August 10, 2023
I still appreciate the opportunities I had as a small child because my mother was a reading teacher. In kindergarten, Miss Brown ultimately turned over the responsibility for class reading in a circle to me. In third grade, we read assigned books independently, and when I completed the book and worksheet well before my classmates, Miss Beck told me, happily, that I would have the opportunity to read a supplemental SRA story each day. Alternatively, in second grade, we were each called on to read a paragraph in the “Dick and Jane” readers. I was consistently punished because I didn’t know where the previous student had left off. I had already finished the story, infuriating Mrs. Fogg because I would not read at the same pace as the rest of the class. These childhood memories suggest that two of my teachers embraced equity and one believed in absolute equality. The teachers influenced my vision of equity today.
On the surface, this sounds straightforward: equality is about providing the same pathways and materials to each student, regardless of background, ability, and mental and physical health. Public schools, stereotypically, are famous for moving an entire grade level of kids at the same pace, minimizing the fact that students do not learn at the same pace. The socially efficient solution is to track students based on their general learning speed and treat that tracking as a marker for future expectations. Those who cannot keep up become destined for low-paying jobs that require few skills. Those who struggle to keep up and/or come close are destined for a more skilled job that would allow them to succeed in the middle class. And those that keep up or exceed the pace are tracked for college and well-paid professions. Until recently, we rarely questioned those distinctions and viewed them as meritocratic realities. Now we wonder whether accidents of birth, upbringing, and luck should be factored into the equation.
Certainly, some of my teachers did not treat everybody the same, just as parents don’t always treat their children the same. Perhaps they practiced equity, defined as providing each individual with what they need to be successful, regardless of their starting point or circumstances. Equity is also about recognizing and remedying historic and systemic inequalities to ensure that everyone has a fair and just chance at success. That’s a tall order for an educator.
With efficient equality, when you give every student the same curriculum, same assignments, and same schedule, it’s hard to argue that you’re meeting individual needs. The differences in outcomes are still evident, but we often don’t know the reasons so we frequently write off those distinctions as expressions of effort. A program based on seat time slips into the zero-sum game of allocating scarce teacher time with an equity framework. Whatever time is spent with one student takes time from another. Most schools have a “band-aid” equity practice of offering scheduled extra help or interventions, where students trade their extra time for individual attention (and the teacher’s extra time). The fundamental premise of extra help is that, if a teacher spends enough time with a student, they will ultimately understand what other students already know, treating understanding as a linear concept on the sequence trail. What if our scarce resource, time, expires for a given unit, skill, or concept, and the student still doesn’t understand? What if that time could have been spent with another student who might be more successful? Which student should have been helped? It’s a slippery slope.
For me, equity is worth the effort. It’s something I valued in my work with students. To move closer to equity, we must honor the individual with minimal concern for personal cost because it is part of what an independent school is about. If extra help is not the answer, then what can we do that expresses the broadest range of possible visions for equity in our schools? Can equity be constrained by equality? How does one provide everybody with the same resources and opportunities while meeting each student’s individual needs? Are the two terms in contradiction to each other, or is equality the baseline for equity? Is it possible to start with a level playing field and then adjust for differences, or are the two concepts more like strange bedfellows? Is it possible that school practices and the current public view of equity are limited to disadvantaged populations, the tallest mountain to climb, rather than recognizing every member of a community as part of some form of historic and/or systemic inequality? Would that recognition change the potential solutions?
Returning briefly to the classroom, let’s move beyond equality and expand the range of visions that define equity. Do we practice equity on the first day of classes? In my early years of teaching, my mentor told me to read the previous term reports of my students so I would better understand their needs. After ten years of doing so, I abandoned the practice because the teachers’ messages only reinforced the traditional biases that I had adopted and applied to my kids. Instead, I could now assume that the playing field was level on Day 1 because each student was a blank slate. I could meet their needs without preconceived beliefs about who they are or what they’ve done, good or bad. It was a critical distinction and highlighted the importance of equitable practice in the classroom. I began each term/year knowing nothing about my students and advisees except what I had learned from my interactions with them.
