision for what you think is right for kids?"

As ECPI begins to sunset, Miles Nash hopes the work with AI will serve as a bridge for participating districts—a way to continue strengthening equity-centered leadership and technology integration beyond the formal life of the grant.

"I hope that schools and districts continue to develop their muscle around equity-centered integration, technology, period," she says. "AI at the forefront."

The goal, she says, is not technology for its own sake, but technology that serves students, recognizes the talent of educators, and amplifies voices and perspectives that are already present in ECPI districts.

That may be one of the clearest lessons emerging from this work with AI and school leadership: the question is not how quickly leaders can adopt AI, but how thoughtfully they can use it to advance their values and best serve students and communities.

"There's no prize for who uses AI the most," Laird says. "I think the prize will be for who uses it the best."