Equity
Equity is not a value. It is a design constraint.
Either equity is built into how you select students, present materials, design assessments, and develop adults. Or it is not there at all. This is where MMG makes that work visible.
The Commitment
A statement is not a system.
Most Montessori schools have written equity commitments. Fewer have examined whether their admissions process, their impressionistic charts, their family communication, their discipline culture, and their adult hiring practices reflect those commitments structurally.
MMG builds equity into the materials, tools, platforms, and leadership formation it produces. The Origins chart sets exist because the standard Montessori impressionistic charts present a Eurocentric version of human history as the default. The decodable books exist because decodables have historically centered one family structure as the norm. The equity course exists because most Montessori educators have completed rigorous AMI, AMS, or MACTE-accredited training and almost none of it addresses how to examine and repair inequity in the structures they lead.
This page is not a statement. It is where you do the work.
Practitioner Course
Equity in Montessori: A Practitioner Course
Most educators who take this course have done the introductory work. They have attended a session on implicit bias. They have read Kendi or DiAngelo or Love. They believe equity matters. What they have not done is examine their school's actual structures: who gets in, who gets disciplined, whose culture is centered in the materials, who gets hired and let go, and what the data shows when it is disaggregated by race and language.
This course draws on Kendi's antiracist policy framework, Ladson-Billings and Paris's culturally sustaining pedagogy, Bettina Love's abolitionist teaching, Tema Okun's white supremacy culture analysis, and Crenshaw's intersectionality to build the analytical infrastructure for equity as an institutional practice. It uses the Montessori context specifically, because the commitments to observation, prepared environment, and respect for the individual that define Montessori pedagogy apply with equal force to questions of race, language, culture, and belonging in the schools we build.
“Equity work is not the work we add when we have time. It is the standard against which we evaluate everything else.”
Who this is for: Educators and school leaders who have completed introductory equity work and are ready for practitioner-level structural analysis. This is not an introduction. It assumes basic familiarity and builds from there.
Equity in Montessori: A Practitioner Course
Moving from equity statements to equity practice. The hard, necessary work.
Most Montessori schools have written equity commitments. Fewer have examined their admissions process, discipline data, curriculum materials, and family partnerships through an equity lens: rigorously, honestly, and with the intention to change something. This course is designed for educators and school leaders who are past the introductory conversation and ready to engage structurally with what justice actually requires in a Montessori context.
What you will learn
- —Apply Kendi's distinction between antiracist policy and racist policy to analyze your school's actual structures: admissions criteria, discipline data, curriculum materials, staffing composition. Identify specific institutional changes, not general intentions.
- —Use Ladson-Billings and Paris's culturally sustaining pedagogy framework to evaluate whether your Montessori materials and presentations affirm or erase the identities, languages, and knowledge traditions of children in your classroom.
- —Draw on Tema Okun's characteristics of white supremacy culture, including perfectionism, urgency, defensiveness, and worship of the written word, to examine the organizational norms of your school and understand how they function as active barriers to equity practice.
- —Engage Bettina Love's abolitionist teaching framework to move beyond diversity and inclusion toward structural transformation: how your school actually designs for belonging, not just tolerance.
- —Develop an equity action plan grounded in Crenshaw's intersectionality framework and Margo Gottlieb's assessment equity principles, specific, accountable, and connected to the institutional structures you actually have authority over.
Price
$250
Format
Async, self-paced
Time
6.5–7 hours
Access
90-day access from first login
Secure checkout via Stripe. 90-day access begins on your first login.
Live Programming
Where the equity work happens live.
The async course builds the analytical foundation. The Institute's equity-focused seminars and intensives put that analysis to work in real school contexts, with real data, alongside peers doing the same work.
Equity Audits & Adult Culture Design
Thursday, April 15, 2026
9:30am–2:30pm CST
$350
This intensive helps schools conduct a meaningful equity audit of adult experience, examine structural patterns, and identify conditions that affect fairness, belonging, and psychological safety. Participants learn to gather and interpret data, uncover root causes, and redesign adult culture systems through an equity-informed lens.
For: Heads of school, DEI coordinators, and leadership teams engaged in adult culture or equity work.
More equity-focused intensives and seminars are scheduled throughout the year.
View the full Institute calendar →Equity Across the Ecosystem
Equity is not a program. It is infrastructure.
Across MMG's materials, platforms, and services, equity is not a layer added on top. It is a design constraint built in from the start.
