Shanker Blog: Educational Equity During A Pandemic
This post is part of our series entitled Teaching and Learning During a Pandemic, in which we invite guest authors to reflect on the challenges of the Coronavirus pandemic for teaching and learning. Our contributor today is Peter Levine, Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship at Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life. He blogs regularly on his own site. Posts in the series will be compiled here.
My wife and I have each spent many hours teaching by video this spring. While sitting in the same house, I meet online with college students who attend a selective private university; she meets with 5-to-9-year olds in an urban public school system, helping them learn to read.
Both of us think and worry about equity: how to treat all students fairly within our respective institutions and across the whole country (even the world). And both of us discuss these issues with our respective colleagues. I suspect that many other educators are similarly wrestling with the challenges of teaching equitably while schools are closed.
Before the pandemic, schools were already dramatically inequitable. In our state of Massachusetts, total expenditures per pupil vary from $14,000 to $31,000 among regular school districts. But the worst-funded Massachusetts district still allocates twice as much per student as Utah does. In Uganda, the government spends $2.12 per student per year on education (although many families spend more).
Boosting a school’s budget certainly does not guarantee better results—as Utah’s decent outcomes show—yet inequity takes many other forms besides cash, from biased adults' expectations to the amount of pollution in the air, or even the degree to which other students are focused on learning.
Although such disparities persist, at least there are some ways of promoting equity within the walls of a bricks-and-mortar school. Every enrolled child can be required to attend for basically the same amount of time, can be afforded the same fundamental rights, can be allocated similar equipment and materials, and can count for roughly the same when it comes to allocating funds or measuring outcomes.
Equity becomes more challenging when schools close their doors and teachers try to serve students CONTINUE READING: Shanker Blog: Educational Equity During A Pandemic | National Education Policy Center