Equity Principles

1
Equity Principles

• Adapted from Six Critical Paradigm Shifts for
  Equity in Education by Paul C. Gorski
• www.edchange.org

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Equity Principle 1

• A shift from
• Equality-based principles to Equity-based
  principles

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Equality

• Equal treatment
• Equal access
• Equal opportunity

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Educational Equity

• A strategy designed to provide differentiated
  educational responses to students who are
  different in important ways so that comparable
  outcomes may be achieved.
• All learners cannot be treated the same because
  their different learning, social, cultural,
  emotional, psychological and physical needs or
  characteristics naturally give rise to varying
  interventions for them to achieve comparability.
  Bradley Scott, 1995

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Shift

• A focus on comparable outcomes,
• Intentional strategies to level the playing
  field, and
• Unequal treatment of unequals

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Are we ready for the shift?

• Ultimately, the key question for us is not just
  whether students and teachers can appreciate
  differences, though we know that tremendous
  individual learning opportunities can emerge from
  a process of education that facilitates this sort
  of appreciation. The key question,instead, is
  whether every student who walks into our schools
  has an opportunity to achieve to her or his
  fullest, to have access to an equitably
  validating, supportive learning environment,
  regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual
  orientation, socioeconomic status, religion, home
  language, (dis)ability, and any other dimension
  of her or his identity.

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Equity Principle 2

• A shift from identifying at-risk students to
  acknowledging a broken system

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Who are we problematizing?

• Does the problem lie with the students and their
  families?
• Are we operating within a deficit framework where
  we have to fix the kids based on who they are?

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Causes of the gap?

• Do we recognize that the inequities (student
  academic performance- the gap) are actually
  symptoms, not root problems, of an inherently
  racist, classist, sexist, etc, system?
• There are institutional practices and polices
  that contribute to the gap.

10
We can and will create schools where equity and
excellence is attained.

• A place to start
• Conduct equity audits
• Confront our beliefs about the achievement gap
• Focus on the assets of other cultures- what the
  children bring to school
• Develop strategies that build upon student
  strengths.

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• We are aiming for schools in which there are no
  persistent patterns of differences in academic
  success or treatment among students grouped by
  race, ethnicity, culture, neighborhood, income of
  parents, or home language.

12

• There still continues today . . .to be just an
  incredible array of negative stereotypes about
  native people. . .We have in this country way
  too many negative stereotypes about black people,
  and about Latin people, and all kinds of people
  its just an incredible problem we deal with. .
  .Everybodys sitting around this table, and
  theyre all looking at each other with
  stereotypes, and they cant get past that. Its
  like everybodys sitting there and they have some
  kind of veil over their face, and they look at
  each other through this veil that makes them see
  each other through some stereotypical kind of
  viewpoint. If were ever gonna collectively begin
  to grapple with the problems that we have
  collectively, were gonna have to move back the
  veil and deal with each other on a more human
  level.
• Wilma Mankiller (1993), former chief
  of the Cherokee Nation