Professor Stuart Greene recently penned a thoughtful analysis of how we frame educational equity in the United States for Oxford University Press's Academic Insights for the Thinking World.
He notes, " To reinvigorate the notion of equity and re-imagine schools, it is important to underscore (a) the equitable distribution of material, emotional, and economic resources to ensure that children have the capacity to direct the course of their own lives in healthy, safe environments in and out of school; (b) the value of inclusion in making critical decisions about the processes underlying the distribution of these resources; (c) the importance of developing measures of assessment that account for what it means to teach for social justice and challenges the limits of assessment rooted in the nation’s economic well being; and (d) the need to leverage the law to center justice as a value in education. In the end, education as a civil right acknowledges the power inherent in education, promotes inclusion, and values an asset-based approach to education that acknowledge the worth of all children.
Read the full text of Professor Greene's piece here.