Equity is something we build. In our schools, equity means figuring out what will keep each learner moving forward and figuring out how to provide whatever that is.
We’ve built some important capacity to meet some of those needs. For example:
- Lunches arrive if a K-12 student’s family would have a hard time paying for the food that allows them to concentrate on class
- Buses arrive if students live too far from school to walk to their classrooms
- Accommodations arrive if a student’s identified disability requires a change to facilities, to equipment, to schedules, or to learning activities
- Financial help arrives in every district to reduce the impact of difference in property wealth between communities all working to help their children learn
- Needs-based aid arrives if students at our universities and community colleges don’t have family resources to cover the full costs.
And yet we know we haven’t built the full system to give our learners full support. Here are examples again:
- Broadband access hasn’t arrived in some homes, making homework and virtual learning hard or impossible for rural children and children in homes with the lowest incomes. We need to build better networks and affordability.
- Preschool participation hasn’t arrived for many children who would benefit, and the preschool programs we currently fund seem to be attracting fewer children than in the past. We may not know quite what needs to be built or rebuilt, but it’s time for some form of renovation to create preschool invitations that parents can happily accept.
- Engagement with college-level work has arrived for some high school learners, but the students who aren’t joining in are disproportionately those with low family incomes, with identified disabilities, and those who are African American and Latino. Without knowing quite what needs to be built there, either, we know it’s time for an upgrade in preparation, recruitment, welcome, support or whatever it takes to make those classes effective for additional learners.
- Cultural connections have arrived more easily for some students than others. All students come to school with competencies and funds of knowledge, and they are more likely to flourish if they can share and build with those capacities. I’m remembering three tales of those strengths surging: one with students bringing Bluegrass music to school along with their grandparents’ fiddles, one with an immigrant child explaining about the camel-ride part of his trip from Eritrea, and one with a classroom where a second-grade teacher mentioned taking a plane from Montgomery, Alabama, and was knocked over by a wave of knowledge about bus-riders and boycotts. We know that learner by learner, we need to enable students to show those strengths and build from them. We don’t know all of how to do that, but we know the work awaits us.
The pandemic has multiplied all those challenges, of course. Over the last 18 months, learners have had vastly different experiences, and identifying right next steps for each one will take tremendous efforts. Plus, classrooms have been changed to add safety, and the newest wave of cases is already requiring quarantines, isolation, and some school closures: the challenges are still growing.
Building equity takes innovation and exertion and persistence. It requires facing challenges before we know how to solve them, and trying out solutions with careful attention to what’s succeeding and what needs another approach. Equity is lasting work.
Building equity is different from stopping discrimination. Bigotry is wrong, of course. It’s good that we’ve stopped having separate schools for children of different races and refusing opportunities to girls because they’re girls. It’s good that so many of us have worked to shake off biased assumptions and prejudiced habits. But letting go of those discriminatory habits is not the same as building schools that work for every learner. That active building is much harder work.
One more thing: Building equity is the best work we can do together. Building systems that work well for every learner how we nurture our rising generation and create a Big, Bold Future for us all.
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