'Equity'

The Equity Task Force encourages the Board of Education to seek wide and extensive community input in reviewing this proposed Equity policy, systematically including key community stakeholder groups while reaching out to constituents potentially unlikely to participate in traditional feedback forums.

Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education (BOE) Equity Task Force (2005-2007), Final Report (March 28, 2007).

Equity at the highest level, not simply equity, is something that we should always strive for in education. Every student should have the best opportunities to learn in ways that will help them now and in the future.

George Couros, "Equity At the Highest Level," The Principal of Change blog (July 30, 2017).


Some definitions:

MMSD Board Policy 9001, as adopted June 6, 1994:
"Equity is defined as providing each student with an equal educational opportunity to achieve the District's 100% success objectives." ....
"100% success objectives is defined as students who graduate, students who complete their individual academic program, students who enroll in a post-secondary educational program, or students who are self-sufficient in other endeavors."

MMSD BOE Equity Task Report Final Report, issued March 28, 2007:
"Equity assures full access to opportunities for each MMSD student to achieve educational excellence and social responsibility."

MMSD Board Policy 9001, as adopted June 2, 2008:
"Equity means the deliberate distribution of resources to provide full and meaningful access to comparable educational opportunity to assure that all MMSD students have the academic and interpersonal skills to be successful adults."

MMSD Board Policy 9001, draft revision for proposed adoption by BOE on July 31, 2017:
"A. 'Educational Equity' means an intentional distribution of DISTRICT resources amongst schools, students and staff based on what each needs to achieve universal goals.
B. 'Resources' means money; programs and curriculum; staff time, expertise, skills and experience; information; and, materials and services such as technology and transportation.
C. 'Targeted Universalism' an approach for achieving equity that sets universal goals for all students and identifies targeted means and processes for specific populations depending on how they are situated to opportunity. This approach recognizes that the DISTRICT must respond with necessary resources and multiple paths needed for different school communities and students to thrive.
D. 'Targeted' means the distribution of resources on top of or in addition to universally distributed resources to support a particular subgroup based on unique or specific qualities or established need, such as the provision of the allocation of an assistant principal to only the school whose student enrollment exceeds a specific number or the provision of supplementary math texts and workbooks to students who achieve within an established range on an assessment.
E. 'Universal,' when used in reference to resources, means the distribution of resources to everyone or everything in the established group regardless of any unique or specific qualities or identified needs, such as the allocation of one lead principal to each school building or the provision of a standard mathematics text book to each student. 'Universal,' when used in reference to goals, means published goals fostering all students’ acquisition of the skills and abilities to be successful in college, career and community."

Some reporting protocols:

MMSD Board Policy 9001, as adopted June 6, 1994:
"This policy applies to situations that affect students within one school, or between or among several schools, and will be reviewed every three years."

MMSD Board Policy 9001, as adopted June 2, 2008:
"Administration will report on an annual basis to the Board of Education the extent of progress on specific measures in eliminating gaps in access, opportunities and achievement. Administration will develop an annual report that will provide data on the distribution of staff, financial, and programmatic resources across all schools."

MMSD Board Policy 9001, draft revision for proposed adoption by BOE on July 31, 2017:
"The SUPERINTENDENT and his/her designee shall recommend and the BOARD shall adopt a tool and/or method by which the DISTRICT can assess alignment of recommendations with the principles in the Educational Equity Policy (Educational Equity Tool). The Educational Equity Tool shall be available on the DISTRICT's website once approved."....
"Beginning in the 2018-2019 school year, the SUPERINTENDENT or his/her designee and BOARD will adopt metrics that will provide data on the distribution of staff, financial, and programmatic resources across all schools, which shall be incorporated into the annually prepared budget documents and/or Human Resources report."

