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Through this work, App{e Valley educators and community leaders established a climate of constructive collaboratian that tan be directed toward addressing the district's new challenges. From the perspective of the schoo! superintendent, "This is a conversation our community is not used to having, so we had to buifd a positive climate before moving to the harder questians of action." Phase 2: Engaging Personal Culture Change has to start with educators before it can realistically begin to take place with students. 7he central aim of the second phase of the work is building educators' cultural competence—their ability to form authentic and effective relationships across differences. Young people, particularly those from historically marginalized groups, have sensikive antennae for authenticity. I recently asked a group of racially and culturally diverse high school students to name the teachers in their school who really cared about them, respected them, and enjoyed getting to know them as people. Forty students pooling their answers could name only 10 teachers from a faculty of 120, which may be one reason this high school has a 50 percent dropout rate for students of color. Aronson and Steele's (2005) work on stereotype threat demonstrates that intellectual performance, rather than being a fixed and constant qual9ty, is quite fragile and can vary greatly depending on the social and interpersonal cantext of learning. In repeated studies, these researchers found that three factors have a major effect an students' motivation and perFormance: their feefings of belonging, their trust in the people around them, and their belief that teachers value their intellectual competence. ihis research suggests that the capacity of adults in the school to form trusting relationships with and supportive learning environments for their students can greatly influence achievement autcomes. Leaders in the Metropolitan School District of Lawrence Township, outside Indianapolis, have taken this perspective seriously.�Clear data showed gaps among ethnic groups in achievement, participation in higher-level courses, discipline referrals, and dropout rates. in respanse, district teachers and administrators engaged in a vigorotas and ongoing process of self-examination and personal growth related ta cultural competence. Central-offce and building administraiors started with themselves. Along with selected teachers from each school, they engaged in a multiyear program of shared reading, reflective conversations, professional development activities, and joint planning to increase their own and their calleagues' levels of cu�tural competence. They studied and practiced Margaret Wheatley's (2002) principles of conversation, with particular emphasis on her admonitions to expect things ta be messy and to be willing to be disturbeci. They designed their own Socratic seminars using chapters from We Can't Teaci► Whai We Don't Know (Howard, 2006) and used the stages of personal identity development model from that book as a foundation for ongoing reflective conversations about their own journeys toward cultural competer�ce. As this work among leaders began to be applied in various schoo[ buifdings, one principal observed, "We are talking abaut things that we were afraid to talk about before—like our own prejudices and the biases in some of our curriculum materials." In another school, educators' discussions led to a decision to move parent-teacher conferences out of the school building and into the apartment compfexes where their black and Latino students live. Phase 3: Confronting Social Dominance and Social ]ustice When we fook at school outcome data,.the history of racism, classism, and exclusion in the United States stares us in the face. Systems of privilege and preference often create enclaves of exclusivity in schools� in which certain demographic groups are served well while others languish in