A Commitment to Equity, Essay Example

“A commitment to equity means a commitment to social justice. This includes a commitment to removing established barriers and biases in school policies, programs, and practices so that the intended learning outcomes may be achieved by students of all societal groups, including those that have been traditionally disadvantaged.” (Ontario Ministry of Education Curriculum Document 1993, in Varpalotai, 1995, p. 242) This statement from the Ontario Ministry of Education Curriculum Document reads as an explicit declaration of the aim to make equity ubiquitous within Ontario schools. What such equity entails is immediately clarified in the text, as it is posited in terms of social justice. In other words, issues of equity within the broader education system must be viewed according to a broader commitment to social justice. Nevertheless, what exactly does such a commitment indicate in terms of both the content and the form of education? The subsequent statement in the document narrows the focus of these twin concepts of equity and social justice: it is the desired alleviation of “barriers and biases in school policies, programs, and practices” with the result of reaching achievement in the form of various “learning outcomes.”  Hence, the realization of social justice and equity within the education system requires a concomitant gesture that eliminates inequality within this same education system. Accordingly, two issues are of immediate pertinence. Firstly, how does one correctly identify the precise barriers and biases that exist within schools? In essence, this would seem to refer to specific groups that are marginalized within the education system and therefore face obstacles in achieving within the system. As such, without the proper identification of these apparent impasses, it would be impossible for social justice to advance within education: a thorough consciousness of such impasses is a necessary condition for social justice. Secondly, this identification must thereinafter be supplemented by strategies that can effectively address such discrepancies within the education system. Ultimately, these two issues are inter-related: insofar as one does not properly identify the barriers and biases of the system, strategies that promote social justice and equity will themselves remain ineffective. At the same time, once these barriers and biases have been identified, what is required is a subsequent effective strategy to eliminate them, guided by the broader notion of such ethical commitments within education towards such social justice and equity.

However, what is of interest in this regard is the idea that such social injustice and inequity within education can be posited as the result of the very intrusion of the social realm into the education realm: i.e., social, ethnic, economic differences cause such injustice in education.  Accordingly, the commitment to social justice in order to eliminate these inequities, from this perspective, appears as a re-introduction of social perspectives into education, social perspectives that caused inequity in the first place. That is to say, what appears missing in such strategies is a notion that emphasizes education in itself, that is, education as something that has value in itself. Hence, in the following essay, we shall analyze in a critical fashion attempts to rectify social inequity in education through further social commitments. To support our critique, we shall rely on curriculum theory, which emphasizes the notion of the “experience of education” in itself. Accordingly, using this definition, we shall then analyze one particular strategy for eliminating inequity, the 2008 strategy of the Ontario Ministry of Education entitled Reaching Every Student: Re-Energizing Ontario Education. With regards to this document, one of its key shortcomings is that social justice and equity presents itself through various “core principles”, which we are to argue operate according to a certain social commitment that overrides the importance of the educational experience itself. In other words, social justice and equity can perhaps be achieved through positing education as separate from the very antagonisms of the social.

Questions of social justice/injustice and equity/inequity may be approached through curriculum theory. This is because the attempt to introduce equity and social justice into the education system can be understood as a specific intervention in the theorization of curriculum: it is the decision that curriculum must be shaped by social justice itself. William Pinar (2004) defines curriculum theory as follows: “curriculum theory is the interdisciplinary study of educational experience” (p. 2) When considering the aforementioned aims of social justice in the context of the theorization of educational experience, it follows that the commitment to social justice entails that social justice is crucial to the educational experience itself. In other words, this approach entails that the educational experience must, in essence, become a social and ethical experience. This begs two immediate questions: firstly, what is the proper ethical and social commitment that must be co-constitutive of educational experience; and secondly, how does one resolve the educational experience with a particular social world-view, and ultimately, ideology? That is to say, if education is conceived in terms of a didactic activity, a relation between students and teachers, how does the need to re-frame the latter in terms of social commitments affect this relation and activity?

