Equity, Educational

Inequality

Historically, educators have invoked a range of theoretical and ethical groundings for how they think about, study, and act upon issues of student diversity in schooling. Psychologists during the 1960s, for instance, invoked notions of individual differences and whether such differences are inherited or due to students' life experiences; the often virulent nature versus nurture debates can be traced to such theories. Sociologists and anthropologists sought to explain the unequal distribution of social socially desirable outcomes through notions of opportunity, social stratification, social and cultural capital, and the so-called culture of poverty. In his seminal study Equality of Educational Opportunity (also known as the Coleman Report), James Coleman wrote about the concept of equality of educational opportunity by noting that moral and ethical issues were raised by the existence of group-based inequality in educational outcomes.

Fairness

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, educators concerned about gender, racial, and social class [Page 805]differences in achievement began to invoke the term equity. In what might be the first published article to specifically theorize the term equity, Nicholas Burbules and his colleagues referenced a 1978 call by the National Institute of Education for proposals that would create better theories about the nature of educational equity. Although the source of such terminology is not clear, Burbules traces it to the idea that what is equitable is fair. Hence, writers who used the term equity conveyed that their efforts were intended to achieve fairness as opposed to mere equality, which can be achieved almost mechanistically. Alternatively, the use of equity might be rooted in the second of the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decisions whereby the U.S. Supreme Court invoked its powers of equity to craft a remedy for the wrongdoings visited upon plaintiffs due to segregation.

By the mid- and late 1980s, the term equity was in widespread use. However, with the exception of Burbules's groundbreaking analysis, what was meant by this term had not been seriously debated or theorized.

In 1987, an American Educational Research Association symposium asked the question: “What is equity in education?” Out of this symposium grew an edited monograph with contributions that

(a) traced the historical development of notions of equity within Western legal jurisprudence from the time of Aristotle who wrote about equity as a form of natural justice through the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown decisions and subsequently;

(b) considered multiculturalism as a form of equity;

(c) deconstructed the continuing power of the eugenics movement to influence school texts long after serious biologists had rejected its claims;

(d) noted how various research paradigms promote different ideals of equity; and

(e) traced concerns for gender equity along the lines of inputs, processes, and outcomes of education.

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