����vlog����

EQUITY IS A CONTROVERSIAL CONCEPT—and also much misunderstood. But at its simplest level, it’s not that mysterious. The basic idea is connected to fairness. Fairness is a basic human value. It’s a hallmark of the most sophisticated ethical systems, but it’s also something that even children sense intuitively. Fairness and equity are central in nearly all aspects of life—and public policy is no exception.

It’s easier to intuitively sense “equity” than to precisely define it, but when moral philosophers do so, two key themes emerge.

First, equity is about equal treatment for all people. Everyone deserves to be treated fairly and equally under the law and by governments and other important institutions.

But there is also a second theme: equity is also about “leveling the playing field” so that everyone has what they need to survive and thrive. This theme acknowledges the reality that people are born with very different advantages and disadvantages, different opportunities and barriers, different gifts and needs. There are also important social forces that distribute opportunity in an unequal way.

An equitable society seeks to level the playing field by providing extra support to those who need more—for instance, more educational and financial support for a family experiencing poverty than for a rich family who can already meet their own needs.

You might be thinking, “Wait; if equity is about treating everyone equally, how can it also be about providing extra support to some people or groups? Aren’t these ideas in tension with each other?”

Let’s consider an example where equity debates have been heated in recent years: public schools.

A fact of life is that kids are different. They differ in their natural gifts and aptitudes, but also in their home and community environments—whether they have had advantages of a stable environment or disadvantages of instability related to broader social inequities.

Now, how should we run an equitable school system?

If we ignore equity and just look at learning outcomes for the average child, we’ll be missing something important! The average child may be thriving, but we may be leaving lots of kids behind. We need to investigate not just averages, but also differences and disparities, and the full distribution of kids’ experiences. The first lesson, then, is that equity needs to play a central role in our thinking about education and other policy issues.

On the other hand, suppose that we do “center” equity in our thinking. There are still two ways we can go wrong.

First, we might focus only on equal outcomes—that is, whether disadvantaged students perform equally as well as advantaged students. We’ll gain a valuable perspective, but we’ll also lose something else. Teachers will be pushed to focus exclusively on disadvantaged students and will lose sight of how the system works for average and high-achieving kids. We might even “level downward” by taking away options like advanced AP classes, since we’re concerned that they promote unequal outcomes. We would be pitting equity against excellence—and therefore losing sight of a more holistic view of equity that is about meeting the needs of all kids.

Second, we might enact policies that seek to improve equity but without clear evidence about their real-world implications. Not every policy that seems sensible works as intended. Not everything works equally well. The world is full of surprises and unintended consequences. We need real evidence to understand how policies work, and which ones work best.

Importantly, this evidence includes scholarship from a diverse set of approaches. This includes statistical analysis with big data and quantitative research designs. But it also includes interviews and insights from real people’s lived experiences, and historical analysis of how we got here, and what we can learn from the past.

—
Mark Shepard is an associate professor of public policy.

Photograph by Alejandra Villa Loarca/Newsday RM/Getty Images; Portraits by Martha Stewart; Photo illustration by Andrei Cojocaru