Equity In Education - The Game Changer

In my last post, I posited that educational equity is the first step toward authentic access and opportunity. Educational equity requires taking the necessary steps to ensure that each learner can and will be successful. Without equity, we will continue down this road of failed programs, failed practices, and failed promises for a significant percent of our learners.

My convictions about educational equity are driven by moral and ethical principles and yes, fairness - the belief that fairness is predicated on each learner deserving our very best every day irrespective of ethnicity, language, gender, or social-economics.

Defining “fairness” and "best" has evolved from personal experiences over time. For example, high poverty and historically marginalized and under represented learners enrolled and successful in courses and programs like advance placement, honors, talented and gifted, college/university prep to name four areas caused me to ponder “fairness” with respect to expectations, choice, requisite learning, and experience.  

Do all learners have "choice" to participate in these experiences? Are all learners prepared for these experiences?  Are there expectations that each learner should be prepared for access and opportunity to these programs?  What does choice really mean?

Further still, I was forced to rethink “fairness” and "best" given the high percentage of students identified and placed in special education as well as remedial courses – not to mention the number of disciplinary referrals and suspensions that were predominantly our disadvantaged learners and learners of color.

I witnessed well-intentioned educators, parents, and community members encourage, incent, and reward learners for their pledges to do “good” in school and “attend” college. “Going to college” was the oft cited response by learners when asked, “What are you going to do when you graduate from high school?”

Fairness, however, requires more than aspirations, more than pithy statements, or programs. Equity is ensuring that each learner, irrespective of their “zip code”, has the necessary skills, knowledge and experience to have authentic access and opportunity for full participation in the educational experience.

A first step for us was shifting our focus to the requisite learning of essential skills, knowledge and experience - for learners to have authentic choices about their learning, they had to have a solid foundation. Though this may seem obvious, we had to ask ourselves if it was “fair” for students not to demonstrate proficiency let alone mastery of literacy and numeracy before moving forward? The resounding response was “of course not”. The problem, our problem was not in the “will” but in the “how” to do this.

With advances in technology, now more than ever we can disrupt failed learning by aggressively monitoring and reporting leading indicators of learning in process as well as the progress of learning. That is, we can “peek” inside the mind of a learner to ascertain how he or she is constructing meaning, formulating ideas, and making learning choices or decisions in real time.

Further, technology-based supplemental programming now makes possible the building, bridging, and reinforcing of skills, knowledge, and experience making “fair” the access and opportunity of, by and for education – for all.

It became very clear to me that unless we literally and figuratively “reset” the system by radically shifting from an intervention or treatment model to “prevention” to intervention, there was not going to be substantive improvement.

A majority of our learners could not access the full curriculum. They were denied these opportunities due to the failure to learn attributed to (as we learned) beginning their formal learning experience with certain gaps, or inexperience with the antecedents of literacy and numeracy; and the failure to “catch up” in essential learning once they entered our system. It was not an intelligence or capability issue; rather, they just didn’t have the experiences preparing them for formal learning.

Why then, would we expect all learners to learn and progress in the same way, at the same time, and in same place?

This inexperience resulted in unrealistic expectations for teachers and learners alike – not to mention actual results. This is where educational equity assuages the expectations. Placing the resources, tools, time, and programming to meet the needs of individual learners is paramount. Eradicating “sameness” with respect to the assumptions that all learners learn in the same way and at the same time is central to fairness. Similarly, the notion certain learners lose an advantage or are denied certain resource for the sake of others is absurd.

The mere cost to remediate, “treat” failed learning is consuming resources at an exponential rate adversely impacting all learners. Until such time that we collectively understand and act to prevent failure we will continue to miss-serve, underserve, or dis-serve learners that have the greatest dependency on educators for their success.

Let me say this clearly, the cost of failure is too expensive. We can’t afford it.

Suffice; fairness is intentional – with purpose. Educational equity is good, right, and true for all. If we are to ensure the promises of an education including access and opportunity created by it, then we must rethink “fairness” in light of preventing the failure to learn. In my experience the path to preventing intervention was providing the tools, resources, and permission to meet the needs of each learner – not treat each learner the “same”.