BLOG SERIES: "Do as I say, not as I do." Pt. 2

Espoused vs. Enacted Values

What schools say they value vs. what they actually fund, staff, and sustain.

By Julio César Manzano, MBA | Fulbright Scholar | ESOL Educator | Founder, Camino Academy

In my MBA, I learned a concept that finally named something I'd been living in schools for years. Chris Argyris and Donald Schön (1974) studied why smart leaders keep repeating the same mistakes. A manager says, sincerely, "I welcome feedback." Then, in the meeting, they shut down the person who speaks up. Espoused theory is what we claim to believe. Theory-in-use — what I call enacted practice — is what our behavior actually reveals. The gap between the two is where institutions lie to themselves.

Edgar Schein (1985) mapped the same idea through culture: what gets said in the plan vs. what gets protected in the schedule. That language landed hard. I had already spent years inside that gap. I just couldn't name it yet.

Source: The three levels of an organization's culture and its implication for leaders

The PLC We Built — and What Happened After I Left

At one high school where I worked, the English Language Development (ELD) department had no real structure for collaboration across grade levels. More than 500 ESOL students on campus — and their teachers were mostly working in isolation. My Texas mentor put it best: "Welcome to education where nothing makes sense!"

There was no common planning period. No standing meeting. No room built into the day for a Professional Learning Community (PLC) — the structured time teachers need to plan, look at student work, and actually improve instruction together.

So my mentor and I designed a rotating PLC on our own:

• Week 1: ELD teachers who co-taught English (grades 9–12) met with me.

• Week 2: Grade-level ELD teams — 9th, then 10th, and so on.

• Week 3: The full department — English, math, science, history — because we served the same kids.

My Resource Teacher (department head) voluntold me to lead it. Adults, it turns out, need collaboration norms too.

The campus improvement plan said the school valued collaboration, teacher leadership, and data-driven instruction. Before I arrived, ELD mostly met monthly for compliance — jargon, forms, requirements. That was it.

Once the rotation ran, it worked in ways people said they couldn't imagine — with zero common planning time. We met at lunch. We talked about struggling kids across classes: socio-emotional needs, graduation plans, chronic absences. In business language: root-cause analysis and cross-functional problem-solving. On our own time.

When I left, the rotation stopped.

The school never treated the PLC as infrastructure. It treated it as one teacher's initiative — unpaid labor squeezed into lunch, skipped when the day ran long. Written commitment. No systems. No protected time. That's espoused vs. enacted in one sentence.

The Pattern Isn't Just One School

This shows up everywhere.

A 2025 study of 16 UK universities found strategic plans and marketing that promised student-centered, active learning — while campuses kept building large fixed-seat lecture halls for passive instruction (Loughlin, 2025). Brochure said collaboration. Budget said something else.

Same move in K–12 equity work: schools tweak attendance policies (single-loop learning) without asking why students are absent in the first place (double-loop learning). As Paul Batalden put it: "Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets."

Critical race and LatCrit scholars have named this for decades. Institutions tell majoritarian stories about why students "fail" — she doesn't care, that family doesn't value education — instead of interrogating the structures that made the real story invisible (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Yosso, 2006).

I lived that story. The student who was always late. The home visit where the door didn't open. The campus narrative blamed priorities. The reality was more complicated — and the system had no structure to hear it. Teachers can grow culturally responsive dispositions. Without sustained leadership and structural change, there's a ceiling on what any one person can do (Leger, Cooper Stein, & DeChenne, 2026).

The Artifact Question

If a school says it values belonging, what actually proves it?

A hallway poster? A mission statement? A heritage-month board that goes up in October and comes down in November?

Real evidence looks like funded bilingual parent liaisons. Home visits with trained staff — not one teacher on their own time. A PLC that doesn't collapse when one person leaves. Counselors who speak the languages students speak at home. Restorative practices with real training, real staffing, and real administrative commitment. Restorative justice fails the same way when districts drop punitive consequences without building the alternative (IES / REL Northwest, 2025; Weber, 2026). Policy without infrastructure isn't equity. It's a slogan.

Did you fund it, staff it, and sustain it — or write it in a plan and move on?

What Survives?

Most schools have thoughtful mission statements. Many have made real progress on collaboration and home communication. But if the budget, the staffing, and the calendar tell a different story — if the program disappears when the pioneer leaves — the stated value was never the operational value.

At that school, the campus goal was belonging. The PLC I built didn't survive my departure. Campus language said Maslow before Bloom. Daily operations still ran on test scores before trust. I don't say this with bitterness. I say it because politeness alone won't close the gap.

I am also the student on the other side of it. I grew up bilingual in the Rio Grande Valley. When I moved to the East Coast, I learned what belonging costs when nobody builds for it — translating three jobs at once in a room that still reads maybe not you.

I also know the opposite. Teachers and teams who protected time, designed scaffolds on purpose, and made space for academic English without asking me to erase where I came from.

Espoused vs. enacted isn't abstract for me. It's the difference between a poster about belonging and a student who actually walks in feeling like they can speak.

So here's the uncomfortable call: stop pretending the plan is the practice. Name the gap. Then ask the question most institutions avoid — Do we actually value what we say we value? And if not, what are we willing to fund, staff, and sustain?

Where do you see the distance between espoused and enacted values in your organization — and who pays the price when the gap stays open?

Next in this series: "Why I Built Camino Academy" — what I decided to build in the gap between espoused and enacted.

References

• Argyris, C., & Schön, D. A. (1974). Theory in practice. Jossey-Bass.

• Schein, E. H. (1985). Organizational culture and leadership. Jossey-Bass.

• Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. F., IV. (1995). Toward a critical race theory of education. Teachers College Record, 97(1), 47–68.

• Loughlin, C. (2025). Building higher education: The tension between espoused educational values and physical infrastructure. Higher Education, 91(1), 369–386.

• Yosso, T. J. (2006). Critical race counterstories along the Chicana/Chicano educational pipeline. Routledge.

• Weber, J. (2026). Restorative justice didn't deliver. Why? Education Next, 26(1).