Real Educational Equity
Conservatives can be forgiven for wanting to dismiss "educational equity" out of hand. After all, equity stands at the center of the DEI movement rampaging through our schools and universities, pushing discrimination and identity politics in the name of social justice.
Yet it's a mistake for those on the right to shun the conversation about educational equity, for two reasons. First, most educators aren't hard-core ideologues seeking to trample our traditions of individual responsibility; they tend to be small-c conservatives who choose to work in the Tocquevillian institutions we call "public schools." When they hear calls for "educational equity," they think it means simply doing right by children often shortchanged by schools — especially low-income students and students of color. In short, they want what most on the right would call "equality of opportunity." Many of these educators are open to counterpoints to the left's vision of equity.
Second, political conservatives can nudge these educators toward a version of educational equity that isn't at odds with excellence. Conservative legislators and school-board members in particular have a big role to play here. Their goal should be to do educational equity right.
On one issue, the left's impulses are mostly correct: Our school-funding systems should provide significantly more resources to disadvantaged students than to their more affluent peers. But on other issues, progressives exhibit the "soft bigotry of low expectations," tying teachers' hands for no good reason. This tendency appears in attacks on advanced education, traditional school discipline, tough grading, and even homework. Such attacks won't advance the cause of educational equity; they will only make matters worse. Instead of leveling down, we need to level up, and to equip disadvantaged students to thrive in schools.
RESOURCE EQUITY
Few on the left or right would defend the way our K-12 funding system used to send more money to the schools of rich kids than those of poor kids. Nor would many disagree that it's more costly to effectively educate poor students than rich ones, making progressive funding policies appropriate. This is the classic "equity" versus "equality" example: It's not enough to provide equal funding for all kids; we must provide more money to high-poverty schools in order to ameliorate disadvantage.
This kind of equity commands consensus. Democrats and Republicans often find common ground on school-funding reforms that provide adequate and equitable funding to high-poverty schools — so long as they include incentives to spend that money well. Red, blue, and purple states have embraced such policies in recent years.
As much as it may surprise some, America's current approach to school funding is dramatically more equitable than it once was. My colleague Adam Tyner has argued as much in a recent Fordham Institute white paper, but it's certainly not the impression one gets from the mainstream media or campus professors. In fact, in almost every state, funding systems already hit the mark in terms of equalizing resources across rich and poor schools.
The main obstacle to making our system even more progressive derives from teacher labor markets. On average, teachers are less willing to teach in high-poverty schools. Maybe they don't want to drive to low-income neighborhoods. Maybe they fear they'll face worse student behavior in such schools. Or maybe they just know that disadvantaged students need teachers willing to work harder and smarter to help them succeed. When we pay teachers the same regardless of which school they work in, as is the practice of the vast majority of districts in America, high-poverty schools get lower-quality teachers than affluent ones. Leveling the playing field will require sending extra dollars to the neediest districts — and to the neediest schools within districts — so they can afford the salaries that effective teachers command on the market.
Yet driving extra state dollars into incentive pay for teachers is a challenge — one that Democrats generally run from. Many, if not most public schools have a long history of squandering the money that taxpayers throw at them. This failure is especially visible in high-spending, high-tax states like New York and New Jersey, where a boatload of money has not fixed dysfunctional school systems. In blue states like these, powerful unions ensure that any extra funds a school receives get soaked up by more generous contracts, complete with across-the-board raises, Cadillac-style benefits packages, and retiree healthcare. All of these are great for their members but unrelated to what's best for students.
How to address that problem? Once state policy has leveled up school funding between rich and poor districts, as has now happened in dozens of states, additional money for low-income schools should come in the form of competitive grants tied to significant reforms. If districts want more money, they should agree to (and get their unions to agree to) initiatives to recruit and retain effective teachers in their neediest schools via merit pay — and convince the ineffective teachers in those schools to find another line of work. Efforts in Dallas and D.C. demonstrate that this strategy can succeed.
Conservatives should also demand equal funding for schools of choice, including charter schools, via "backpack funding." Funding students rather than school systems is essential for the school-choice movement to work effectively, and thus should be an important priority for the right. If folks on the left prove willing to push teachers' unions to accept serious reforms in return for more money, people on the right should agree to redistribute resources in pursuit of greater equity.
ADVANCED EDUCATION
Whatever one thinks of the No Child Left Behind Act, one of its most laudable legacies was its aspiration to end the "soft bigotry of low expectations," in President George W. Bush's memorable words. This amounted to a call to work toward equity by leveling up rather than leveling down.