The response to these questions in the above Ontario Ministry of Education statement appears clear: there are inequities in the current educational experience that must be resolved. Insofar as inequity is deemed in the above citation to be “established”, this implies a systematic presence of barriers and barricades that are identified in the document, which necessitates a radical re-evaluation of the entire curriculum’s formal structure in order to provide the desired elimination of such formal impasses. The strategy for such an elimination, therefore, is to posit the educational experience in terms of various ethical and social discourses that emphasize equity in order to, in essence, re-socialize the educational experience, a re-socialization insofar as previous social “injustices” are to be replaced by social justices. As we are to see, however, such an approach both overlooks and undercuts the educational experience itself, through the contextualization of education according to a superior political paradigm, which consequently omits a re-evaluation of the educational experience: education becomes subordinate to ideology.

Such shortcomings are clear when considering strategies to eliminate inequity such as  Ontario’s Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy of 2008. One of the weaknesses of this document is that it seeks to identify barriers and impasses in the educational experience through reference to a greater social, political and economic approach. Accordingly, it neglects the possibility that it is because education is posited in an invariably social context – as opposed to being posited as a worthwhile experience in-itself – which engenders such inequities. In other words, perhaps to maintain the equity of the education experience, what is required a suspension of the effectivity of the social and the economic within education, as opposed to trying to introduce within education yet another social discourse.

The theoretical inadequacy of reading education from the perspective of the social is explicit from the outset of the “Quick Facts” summary of the document, which begins as follows: “Publicly funded education is a cornerstone of our democratic society.” (2008b, p. 1) Against the imperatives of our reading of curriculum theory, which emphasizes the educational experience itself, such a strategy immediately introduces a political element into the positing of education: the notion that public schools are inseparable from democracy. Such a notion obviously disregards, for example, the fact that in democracy there are also private schools, whereas in communist societies there are no private schools, but only public schools. Prima facie, this may seem like a minor point to criticize, however, it intimates the certain inflection of an ideological element that has the potential to intrude upon the desired resolution of the formal impasses of inequity within education that the document seeks to resolve: in essence, this opening statement already indicates the suppression of the educational experience itself to a meta-educational political and ideological world-view. From another perspective, this latter view can perhaps negatively impact the very possibility to identify inequalities in the educational experience, to the extent that the educational experience is to be indexed according to a specific social and political discourse – the presence of inequalities and injustice in these social and the political discourses, such as democracy, may now recapitulate themselves within the analysis of education. In other words, is not an immanent, phenomenological approach to the educational experience, one that seeks to analyze the educational experience and the relations that constitute this experience more germane to the actual functioning of education than immediately adapting a political justification for education? Is public education itself not a worthy enough “goal”, without having to be tied to a democratic or political logic that recalls ideological and political tensions? That is to say, is the construal of the problematic in this manner not a subtle re-introduction of an inequality between political ideologies within the educational experience, in the privileging of a certain form of political discourse in regards to the educational experience as opposed to privileging the educational experience itself?

This identification of politics and ideology that inform strategies to realize social equity and justice within education are crucial, because, as we have mentioned, one of the key features of making this particular ethical commitment central to education is that of identifying the very barriers and blockades that necessitate the ethical commitment. In other words, the adaptation of a meta-educational social and political perspective, as opposed to an immanent educational curriculum theory perspective could potentially influence the types of barriers and blockades that are identified within the education system, according to a resolutely political and social nature of this identification.