The “blank slate” view has similar equity implications for standardized testing. Are we comfortable claiming that we are meeting the needs of our students by looking at the scores and percentiles of a standardized test that was taken once or twice? What information do the results convey that will result in actionable steps that we are certain will help each student? Even after reams of data that correlate bands of test scores with specific socioeconomic groups, are we prepared to say that our responses to those scores are equitable? Even as we recall from our own experience that performances on standardized, timed tests are uneven at best, are we prepared to slip into equality mode simply because we don’t yet know these students? And if we can rationalize that position, are we then prepared to stomach the confirmation biases that will take over when these same students test years later after we have relegated them to a specific pathway based on their scores and prior performance?
Programmatically, we’re still stuck in the equality paradigm, perhaps with a small dose of fairness. When we have evidence that the playing field is not level, we tend to lower the floor to improve the odds of equality. In layman’s terms, if we dumb down the curriculum or compromise our expectations, we can level the playing field at the outset. That concept, however, runs contrary to another critical tradition at an independent school: rigor. We have to provide the appropriate amount of rigor for every student so that success comes at the price of time and effort, or so we believe. The natural solution is to level courses by creating sections that begin the study of the subject in a different place in the sequence and have varying expectations for the pace of progress. So everybody gets on their treadmill at the same time, but some treadmills run faster than others. In another programmatic strategy, entry into the higher levels of a given course is often accompanied by prerequisites, meaning that we value past performance—which was inconsistent and drives our expectations—over future potential, a concept closely related to individual needs. In short, we value scarcity (what students can’t do based on the historical record) more than abundance (future potential with supportive expectations), making our standard practices lean more toward equality than equity.
These popular practices are often sources of anger and frustration for students; white, affluent students included. They don’t like their lower placement because it tarnishes their transcript, they don’t like the late work policy because it takes them longer to conceive and write an essay, and they dislike the early start of the daily schedule because they see influencing messages on social media that teenagers don’t function well at 8 a.m. One of the best ways to help white students empathize with the feelings and challenges of students of color is to remind them regularly of the anger they feel when they are shut out of an opportunity that feels life-altering or forced to do something that conflicts with their biological clock, perceiving that they are at a competitive disadvantage. When they feel that anger, will they better hear the suggestion that one might multiply that anger 10 times or 100 times to empathize with how students of color are responding to their targeted structural inequities? This approach also means that schools that profess a commitment to equity for all must make some structural and programmatic changes to ensure that their level of commitment is not just taglines, but actions as well (for the source of this proposal, see Jal Mehta’s 2020 article).
There is another option that expands the vision of equity for all and remains consistent with the rigorous expectations of our schools. We could raise the ceiling for all students rather than lowering the floor for some. While it sounds counter-intuitive, think about why it might better address issues of equity. If we design a course that will be extremely challenging to the highest academic performers (note I did not say “brightest students”), we acknowledge that the playing field is not level to start and that we are not striving for equality or equity of outcomes. Under the principles of equity of opportunity, we are trying to maximize intellectual growth for every student, knowing that it will vary. What I am describing and have already done, negates the need for grades, sorting, ranking, and multiple course levels. For all practical purposes, those concepts of equality, the stratified level playing field, become irrelevant. Growth is no longer relative to others or a baseline; it is personal and individual.
During my years of wild ideas for the teaching of world history (I thank my department heads for putting up with me), perhaps the one year that was most enlightening for the students and challenging for me was the year I significantly raised the ceiling. In 2009, I was teaching a thematic world history course (regular, not honors) for which the winter term theme was politics; in short, we studied the 18th and 19th centuries through a political lens. This particular year, however, instead of using one of the course packs I designed with a colleague (abandoned the textbook years earlier), I selected a single work that was the core text of a graduate history course at Yale University, Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship & Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. My colleagues said I was crazy; my time would be spent rereading the text with the students so they could understand it. I pressed forward with planning. On Parents Weekend in October, I informed parents that our class would be reading the book after Thanksgiving until Spring Break, and the students would conclude with projects that reflected their interests within the guardrails of the course. In that group of parents was one father, a leading American historian and author of 12 books on the founding of this country. I was visited by this parent after class. He told me he had never known of any high school or undergraduate program that used the Moore book, but he thought it was worth trying. Perhaps his unmotivated son would wake up and rise to the occasion.