Unfortunately, across a range of issues, some equity advocates would turn that idea on its head. They argue for lowering standards so that students might achieve more equitable outcomes. Do gifted-and-talented programs and Advanced Placement courses disproportionately serve white, Asian, and affluent students? Eliminate them! Do suspensions disproportionately affect low-income students and students of color? Make them illegal! Do disadvantaged students turn in homework at lower rates and complete fewer assignments on time? Get rid of homework and deadlines!
Progressives' skepticism of academic giftedness stems from their discomfort with the notion of merit itself. They tend to view participation in various forms of advanced education through the prism of disparate impact. To be sure, black, Latino, and low-income students are significantly underrepresented in gifted-and-talented programs, advanced courses, and selective-admission exam schools. If "talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not," as the saying goes, these programs must be cramping opportunity.
Such leveling down runs counter to true equity, and harms our schools and our students — especially the neediest among them. But many conservatives tend toward an absolutist position in the opposite direction, focusing solely on merit and achievement. They insist that considering someone's racial or class identity is (or should be) irrelevant, whether we're talking about selection into gifted-and-talented programs at age eight or entrance into selective universities at age 18. Everyone, the argument goes, should be judged as an individual; if racial or class disparities emerge, that's just the way the cookie crumbles. It's not schools' job to level the economic playing field, but to help every student fulfill his God-given potential. The more kids learn, the more our future economy will grow, and the more secure our nation will be.
Fortunately, common ground between the conservative and progressive positions is possible. If access to gifted-and-talented programs and advanced courses has been inequitable in the past, the solution is not getting rid of them, as some on the far left propose, but opening them to many more students — especially qualified youngsters from underrepresented groups. Such is the recommendation of the National Working Group on Advanced Education, which I convened in 2022. When it comes to advanced education, don't end it: Mend it, and extend it to a more diverse group of students.
One of the best ways of doing so is using local norms when identifying students for gifted programs and other forms of advanced education. That means selecting, say, the top 10% of students in every elementary school and inviting them into gifted-and-talented programs and acceleration opportunities, in addition to students who score at the top 10% of their entire district or state. That would ensure that students at every school in America, including those located in high-poverty districts, would enjoy such opportunities.
It would also boost the number of low-income students and students of color who participate. To facilitate this, schools and districts should avoid using selection factors that can introduce racial or socioeconomic biases, such as mandatory recommendations from teachers or parents. Instead, universal screening via standardized tests should identify all students who could benefit from advanced learning and place them in programs by default.
STUDENT BEHAVIOR
School discipline is another area where progressives have sought to level down, though they aren't wrong to focus on the issue. As with adult involvement in the criminal-justice system, stark racial and socioeconomic disparities exist in school suspensions and expulsions. For many progressives, such disparities constitute clear evidence of racial discrimination and injustice. Their impulse is to strictly limit the use of what they call "exclusionary discipline."
Conservatives view the issue as far more complicated. They reject simple disparate-impact analyses, asking instead whether disparities in suspensions and expulsions bear some relation to differences in student behavior. If adults from certain groups are more likely to commit murder, it's more likely that they will be locked up for violent crime. Likewise, if students from certain groups are more likely to get into school fights, they will be suspended or expelled more often — even if justice is meted out to individuals fairly and without bias.
Yes, black students get suspended and expelled at disproportionately high rates. But if we control for class, most of those disparities disappear. That's because kids of all races growing up in poverty are much more likely to experience challenges that tend to fuel misbehavior in school. Children without a father in the home are more likely to get into trouble at school; so are children from dangerous neighborhoods, children suffering from lead poisoning, and victims of abuse or neglect.
Black students in America are three times as likely as their white peers to live in poverty. It's thus a matter of tragic but basic math that black students are more likely to misbehave in school than their peers — not because they are black, but because they are suffering the effects of poverty.
In light of this unjust reality, what would it mean to resist the soft bigotry of low expectations? How can we level up instead of down?
We hardly ever ask these questions because most of our arguments address how adults should respond to student misbehavior. Should teachers send kids to the principal's office? Should principals suspend students, and for what sorts of infractions? Should school-board policy ever include expulsions, and what safeguards should be in place? How can we reduce racial bias in these processes?
Those decisions, however, lie downstream from student behavior itself. The first goal of any student-discipline policy should be to help students behave better. We should reject the soft bigotry of low expectations when it comes to students' comportment in classrooms, hallways, and the cafeteria, just as we reject it when deciding what certain students can learn.
