California Professional Standards for Education Leaders · 5A–4
Continuously improve cultural proficiency skills and competency in curriculum, instruction, and assessment for all learners.
Cultural proficiency is not a finished credential. It is the continuing ability to notice context, learn from communities, and change curriculum, instruction, and assessment when access or meaning is compromised.
What this looks like in practice
Leaders connect cultural learning to the instructional core. They examine whose knowledge is represented, whether language is treated as an asset, how students can demonstrate learning, and whether support preserves rigor and dignity.
Data can reveal opportunity and outcome patterns, but interpretation must include teachers, students, and families. The goal is not to attach a cultural explanation to a gap; it is to locate changeable features of the learning environment.
Developing the practice
Study experience and evidence
Pair disaggregated patterns with classroom work, observation, and the accounts of learners and families.
Examine the learning design
Review representation, language demand, accessibility, prerequisite access, assessment method, and opportunities to revise.
Build collective capacity
Use collaborative inquiry and coaching to change practice, then study student experience and work again.
Useful connections
Accessibility resources for assessment
SDLA’s CAASPP and ELPAC accessibility resource can prompt practical discussion about access without changing the construct being measured.
Questions for reflection and mentoring
- Which learners must work hardest to enter our current curriculum before they can show what they know?
- Are we interpreting a pattern with students and families or about them?
- What instructional artifact will show that our cultural learning changed practice?