Equity, Ethnicity, Diversity, and Excellence in Education

Abstract

Equity has attracted considerable attention in the education sector, yet it remains elusive in educational achievement outcomes for many students in developed countries. Equity in education was defined by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in their 2008 policy brief as a measure of achievement, fairness, and opportunity in education where fairness and inclusiveness comprise the two key aspects. Equality is about access to and participation in education, with equal amounts of resource, time, and focus. Equity may require unequal amounts of time, focus, and resource to redress an imbalance and to achieve similar outcomes. Educational equity is about raising the achievement of all students while narrowing gaps between the highest and lowest performing students, eliminating the racial predictability and disproportionality of which student groups occupy the highest and lowest achievement categories and addressing access to resources and opportunity. Given the breadth of topic including gender, ethnicity, social class, disability, religion, and geography, this bibliography excludes vast areas of inclusive education literature, gender analysis, disability and special needs, indigenous, and most of the multicultural literature. The focus is instead on two strands, namely, ethnicity and diversity, creating positive classroom climates with rich curriculum and high-expectancy teachers. Most of the literature confirms the central role of socioeconomic status and school choice as significant and also teacher classroom practices as critical opportunities for redress. The OECD compares developed countries and reports regularly on their findings; UN agencies such as UNICEF’s Innocenti Centre produce regularly on interrelated institutions such as schools and education, across many countries; and the American Educational Research Association (AERA) produces highly regarded educational research including equity, equality, and academic excellence studies. Excellence in education has been focused upon student or learner academic achievement, usually determined through state or nationally sanctioned testing. These tests are likely normatively rather than competency based, reflecting dominant ethnic and social class biases. Excellence is understood within the literature as manifesting high degrees of specialism and aptitude for academic tasks. Terms such as “achievement” are intimately linked to these notions of excellence. However, it is possible, as some literature confirms, to associate excellence with diversity and the achievement of equity. Thus, schools and teachers go beyond access to education to actively requiring educators to respond to the diverse needs of learners in ways that increase enquiry-based learning, and reinforcing the child’s sense of value as learners and belonging as citizens through culturally appropriate teaching. Fairness and inclusiveness are managed within a more contained language of choice and self-improvement. Every school is a microcosm of their community, but how this community is refracted is dependent upon specific teaching and classroom practices, school behaviors and processes, and the public policy milieu of each country. Learning is not only an illuminating and creative process but also requires discipline and perseverance. Compressed curriculum, spoon-feeding teaching, low expectations, or constant rapid reform to deal with inherent problems such as inequity of outcomes within the education system contribute to a further erosion of teachers’ professional judgements and schools as part of communities of learning.