No school policies should signal to students that they can get away with bad behavior — interrupting instruction, cussing out their teachers, bullying their peers, or engaging in violence. Schools should instead help students meet high behavioral standards. That means modeling good behavior for students, holding them accountable for infractions, working proactively with families on bigger issues, and supporting teachers as they hold the line of discipline.
We do all of this to help misbehaving students, but also to protect their peers. One of the purposes of office referrals and suspensions is to allow other students to return to learning (or, in the context of hallways and lunchrooms, to feel safe). Several high-quality studies confirm the common-sense notion that misbehaving students can wreak havoc on their peers — both by pushing them toward worse conduct and by making it harder for them to learn. Given that high-poverty schools struggle the most with disciplinary challenges, keeping disruptive students in classrooms only widens the achievement gap. Such policies also drive teachers crazy, and chase many of them out of the profession — or at least out of high-poverty schools.
We need well-designed interventions for badly behaved students — especially chronic and violent offenders — that help them improve their behavior, keep them learning, and protect their peers from further disruption along the way. That's a tall order. Several schools and districts are experimenting with various approaches, from much-improved versions of in-school suspensions to "alternative placements" — schools that students attend for short periods before returning to their home campuses. We should expand and build on these efforts.
As in every area of education, progress will only happen if we get the details right, which will mean a lot of trial and error. But that's far better than rejecting every form of student discipline as racially tainted.
HOMEWORK
For conservatives, homework is a straightforward issue: Teachers should assign homework, as they always have, and students should be expected to do it. Practice makes perfect, and children can't learn without exerting effort.
Some on the left, however, believe that assigning homework is inequitable. They cite the "homework gap" — the consistent finding that children from low-income households spend significantly less time on homework than their more advantaged peers. Therefore, they argue, we should reduce homework or eliminate it altogether.
That's no way to do educational equity right. Instead of leveling down, we should try to compel more students to do more homework — at least the valuable, productive kind, which studies show is related to increased academic achievement. That requires addressing the barriers that some low-income students face when it comes to doing homework.
One such barrier is technological. Although we've largely closed the digital divide, low-income families are still less likely to have high-speed internet access in their homes. And while schools dramatically ramped up their one-to-one laptop initiatives during the pandemic, there are still locales where some students lack access to workable devices. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 22% of U.S. teens said they often or sometimes must do homework on a cell phone, 12% said that "at least sometimes" they cannot complete homework assignments because they can't reliably access a computer or internet connection, and 6% said they have to complete their homework using public Wi-Fi "at least sometimes" because they lack an internet connection at home. To the extent that schools assign homework that must be done online, that's a problem.
Low-income students are also less likely to have a quiet place to do homework. This is unsurprising, given that their homes tend to be smaller. Many of them must also take care of younger siblings, which eats into their homework time. Their parents may also be less capable of helping with homework: In lower-income families, parents and other caregivers are much more likely to have dropped out of high school themselves.
The answer to these challenges can't be to throw up our hands and say we won't assign any homework to anyone; the correct answer is to help students overcome the obstacles they face. Doing so will entail addressing technology gaps by providing laptops or Chromebooks to all students, as well as Wi-Fi hotspots. Better still, we can make such technology available at school by keeping media centers open and staffed before school, after school, and on the weekends. The marginal costs of keeping public-school facilities open longer are minimal, and the benefits could be substantial.
If that creates new challenges — for example, there may be issues with transporting students to and from these extended-learning-time opportunities — schools could incorporate study-hall periods into the regular school day itself. Schools could make the day longer and adjust the transportation schedule accordingly. Or they could team up with community organizations — from public libraries to Boys & Girls Clubs to churches — to provide homework help and quiet environments for completing work.
None of this is rocket science. In fact, KIPP charter schools have been implementing versions of this approach for a quarter-century. That's because KIPP and other great schools that serve impoverished students have always known that helping their students catch up to their more affluent peers means working harder and longer — not just closing the homework gap, but reversing it.
Getting traditional public schools to move in this direction will be hard. Chromebooks and Wi-Fi hotspots cost money; so does keeping school libraries open after school or on weekends. But promoting educational equity correctly will require calling the bluff of those who want to lower expectations for students' work and effort in the name of equity.
GRADING
Student grading is an issue that has flown under the radar for years. It's barely discussed in teacher-preparation programs and rarely a topic in professional-development sessions, bespeaking an assumption that there's nothing much to grading or that everyone does it well.
Recent grading-reform efforts are doing some good: Ensuring that an "A" in algebra means the same thing across classrooms, schools, and districts is necessary if we're to establish consistently high standards for all students. Yet many equitable-grading reforms are lowering standards, if anything.
