Core Essays
Educators and the general public in our nation are deeply divided over the meanings of excellence and, especially, equity in education. The respected education scholars whose essays are featured in this section share their insights into the meaning of these concepts in light of the deep, structural inequities in our education system that reinforce the unacknowledged advantages to more-privileged students and barriers to less-privileged students in achieving excellence.
We invite you to share your own experiences and insights in a dialogue with the authors of these essays and other visitors to the site.
School Reform and Second-Generation Discrimination: Toward the Development of Equitable Schools
In his seminal 1972 work, Inequality, Christopher Jencks argues that Americans are confused about the concept of equality. He suggests that, while there is considerable support for the notion of equality of opportunity, there is far less support for the idea of equality of results. The pursuit of greater equality with respect to educational outcomes and long-term results is what equity, as practiced - or at least aspired to - in the context of schools, is largely about. As schools and districts struggle with efforts to raise student achievement and reduce disparities in student outcomes, it is clear that many educators and the broader public remain divided and confused about what it means to place equity at the center of reform efforts and what it might take to move in the direction of equality in results. Most of this opposition is due to the perception that any effort to promote the educational interests of disadvantaged students will come at the expense of the most privileged. Since the most privileged students tend to have the most powerful parents, in most places the pursuit of equity loses out.
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Equity, Difference, and Everyday Practice: Taking a Relational Approach
As an educational anthropologist, I am interested in listening to how people working for social justice - in particular, in local settings - wrestle with fundamental questions about equity and its relationship to the "differences that make a difference" in education, such as race, ethnicity, class, and disability. In my work, I attend to the multiple, complex, and conflicting notions of equity operating inside real schools. Following the political philosopher Iris Young, I view these as a set of justice claims: frameworks within which ideas about equity and its relationship to difference are organized in everyday discourse and practice.
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From Adequacy to Comprehensive Educational Equity: Toward a Realistic Agenda for Equity and Excellence
Our founding fathers dreamed of a nation that would provide widespread educational opportunity to its children, and we have a long history of efforts to realize this goal. Over the years, the capacity of the public schools to educate the country's students has grown enormously. However, in spite of steady improvements in overall caliber of our public schools and the educational attainment of our citizens, wide achievement gaps persist between poor and minority students and their peers in other groups. The reasons for these achievement gaps are clear. Poor and minority families' inequitable access to health care, stable housing, and early childhood education, among other resources, put their children behind their peers even before they begin school.
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What Excellence Takes: A Classroom View
Coming soon
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Measuring Excellence Equitably
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