The Ontario Ministry of Education’s Reach Every Student: Reenergizing Ontario Education is quite specific in identifying inequity in terms of particular “groups of students…that may be at risk of lower achievement” (2008b, p. 1) The document is acute in noting that “recent immigrants, children from low-income families, Aboriginal students, boys, and students with special needs” make up “just some of the groups” (2008b, p. 1) that can be excluded from the education process. What is immediately striking about this identification of at-risk groups within the education system is the broad spectrum of students considered: they include inequities posited according to gender differences, class differences and ethnic differences. Certainly, this broad spectrum of “at-risk” students can be said to reflect an underlying political commitment to democracy, alongside an ethical commitment to social justice without discrimination, insofar as there is a pronounced care to not exclude anyone from consideration. This is made all the more explicit with the addendum that states these are “just some of the groups” that may be affected by inequity. Hence, the definition of particular groups is thorough. Yet in this thoroughness, a fundamental ambiguity is simultaneously introduced: according to this large number of groups, it almost trivializes some of the real inequities that may exist in the educational experience. The concern here appears to be political, i.e., to not leave anyone out, as opposed to providing a thoroughly immanent analysis of inequities in the educational experience. In other words, the above classification of potential groups that may experience inequity is so extensive that it becomes meaningless.

The document nevertheless proposes a concrete strategy that both identifies and ideally is to eliminate inequity in education. This strategy takes the form of the so-called “three core priorities”: “1. High levels of student achievement; 2. Reduced gaps in student achievement; 3. Increased public confidence in publicly funded education.” (2008b, p. 1) To critically analyze this strategy, we shall posit each priority separately.

Firstly, the notion of “high levels of student achievement” immediately is problematic in two respects. On the one hand, a high level of achievement for all students immediately appears to be overtly optimistic, when considering the variations in achievement between different students. Obviously, this priority implicitly suggests that such high levels of student achievement would be tied to the consideration of individual students. That is to say, high achievement levels would be relative to the particular student in question. Whereas the aim to have high achievement levels for all students immediately appears commendable, in a sense it takes too abstract an approach to the problem of inequity in the curriculum: when considering this point from our emphasis on the educational experience, the educational experience is necessarily immanent to the particular relationship of students. In other words, by taking such a meta-discourse approach to the problem, particular needs of students may be overlooked through this very meta-discourse that proclaims high levels of achievement for all. Moreover, this approach is also ambiguous regarding the formal and contentual aspects of curriculum: is high achievement a formal notion related to how the education experience is structured, or is it a contentual problem, as to what is taught in classrooms? Furthermore, such a desire for high achievement “for all” as a resolution to inequity seems to overlook the very differences that constitute society, an overlooking that can be viewed as perpetuating differences and discrepancies that give rise to inequity in the first place. For example, Rezai-Rashti (2004) observes that current curriculum theory attempts to “raise the question of how school curriculum can open teachers and students to a careful consideration of social difference, critical knowledge and an understanding of how social change might be organized.” (p. 2) The broad claim of “high levels of student achievement” can potentially re-create the abandonment of those marginalized within the educational experience, as a singular goal is ascribed for all. In this regard, such a “core priority” would perhaps be better formulated by noting the subjective and relative notions of achievement. This formulation would stress a realistic as opposed to idealistic approach, an idealistic approach that is perhaps ultimately informed by the previous political ideology of democracy. This is not to diminish the aim of promoting achievement, but rather a rejection of the notion of achievement as some abstract, teleological goal. Achievement is better served by being placed in proper contexts, contexts that can be defined in terms of maximizing the subjective educational experience that is constituted by relations of difference that are at the core of the education system.