Student effort is key to student learning. Especially as children get older, they cannot master challenging material by osmosis; they must put in the work — do the practice math problems, write and rewrite research papers, study for their history and science tests, etc. Most adolescents will not choose to spend extra time and effort on schoolwork because of their intrinsic love of learning; tough grading practices are necessary to motivate students to work harder. Several studies demonstrate that tougher-grading teachers positively affect student learning, even after their students leave their classrooms. This is true of students from all racial subgroups as well as those in high-poverty schools.
Simply making it easier for students to jump through hoops doesn't help children learn, yet that's exactly what we're doing. The evidence on grade inflation continues to pile up. Like so many negative trends in U.S. schools, this phenomenon started before the pandemic, but the Covid-19 era exacerbated it. Schools understandably relaxed standards while kids were attending school remotely, but the push for "equity" in grading gained steam after the racial reckoning of 2020.
Today, elite colleges cannot rely on students' high-school grades to accurately reflect their ability — most applicants get straight A's. Further down the academic road, graduation rates stand at record highs, in part because standards for graduation — which are of course tied to receiving passing grades in required courses — are lower than ever.
These trends should cause us to bend a critical eye on any grading practices that lower standards. That includes the "no zeroes rule," which mandates that teachers give no lower than a 50% on any test or assignment, even if the student doesn't complete it or turn it in. For reasons obvious to anyone who has ever met or been a teenager, this system will incentivize many students to work less. The same is true of bans on punishing late work, cheating, and failure to complete homework. Like many adults, children need someone to hold them accountable for doing what's in their own long-term interest. That means hitting the books, doing their homework, and receiving feedback on whether they did it well.
Grading reforms that work to reduce bias and establish higher expectations deserve support. The former goal is important: Whether due to students' socioeconomic backgrounds, their race, or the intersection of the two, unintentional bias can creep into the grading process. A teacher might anticipate lower-quality work from a student given his zip code or appearance or gender. Or, a teacher might extend the soft bigotry of low expectations to a student facing hardships at home.
Blind grading methods can help here. Schools can adopt electronic grading systems whereby teachers don't see the students' names until after completing their evaluations. Or they can assign teachers to grade papers and tests from other teachers' students. Graders also benefit from clear rubrics that enforce tough standards for what is considered A-level work. The Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs use such an approach to evaluate student exams.
For decades, we largely expected teachers to figure out grading on their own, and did little to make grade expectations consistent across schools or districts — or even across classrooms. Grading reformers have performed an important service by bringing the issue to our attention. But some grading reforms are better than others. Reducing bias should not come at the cost of high standards.
TYING TEACHERS' HANDS
Another mistake some equity advocates make is unduly reducing teacher authority and autonomy. To be sure, educators shouldn't always have carte blanche to do whatever they like, but too often, reformers force educators to teach with one or both hands tied behind their backs. They bar teachers from using time-tested, effective practices because they conflict with the high church of educational equity's novel doctrines. For example, some districts don't allow elementary teachers to group students by achievement levels when teaching reading or math. Many more have moved to "de-track" middle-school and high-school courses, eliminating "on-level" and "honors" courses and starting everyone in the same classes.
Imagine you're a seventh-grade teacher. If your class is typical, your students enter your classroom at achievement levels ranging from third through 11th grades. Your district-provided instructional coach suggests that you cope by "differentiating instruction" — applying different tools, methods, and processes in order to successfully reach all individuals. You might as well ask them for some enchanted beans so you can grow a sky-high beanstalk while you're at it: This is magical thinking.
Most research finds that grouping students by achievement tends to help everyone learn more, especially if those groups are flexible and continuously remixed. But because progressive education dogma condemns any form of grouping or tracking, we make life harder for teachers and undermine students' learning. Constrained teachers are disgruntled teachers, which is bad for everyone — especially students.
STEERING EQUITY RIGHT
It's easy to see why equity has become a poisonous word on the right. Much of what is happening in our schools today under the banner of "educational equity" is wrongheaded or worse. Progressive advocates are dismantling advanced education, thereby disserving academically gifted students from all backgrounds. Actuated by a warped form of compassion, they're slackening school discipline, thus cementing tragic disparities in misbehavior when they ought to be helping kids level up. Education activists are taking the easy way out by imploding homework expectations and grading standards instead of doing the hard work to prepare disadvantaged students to reach a reasonable bar. All of these misguided steps hamstring and frustrate teachers as they labor in an already difficult calling.
The answer for conservatives is not to roll their eyes and walk away from the debate, but to engage on these issues and fight for common sense. Doing educational equity right is possible — but only if voices on the right make the case for it.