Origins Chart Sets
The standard Montessori impressionistic charts tell one story. These tell many.
The Origins Series rebuilds the Great Lessons from current scholarship, centering civilizations across Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific alongside Europe. Not because diversity is a goal. Because accuracy is. Each suite charts at least four civilizations across multiple time periods and continents, correcting a Eurocentric default that has been reproduced in Montessori classrooms for generations.
Explore Origins Series→Decodable Books
96 books built on the science of reading. Whose stories appear is not a neutral choice.
96 decodable books aligned to Montessori bead colors and the science of reading. The stories center diverse families, communities, and experiences as the default, not as a diversity add-on. Because the families children meet in early reading materials teach them who belongs in a story, in a classroom, and in the world.
Explore Decodable Books→MMAP Equity Analytics
Schools hide inequity inside averages. MMAP makes it visible.
The MMAP equity analytics module disaggregates assessment and progress data by race, language background, gender, and other dimensions. Patterns that would otherwise stay invisible inside school-wide averages become visible and addressable. Equity work requires data. This is the data.
Learn about MMAP→Every Family Belongs Here
Equity is not a program. It is how we practice.
Session 08 of the Family Education Series addresses belonging, representation, and equity with families directly. Not a session for families who need to hear it. A session for every Montessori family, because belonging is a design practice, not a population-specific intervention.
Explore Family Education→Toolbox: Hiring & Separation
Bias causes the most damage in hiring and in exits. These toolkits build equity into both.
The Hiring & Selection Toolkit and Performance & Separation Toolkit are built with equity frameworks for the two organizational processes where unexamined assumptions most reliably produce inequitable outcomes. Rubrics, protocols, and language designed to interrupt bias before it becomes a decision.
Explore Toolbox→Authagraph Maps
The map your students have been looking at is wrong. Not metaphorically. Geometrically.
The Mercator projection — the map in most Montessori classrooms — systematically inflates the size of Europe and North America while shrinking Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia. This is not a neutral distortion. It encodes a Eurocentric view of the world into children's spatial intuition. The Authagraph projection shows accurate relative land masses. Africa is larger than the United States, Europe, and China combined. These maps make that visible.
Explore Authagraph Maps→Advisory
Schools working with MMG Advisory engage equity as a structural question, not a standalone initiative.
Culture repair, governance work, and strategic planning all involve equity at the structural level. Advisory does not treat equity as a separate workstream. It asks how power is distributed, how decisions are made, who is at the table, and what systems are producing which outcomes.
Explore Advisory→Resources
The work continues.
Additional equity resources are in development. When they are ready, they will be here.
Reading & Reference
MMG Equity Reading & Reference List
The scholars, research, and theoretical frameworks behind MMG's equity approach — from Ladson-Billings, Kendi, Love, and Crenshaw to Montessori's own writing on human dignity and the prepared adult.
View & download →Self-Assessment
School Equity Self-Assessment
A free diagnostic tool for Montessori schools to assess equity practice across admissions, curriculum, discipline, hiring, and family engagement. A lead into deeper advisory or Institute work.
View & download →Language & Terminology
Language and Terminology Guide
Not a glossary to memorize. A thinking tool for examining the language norms in your school — the words in your handbook, your progress reports, your Great Lessons — and the reasoning behind the choices MMG has made across its products and publications.
View & download →Stay informed
Get notified when equity resources are published.
The Makers Network newsletter covers new equity resources, Institute programming, and practitioner-level thinking for Montessori leaders.
Join the Makers NetworkWhere to go from here
The equity work connects to everything.
Institute
Live equity programming lives in the Institute. Seminars, intensives, and cohort experiences that put structural equity analysis to work in real school contexts.
Explore the Institute →Learning
Equity-centered materials: Origins chart sets, decodable books with justice-centered stories, family education sessions. The curriculum layer of the equity work.
Explore Learning →Advisory
For schools ready to engage equity as a structural question across governance, culture, and strategic planning. Advisory addresses the systems level.
Explore Advisory →Because children experience the organization adults create.
Start a Conversation →The Makers Network
A weekly email for Montessori leaders and practitioners.
The Makers Network is a free weekly email on leadership, organizational design, adult culture, and what it actually takes to run a Montessori school well.
New tools, ecosystem updates, and thinking that doesn't fit anywhere else. No noise. Just what matters to people doing this work.