Equality or Equity? E-CARGO Perspectives on the Fairness of Education

Abstract

The educational equality or equity problem (EEEP) has a long-term debate in civilization. This problem is often discussed by sociologists, philosophers, educationists, and so on for various phenomena or decisions. However, there is hardly any absolutely convincing answer to this question. We believe that a series of quantitative methods may provide decision-makers with a clearer orientation in their discussions and help them make decisions. Therefore, this article depicts a common scenario to discuss the EEEP. It uses quantitative methods to conduct computational social simulations and obtain the results under equal or equitable conditions via role-base collaboration (RBC), environments-classes, agents, roles, groups, and objects (E-CARGO), and group role assignment (GRA). The simulation results show that educational equality or equity can be significantly improved by making a reasonable and optimized allocation plan through GRA. Finding the optimal allocation plan, which validates the reliability of the results by changing the experimental parameters of equality and equity, is helpful and interesting to relevant decision-makers.