from Terry Hayek
In a profession increasingly full of angst and posturing and corrective politics, there are few ideas as easy to overcome as capital.
Even. Equality. Equity. Equilibrium. Equalize. These are all nice ideas—each neat and whole, implying its own kind of justice while also connoting the precision of mathematics. Level. the same. a twin. Each word has its own nuance, but one common feature they share is access – a level, a shared area with open paths that are equidistant to mutually agreed currencies.
When we discuss justice, there are so many convenient handles—race, gender, language, poverty, access to technology—but there may be a larger view that we miss when we do.
Equity is the idea and goal of fairness and inclusiveness to provide all students with the resources, opportunities and supports they need to succeed, regardless of their background, ability or socio-economic status. Unlike equity, which treats everyone the same, equity recognizes that students come from different circumstances and may require different approaches and resources to achieve similar outcomes.
The equity scale
There is no more global question – perhaps justice on global problem of our time. UN statistics published last year in The Economist say it clearly While sub-Saharan Africa has seen progress in primary education, gender inequality is actually widening among older children. The ratio of girls enrolled in primary school rose from 85 to 93 per 100 boys between 1999 and 2010, while it fell from 83 to 82 and from 67 to 63 in secondary and tertiary education. And elsewhere, in Chad and the Central African Republic, there is a flat rate of fewer than 70 girls for every 100 boys.
This is a fundamentally different conversation about justice than we might be having in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada or Australia. We have the luxury of getting pickier and harsher on ourselves as we progress, ie. let’s first make sure there are free, quality schools everywhere and all children can read and write, and then at some point down the line we can worry about iPad vs Android or broadband in our poorest communities.
It’s easy to miss the scale of this as a “problem” because unlike grading, curriculum, teacher pay, class size, educational technology, or any other evergreen educational choke point, equity never stops influencing. It is both the center and the periphery of everything, because we are always what we are, where we are.
The cultural effect
As a species, we express ourselves through differences. What makes “culture” interesting is how it recognizes the individual while allowing it to disappear again into the whole. There is both identity and anonymity in culture. There is a constant self->group transaction that is based on both affection (internal expression) and image (external expression). This transaction is then repeated in different cultures with completely different functions. Differences within and between cultures are still differences, but the individual can think simply while the groups collect.
So it’s a brutally narrow view of how people come together and unite and manifest their vision of what it means to be human, but the point remains: as educators, we suffer from the same reductionism when we see the masses the same way that Nielsen makes the TV ratings. Students are not a demographic, and it is murky at best to see how treating them this way has improved their situation or our overall progress.
As we squint and try to narrow the gaps, it’s all too easy to lose sight of the scale and product of our work. Segmenting Mackenzie and Andrew into a group and that group into a subgroup and understanding them in data and the knowledge that we hope they come away with, in standards that we can teach with – all of this becomes tone – posture dictates the conditions of teaching and learning . Equity in the classroom is different from equity in the labor market.
A further consequence is that we all share justice and injustice, both in possession and in effect. In The Hidden Wound, Wendell Berry writes, “It is perhaps the most significant irony in our history that racism, by dividing the two races, has made them not separate but fundamentally inseparable, not independent but interdependent, incomplete one without the other, each desperately needing to understand and use the other’s experience…we are one body and division between us is a disease of one body, not two.” It is both abstract and practical. We share both living space and social membership.
Somehow, however, public education, more than any other industry or profession, is expected to bridge these inherent differences while transcending them. Our task?
- Create a curriculum that provides a common language for knowledge without homogenizing the nuances of that knowledge
- Design learning models that are inherently inclusive, regardless of access to technology
- Create authentic features for family members and communities who may speak a completely different language
As individuals, we work to set ourselves apart—as children, often based on image, and as adults, often based on income, where we choose to live, what we drive, the smartphone we carry, and what we choose to do “for living.” But each of these expressions of who we are—gender, native language, race, sexuality, socioeconomic level, and so many others—is also an opportunity for incongruity that works to undermine the function of education.
It is easy to see equity in education as a matter of equity, access and inclusion, but this is only so if what is equitably accessed is a teaching and learning system that is able to meet the needs of increasingly global population – this means fluid, responsive, dynamic, neutral and alive. For an industry that struggles to get every student to read on grade level, that may be small. My instinctive reaction then is that this can only happen through the gentle expression of the local – this student in this home in this community, with the school functioning as an exceptional support system.
Equity is at the student level, not at the demographic level, because demographics only exist on paper. For every student there is commonality and there is difference; there is shared (ie, a student in need of knowledge) and there is distinction (eg, poor, rural, white, black, male, female). It never stops. We can overhaul our schools, curricula, pedagogy, and technology until they are inclusive, equitable, and accessible to every student, but these are ongoing efforts that may represent a kind of basement to our goals.
But why not think about something more ambitious? New thinking about gender terms and definitions emphasizes both the characteristics and fluidity of each culture. If we insist on standardizing content, perhaps we can avoid standardizing education. How many different answers are there to “Why should I study?” Fantastic! Let’s repeat ourselves until we can read that.
The work ahead of us, then, may not be to level an academic playing field to which there are no rights, but rather to create new conditions for why we learn, how and where – and then to change expectations about what we do with what we know.
Simply ensuring access and inclusion in the content base is no longer sufficient if our goals transcend academic boundaries. A modern definition of equity in education might be less about equity, fairness, or even, and more about personalization—a set of knowledge, habits, and networks that help each student realize his or her uniquely unique potential.
As for the definition of equity in education? How about “eye-level access to curriculum, educational models and learning spaces that depend entirely on the local interests, knowledge requirements and human feelings of individual learners”.
Or more succinctly, “a fully realized system of learning that begins and ends with the humanity of each student.”
A New Definition of Equity in Education; flickr user to credit adapted image helping and Scots;
