with Terry Heick
In a profession that is often fraught with angst and posturing and policy making, there are few ideas that are as easy to find as balance.
It’s equal. Equality. Equality. Equality. Measure it. These are all great ideas—each neat and tidy, showing its own kind of justice while incorporating mathematical precision. Level. Likewise. Twin. Each word has its own nuance, but one thing they share in common is access—a level, shared space with open paths. equality in agreed currencies.
When discussing equality, there are many convenient handles—race, gender, language, poverty, access to technology, but we may be missing a larger perspective when we do so.
Equality concept and objective of fairness and inclusion in provisionuntil all students have the resources, opportunities, and support they need to succeed, regardless of their background, abilities, or socioeconomic status. Unlike equity, which treats everyone the same, equity recognizes that students come from different backgrounds and may need different methods and tools to achieve the same results.
Balance Scale
There is no other global problem—equality perhaps i the global story of our time. United Nations statistics published last year in The Economist made it clear. Although progress is being made in sub-Saharan Africa in primary education, gender inequality is actually increasing among older children. The rate of enrollment of girls in primary schools increased from 85 to 93 per 100 boys between 1999 and 2010, and decreased from 83 to 82 and from 67 to 63 at the secondary and tertiary levels. And in other places, in Chad and the Central African Republic, there is a low ratio of less than 70 girls for every 100 boys.”
This is a very different conversation about equality than we would have in the United States, the UK, Canada, or Australia. We are happy to be selective, and we are aggressive with ourselves, as progress is made, that is, let’s first make sure that there are free, high-quality schools everywhere, and that all children can read and write, and then at some point we will go down the line. we can worry about iPads versus Androids, or broadband access in our poorest communities.
It’s easy to miss the scale of this as an ‘issue’ because unlike testing, curriculum, teacher pay, class sizes, educational technology, or any other area of ongoing edu-choke, equity doesn’t stop impacting. It is both at the center of everything because we are always what we are, where we are.
Cultural Effect
As a species, we express ourselves differently. What makes ‘culture’ interesting is how it both recognizes the individual while simultaneously allowing it to disappear and become whole again. In culture, there is both the self and the unknown. There are constant group transactions based on both love (internal speech) and image (external speech). This transaction is repeated in all cultures, with completely different functions. The differences between and among cultures are all differences though, but one can easily imagine the groups collect.
So this is a brutally small view of how people gather and unite and express their vision of what it means to be human, but the point remains: As educators, we face the same reduction when we see the masses the same way Nielsen does television ratings. . Students are not statistics, and it’s great to see how treating them that way has improved their situation or our shared progress.
While shrinking and trying to fill gaps, it is very easy to lose sight of the scale and product of our work. The division of Mackenzie and Andrew into a group, and that group into a small group, and their insights into data, and the knowledge that we hope they will come out with into standards that we can teach—this all becomes a tone—a stance that sets goals. of teaching and learning. Equality in the classroom is different than in the job market.
What follows is that we all share equality and inequality, both in what we have and in the outcome. In the book “The Hidden Wound,” Wendell Berry writes, “It may be the most important irony in our history that apartheid, by dividing these two races, has made them not separate but fundamentally inseparable, independent but interdependent. , incomplete without the other, each in dire need of understanding and using the other’s knowledge…. we are one body, and division between us is a disease of one body, we are not both. This is both invisible and practical. We share both housing and community membership.
In some ways, however, public education, more than any other field or profession, is expected to accommodate these inherent differences while transcending them. Our job?
- Create a curriculum that provides a common language of knowledge without making distinctions between that knowledge
- Design learning models that integrate naturally without access to technology
- Create authentic activities for family members and communities that may speak a completely different language
As individuals, we work to differentiate ourselves—as children, often based on image, and as adults, often based on income, where we choose to live, what we drive, the smartphones we carry, and what we choose to do for a living.” But each of these expressions of who we are—gender, native language, race, gender, socioeconomic status, and more—and it’s unequal opportunities all work to undermine the work of education.
It is easy to see equity in education as a matter of justice, access, and inclusion, but that is only the case if what is achieved is a teaching and learning system that can meet the needs of a growing population around the world—that is, it is fluid, responsive, flexible, neutral, and alive. In an industry struggling to get every student learning at grade level, this may be a lot. So, my gut reaction is that this can only happen through local love—this student in this home in this community, with the school acting as an extraordinary support system.
Equality is at the student level rather than the population level because population statistics exist only on paper. For every student, there are commonalities and differences; there are commonalities (ie, the student in need of information), and there are differences (eg, poor, rural, white, black, male, female). This never ends. We can revise our schools, curriculum, pedagogy, and technology until they are integrated, fair, and accessible to every student, but that would be an ongoing effort that would represent a form of underlying structure for our goals.
But why not consider something more ambitious? New thinking about the concepts and meanings of gender emphasizes both the characteristics and dynamics of any culture. If we insist on standardizing content, we may avoid standardizing education. How many different answers are there to, “Why do you study?” It’s delicious! Let’s repeat ourselves until we can respect that.
So, the task before us may not be to level the playing field, but to create new words for why, how, and where we learn—and then change the expectations of what we do with what we do. we know.
Merely ensuring access to and inclusion in the body of supported content is no longer enough if our goals extend beyond education. A modern definition of educational equity may be less about equity, fairness, or even, and more about personalization—a complex of knowledge, practices, and networks that help each student realize his or her unique strengths.
About the definition of educational equality? How about, “access to that level of curriculum, educational models, and learning environments that depend entirely on the native interests, knowledge needs, and personality preferences of each student.”
Or in short, “a fully realized learning program that begins and ends with the personality of each student.”
A New Definition of Educational Equity; user-friendly image annotation adapted from flickr and skotit;
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