Equity Principles

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Equity Principles
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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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Equity Principles

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

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Equity Principles

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

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Equity Principles

• 3. A shift from color-blindness to self
  examination and understanding our own racial
  identities

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Color-blindness

• We often hear educators say that they dont see
  color, they just see children.
• It is an impossibility . . .
• Color is immutable and unavoidable its the
  first thing you notice about someone, whether you
  register it consciously or not.

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Color-blindness

• It is offensive . . .
• It blurs the real problems that communities of
  color struggle with i.e., low expectations,
  achievement gap, etc.

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Color-blindness

• It is an illusion . . .
• Used as a tool to deny the importance of race.
• The understanding of race and its construction in
  our culture is necessary for addressing the
  inequities in our schools.

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Self -examination

• Deeply explore all dimensions of our own
  identities race, gender, religion, etc.
• What impact does my race have on me or others?
• Have the courageous conversations that allow us
  to lift the unconscious veil of color-blindness
  and silence. Then we can develop the color
  consciousness needed to help all students reach
  their potential.

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• Adolescents of color really begin to think about
  their identities during adolescence. Thats an
  important time to explore racial and ethnic
  identity. While White youth are also exploring
  their identity at this time, they usually arent
  exploring the racial aspects of that identity.
  So, its not uncommon to find adolescents of
  color actively exploring identity, which
  manifests itself in styles of dress, patterns of
  speech, music, and who they hang out with in the
  corridors of their schools.

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• All of this is happening in the presence of White
  teachers who have no personal history with that
  type of identity exploration, nor have they given
  much thought to their own identities, even in
  midlife. If one person is having an experience
  that another has not shared or even thought
  about, its easy to see where there can be
  misunderstanding and conflict.

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• This is particularly true when adults respond by
  telling youngsters not to do the things
  associated with their identity exploration Dont
  wear those clothes, dont listen to that music,
  dont talk that way, dont sit together in the
  cafeteria.
• -Beverly Daniel Tatum (Sparks, 2004, p. 49)