The second core priority is the aim for “reduced gaps in student achievement.” Whereas this priority prima facie may suggest the aim of taking inclusiveness too far, in the sense that the reduction of gaps would imply the simultaneous reduction of higher achievement in education, this priority rather emphasizes “equity and excellence.” (2008a, p. 8) This priority, however, remains entirely ambiguous. For example, this second priority states that the “goal is to foster social cohesion through a publicly funded education system that respects diversity and brings all students together to learn through a shared set of experiences.” (2008a, p. 8) Once again, this principle places the educational experience as secondary to a social experience. Education is not construed as an autonomous sphere vis-à-vis society, but is rather ultimately merely a step in a societal teleology. Whereas education and society are undoubtedly related, there is nevertheless a tendency, as Thomas L. Good (2008) notes, for “policymakers [to] often posit simplistic ‘cause-effect’ relations between schooling and societal outcomes.” (p. 1) This simple cause-effect approach Good identifies subordinates the educational experience to a greater social and political construct that informs policy regarding education. Whereas this second core principle notes that “one of the most consistent findings in the educational literature is the strong link between socio-economic status and educational achievement” (p. 8) and proposes to “narrow the achievement gap between poor children and their wealthier counterparts” (p. 8) this strategy would remain truly inclusive to the extent that socio-economic difference would play no role in the educational experience itself. However, the second core principle, while criticizing socio-economic differences, simultaneously re-introduces the priority of the social and the economic within education. Arguably, it is by positing the educational experience as separated from the social (or economic), or in other words not trying to create a gap between the achievements of students, but rather a gap between education and socio-economic factors, which could prevent the influence of the latter on the former and thereinafter engender equity.

The third core priority aim as presented in the Document is the “Increased Public Confidence In our Publicly Funded Schools.” This priority is explicit in overlooking the educational experience itself, rather once again emphasizing the social support for the educational experience. The aim is to “creat[e] communities that value learning and support the investment and social commitment needed to maintain our publicly funded schools.” (2008a, p. 10) This is immediately a scathing social indictment, as it infers that there is a danger in maintaining publicly funded schools. Within the context of a rich Western country such as Canada, the inability to support public schools could only be an indictment of the ruling social and political ideology. Whereas this priority seems to recognize such a troubling notion by promoting the need for investment and the value of the educational experience, the very need for such a promotion suggests that the educational experience has already been devalued. Furthermore, perhaps one of the precise reasons the educational experience is devalued is because it is always subordinated to a social, political or ideological dimension: the educational experience is not posited as producing any value in itself, beyond the aforementioned “simple cause and effect” relationships between society and education. This is a trend found in some discourses that emphasize the priority of society, economics, civilization, etc., as Bennion notes: “public education is amply justified if it can be shown that it is a necessary means of accomplishing the ends of civilization” (2009, p. 77) Accordingly, notions of equity and social justice are replaced in this core principle by a social economic support for education, one that overlooks the ethical commitment that appears to be central to the document.

Thus, whereas the desired realization of social justice and equity has become a crucial element in the thought of Ontario education, there nevertheless remains a tendency within the literature to overlook the educational experience itself. Documents such as the above plan from the Ministry of Education for Ontario stress that the educational experience needs to be supplemented by notions of social justice. However, this covertly demonstrates that the social experience inevitably overdetermines the educational experience. Insofar as equity and justice alongside inequity and injustice remain posited as social themes, the correct approach is to rather separate the educational experience as much as possible from ideologies and social and political constructs, thereby emphasizing the educational experience itself, in an attempt to increase education’s effectivity for its own sake.

Works Cited

Bennion, Milton L. (2009). Citizenship: An Introduction to Social Ethics. Charleston, SC: Bibliobazaar.

Good, Thomas L. (2000). American Education: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Chicago, IL: Humana Press.

Ontario Ministry of Education. (2008a). Reach Every Student: Renergizing Ontario Education. Accessed at: http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/document/energize/energize.pdf

Ontario Ministry of Education. (2008b). Reach Every Student: Renergizing Ontario  Education. Quick Facts. Accessed at: http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/policyfunding/EquityQuickFacts.pdf

Pinar, William. (2004). What is Curriculum Theory? London: Routledge.

Rezai-Rashti, Goli M. (2004). »Race, Culture, Equity and the Ontario Curriculum: A Critical Investigation of the Social Sciences Curriculum.« AARE International Education Research Conference, Nov. 29-Dec. 2, 2004.

Varpalotai, A. (1995). “Affirmative Action for a Just and Equitable Society.” In R. Ghosh & D. Ray (Eds.), Social Change and Education in Canada (3rd ed.) Toronto: Harcourt Brace. pp. 240-253.