Can't we all be equal?

With recent events in the United States with nationwide protests against the death of Floyd George while in Police custody, there has been a clamor for educational reform to make education more equitable for minorities and marginalized groups. One approach to make education more equitable is to provide additional support for those minorities in order to attain more equal educational outcomes. 

We have probably all seen the graphic below illustrating the differences between equality and equity. Equity involves providing sufficient resources as needed to remove an inequality so all have the same outcome.

However, with equity in education comes a paradox: the education system must treat individuals unequally in order to create equality of outcome. This can be contrasted with equality of opportunity, each individual is granted an equal opportunity to pursue their own unequal outcomes. Historically speaking, equal opportunity has resulted in the liberty of the individual take, for example, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, while equality of outcomes has resulted in more negative consequences for the individual and creates incentives to embellish or drive towards lesser outcomes for learners e.g. the outcome of 80% passing level 2 NCEA in New Zealand meant schools from lower socioeconomic areas providing less academic courses to meet the target.

The equity argument is also based on several assumptions. One is that although there is a correlation between certain variables like race and gender with a lack of student achievement, correlation does not imply causation. 

In statistics, many statistical tests calculate correlations between variables, and when two variables are found to be correlated, it is tempting to assume that this shows that one variable causes the other. Correlation does not imply causation. Just because two events occur together does not mean that a cause and effect relationship has been established. 

We cannot, for example, assume that since there is a statistical disparity between the rates of male and female or between various ethnic groups in relation to student achievement, that the disparity must be correlated to disparate treatment of that group. In fact, Fletcher and Tienda suggest that Latino and Black students perform better in Mathematics than their Caucasian counterparts in diverse classrooms, indicating that factors related to educational disparity are complicated.

When analyzing statistics, and a disparity is noticed, a good question to ask is “what variable is causing the disparity between two correlating statistics?” This will assist in finding the actual cause, otherwise, it is confirmation bias, which is attempting to find or produce evidence for a preconceived bias (that race, gender, etc are the reasons for the disparity).

Another assumption is that all learners or communities desire the same outcomes in terms of educational achievement. Educational success can vary between learners and so creating an environment where all learners achieve the same outcome does not reflect the diversity of our learners or our communities.  

Inequality of outcome does not imply unequal treatment because other possible variables need to be discovered and considered. Social justice implies disparate treatment, however, if those demanding social justice demand equal outcomes, they are fighting against disparate outcomes and not against disparate treatment.