The Genetic Lottery by Kathryn Paige Harden

Author:Kathryn Paige Harden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

This vision of what equity means has deeply penetrated the thinking of educators in America.26 A memetic illustration of the difference between equity and equality features three people of different heights, all trying to peer over a baseball fence (figure 8.1). “Equality” is them each getting a stool of the exact same height, resulting in the persistent expression of individual differences among them. In contrast, “equity” is illustrated as each person getting a stool high enough for them to see over the fence, with higher stools (i.e., more intensive support) given to the shortest people.

Instead of treating everyone the same, then, equity in education is thought to involve giving the children who are most likely to struggle in school (either because of their background social conditions or because of “natural chance”) tailored and intensive supports to bring their learning, as much as possible, up to the level more easily attained by their more advantaged peers. Reinforcing the idea of equity in terms that a five-year-old can understand (figure 8.2), my own daughter’s pre-K classroom featured a bubble-lettered, rainbow-colored sign stating that “Fair isn’t everybody getting the same thing. Fair is everybody getting what they need in order to be successful.”

Advocates of an equity perspective object to the rhetoric about “equality of opportunity” that dominates American political discourse. Equality of opportunity can actually be defined in multiple different ways,27 but the most straightforward definition is simply to treat everyone exactly the same. The problem, of course, is that people are not exactly the same, genetically and otherwise. Like building a fence that is six feet tall and giving everyone, regardless of their height, the exact same six-inch footstool to see over it, an education system that provides everyone with equality of opportunity in the form of exact uniformity of educational conditions will ineluctably produce profound inequalities of outcome.

FIGURE 8.2.  Pre-kindergarten classroom sign about fairness. Photo by author.

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