Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)The purpose of this research is to explore if policy makers and implementers shift 
and/or change their understandings of the portfolio management model (PMM) when 
engaged in equity-oriented transformative professional learning. The portfolio approach 
to urban education, at present, is being implemented or considered by over one third of 
the US. There are 20 states, 40 cities, and the District of Columbia that are pursuing 
and/or implementing the portfolio management model (PMM).  This research study 
examines how systemic, socio-political, socio-historical, and interconnected policy 
networks have resulted in inequity. Furthermore, this study focuses on how policy makers 
and implementers engage with one another and their context(s) while learning about 
educational equity. This occurred via facilitating transformative professional learning 
opportunities aimed to illicit critical self-awareness, reflection, and examination of 
perhaps the more pernicious underpinnings of authentic decision and choice making in 
US education reform. The study also explores the ways in which institutional context and 
the research design itself may have impacted and/or impeded shifts in learning.  
The study’s theoretical frameworks guided the decision to use critical qualitative 
inquiry and narrative inquiry to investigate the raced, gendered, sexed, and classed 
experiences of policy makers and implementers, and further, implications for policy implementation regarding other forms of othering such as ableism, linguicism, ageism, 
etc.  
Thematic analysis of the data, analyzed using critical frameworks, were 
articulated as interspliced data vignettes. Findings suggest that learning is social and that 
designed experiences around educational equity can provide ways in which policy 
makers and implementers can formally intervene in their own practices of developing 
and/or cultivating critical consciousness, as well as decision-making toward PMM 
adoption and implementation in their respective contexts. Participant’s narratives both 
challenge and perpetuate dominant, historical approaches of urban education reform 
adoption and implementation, and exposes how US urban education policy arenas have 
not systemically centered critical consciousness, resulting in equity-oriented policies 
being interpreted and implemented in inequitable ways. Findings from this study guide 
future research and practice that focuses on urban education policy creation, adoption, 
and implementation