In recent weeks and months, the word “equity” and the intention behind “equity” related work have been questioned. Because of this, the Prichard Committee is joining the refrain of leaders across the state who are working to dispel misinformation and to rightly connect the work of “equity” to achieving full “equality” for which we, and our Constitution, aspire.
Specifically, for our work, equity is ensuring all students, regardless of socioeconomic status, race, learning difference or gender have opportunities to advance, such as:
- The tools they need to learn
- Access to early learning opportunities so they are well-prepared for kindergarten
- Transportation to and from school and extracurricular activities
- Food and health care services so they can focus on academics
- Access to the internet and digital devices so they can continue learn outside the classroom
- Opportunities to attend higher education regardless of their family’s ability to pay
Simply put, “access without support, is not opportunity”. Equity is ensuring students have the supports necessary to turn access to education into opportunity.
For decades, we have talked about equity in our schools, how it can be used to equalize funding between poor and wealthy districts (that’s what the SEEK formula is for), and how it can equalize learning supports for students who may need more help than others. In recent years, we began to see rankings and assessment scores drop in important areas like 4th-grade reading and math proficiency, so we began tracking movement among student groups. In 2020, our first Big Bold Future report displayed the educational gaps between different racial student groups. The trends should call us all to intentional and targeted responses.
Through the COVID-19 pandemic, which kept students out of classrooms through 2020 and into 2021, these gaps were exacerbated. And, while state assessment results will not be out until later this year, national studies project significant learning loss with losses up to 60 percent higher for students from less educated homes.
As our 2016 report Equity with Excellence showed, however, educational equity is not just about helping close the gap in achievement between various groups of students. We must meet students where they are and help them meet their potential – which means access and support to the meet the state’s academic proficiency standards – and to go beyond them!
To underscore the importance of an “equity” approach to education, we will be posting a new piece on social media every Thursday – “Equity Thursdays.” It may be a key point from a blog, an infographic, or maybe even a video. Each piece will seek to help define the many different facets of equity. We hope you will follow and share these pieces with your audiences. With a Groundswell of education champions working together, we will achieve a Big Bold Future for Kentucky – increasing income and decreasing poverty with education at the core.
I’ll close with the words from our namesake, Ed Prichard, who in 1964 wrote the following passage for then Kentucky Governor Ned Breathitt:
“Ours is the vision and ours the growing reality of a great society in which the accidents of race and color, parentage and poverty, location and geography will not be allowed to dim the light of human hope and to cripple the possibilities of human growth.”
This quote is an important reminder of the Prichard Committee’s founding vision — one that has been too long in the realization and should prompt greater urgency with each passing year.
We can never let our state forget that we are leaving too many students behind, not realizing their unique potential, and that we must, with urgency, understand and work so each of Kentucky’s young people inherit a brighter future – a Big Bold Future – with education at the core.
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