I began with three hypotheses that reflected my vision of equity:
- All kids are capable of sophisticated thinking, but they’re not starting in the same place for a variety of reasons related to inequity, exclusion, possible trauma, and gaps in social-emotional development.
- With the appropriate encouragement, challenge, and level of trust, students will rise to the occasion and critically evaluate key historical principles that matter to them and are crucial and relevant to understanding their world.
- If I and their peers give each student the support they require, they will all perform at a much higher level in this course with smaller differences in outcomes.
When the adventure began, I did not tell my students they were reading scholarly graduate material. By the end of Week 2, most of them had asked why the reading was so difficult, and I had to spill the beans. Most disconcerting to the historically most successful students was the discovery that their previous methods of “doing school” did not work. Suddenly, every student was in the same boat and all had the potential to succeed (equity of opportunity). The kids soon figured out that they would not be coming to class prepared with polished answers to questions (nor would the grad students at Yale), and that their best strategy was to explain what they had figured out and then rely on questions about what they didn’t understand. Ultimately, they recognized that the political revolution narratives they were reading were similar to those they had studied in the past, but this narrative was presented through a different and more complex lens that better resembled their interests (one student described it as 3-dimensional). Because the lens was so different, nobody benefited significantly from prior knowledge of the material. They were seeing abundance rather than scarcity of opportunity. The goal was a broad and deep thinking exercise for every student, but how and when they arrived at that goal would vary.
During the second half of the term, I cut back the reading and introduced team project work. Each group of students was asked to select one of the three revolutions (English, American, or French). Each team formulated a Big Question and then answered that question by either supporting the Moore argument or challenging it. This exercise increased the stakes for understanding the Moore thesis, and here is where peer support was at its best. While everybody was learning at their own pace, the natural competitive ethos accelerated everybody to a satisfactory, but varied, level of understanding. Those who struggled with one element of the thesis were supported by other team members who also needed help from their peers or me. This was negotiated within each team to maximize effectiveness. It wasn’t a perfect plan, but I saw a few students who had been weaker performers in the fall rise to the occasion, knowing that each member of the team had an important role to play. My equity hypotheses were starting to show some anecdotal validity. It was a first step.
There is much more that could be said about this course and the subsequent work to test elements of the equity hypotheses. The primary lesson learned was that if I provide each student with equity of opportunity, regardless of their past record, then the traditionally “weaker” students will flourish because they feel like they have as good a chance as any student to understand; they trusted the system in my classroom. The traditionally “stronger” students sacrificed some of their “doing school” techniques, so they had to be sufficiently motivated by the subject matter and approach to put aside their prior track record and prove themselves again in a different classroom culture. And I had a responsibility to move their thinking forward as much as I did with the weaker students; meeting everybody’s learning needs. There’s nothing I will consciously do to tip the scales in favor of any student. Because I ended up coaching more than teaching them, I could meet the learning needs of almost every student (this was my first go at the new approach), building trust and sending the message that nothing would make me happier than seeing them all demonstrate their mastery of the origins of modern political revolutions.
As we continue to rethink our equity initiatives, remember that, while they may have been created for specific reasons and targeted specific groups of students, it will be challenging to succeed unless the principles of equity are applied to everybody in the school community. We all begin with equity of opportunity. We then constructively meet individual needs, not by punishing some for the inequities of the past. Equity is a prospective, not a retrospective, concept. We do nothing for the future success of our students by making some responsible for past injustices. We honor everybody’s past, pleasant or unpleasant, and do everything possible to make the future brighter for each according to their needs.
You may also be interested in reading more articles written by Joel Backon for Intrepid Ed News.
