51 Equity
Creating Equity in the Classroom
by: Anthony D. Richardson
INTRODUCTION
There are many avenues we can take toward equity in the school. We will discuss Culture, School Size, Gender, Learning, and Funding. Five important topics needed for equity in the classroom. Before you can fair assessment of anything a person faces, they must try to understand the what, when, why and how. Equity is what every Teacher, Principal, School Super Attendant, and Parent should strive for.
CULTURE
Year 2004 represented the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954), the Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation in schools. Brown v. Board has been called the defining legal decision of the 20th century, framing as it did the United States’ struggle with issues of race and racial equality. In that decision, the justices clearly state that they were striking down segregation in public schools both to increase educational equity and to eliminate the racial stigma associated with segregation.
Despite a wide range of efforts over the past 50 years, issues of racial and ethnic stigma and its relationship to identity and motivation remain central issues for those interested in creating racially equitable educational settings today. I argue that efforts to improve educational equity can only advance when a corresponding effort is made to reduce racial and ethnic stigma.
In the 50 years since the first Brown decision, we have learned a great deal about both the value of diverse learning environments for student development and how to create effective diverse learning environments. Nevertheless, as we come to understand that the racial and ethnic stigma discussed in Brown continues to play a central role in modern educational outcomes and inequities, we can direct our reform efforts in productive ways.
- First, teachers much acknowledge how deficit-based notions of diverse students continue to permeate traditional school thinking, practices, and placement, and critique their own thoughts and practices to ensure they do not reinforce prejudiced behavior.
- Second, culturally relevant pedagogy recognizes the explicit connection between culture and learning, and sees students’ cultural capital as an asset and not a detriment to their school success.
- Third, culturally relevant teaching is mindful of how traditional teaching practices reflect middle-class; European-American cultural values, and thus seeks to incorporate a wider range of dynamic and fluid teaching practices outcomes through the amelioration of stigma.
Culture … impacts our lives by determining what is important and what is not,what makes sense and what does not. The culture then makes these constructions available to the young and to new initiates for appropriation and use in transforming their participation in that culture. Learning, then, becomes a matter of changes in one’s relation to the culture(s) to which one is connected. SCHOOL SIZE
A large-scale quantitativ