Some relevant resources for district information, past and present:

• U.S. Department of Education (USED) Civil Rights Data Collection: survey years 2013 (Educational Equity Report, including school-level data for download), 2011, and 2009; although the next biennial CRDC publication occurs in 2018, the district's data for survey year 2015 would have been compiled and submitted earlier this year.
• Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI): various dashboards with district-only access (from which relevant current data can and should be made available to the public), including: Achievement Gap Dashboard, MAP Dashboards, PALS Dashboards, ACCESS Dashboards, and more.
• Teacher Equitable Access Plan for Wisconsin, submitted by DPI to and approved by USED in 2015, describing "the steps that the [State Educational Agency] will take to ensure that students from low-income families and students of color are not taught at higher rates than other children by inexperienced, unqualified, or out-of-field teachers, and the measures that the agency will use to evaluate and publicly report the progress of the agency with respect to such steps," and the MMSD DPI Final Equity Plan submitted in 2016 pursuant to the state plan (including planned quarterly and annual reviews of progress, and evaluation/monitoring metrics).
• USED Office for Civil Rights (OCR) December 29, 2016 letter to MMSD, with OCR's analysis of disparities in participation for the district's African-American and Hispanic students at the elementary, middle, and high school levels in Advanced Learner programming, including Advanced Placement course participation.

The rule of law versus the rule of rank

"I thought individual rights were natural rights," said Ben.

"That's the sort of fiction we call myth," said Hortense. "Useful symbolically. But as a practical matter, society confers or withholds rights. The medieval European Custom of Merchants let the genie of individual rights out of the bottle—or opened the Pandora's box of their nuisances and evils, as people who deplore individual rights would have it.

"The contractual law we inherited from those medieval merchants contained radical conceptions. Not only did it apply alike to all individuals, no matter who they were or what their social status might be, but it was available to individuals for no other reason than that they were individuals, making contracts. That second notion is so inseparable from our contractual law that we even have the fiction that a corporation is a person. That's so corporations, like individuals, can make contracts and carry on commercial life under protection of civil law. To realize how radical the Custom of Merchants was, we only need to think about some of the battles to extend the jurisdiction of contractual law.

"For instance, slaves lack rights as individuals. After slaves in the United States were freed, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution theoretically gave them access to all the rights of individuals available under contractual law. But by custom, hierarchical law, the rule of rank, still prevailed, so freedmen and their descendants seldom enjoyed the benefits of contractual law. Every time a black homeowner was driven from his legally purchased home in a white neighborhood he was being treated as if hierarchical law, derived from social status, prevailed. Every time effective barriers were thrown up against black-owned businesses, and they were, more often than not, or against employment of qualified blacks, or they were excluded from labor unions and apprenticeships controlled by unions, it was as if contractual law did not exist for African Americans. As someone has said, even buying a loaf of bread is a contract. So is being served a meal in a restaurant. A bus ticket is a contract, but if you have to stand instead of sit because of your color, that's the rule of rank, not contract. So many of what we call civil rights are actually rights to make contracts as equals." 

Jane Jacobs, Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (1992).

Public schools, public choice

No one can know the preferences or values of other persons apart from giving those persons an opportunity to express their preferences or values. If constituencies and collectivities are organized in a way that does not reflect the diversity of interests among different groups of people, then producers of public goods and services will be taking action without information as to the changing preferences of the persons they serve. Expenditures may be made with little reference to consumer utility. Producer efficiency in the absence of consumer utility is without meaning. Large per capita expenditures for educational services which are not conceived by the recipients to enhance their life prospects may be grossly unproductive. Education can be a sound investment in human development only when individuals perceive the effort as enhancing their life prospects.

Vincent Ostrom and Elinor Ostrom, "Public Choice: A Different Approach to the Study of Public Administratration," Public Administration Review, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Mar. - Apr., 1971), 203-216.

A.O. Hirschman on arguments against fixing failure

According to the perversity thesis, any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy. The futility thesis holds that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will simply fail to "make a dent." Finally, the jeopardy thesis argues that the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment.

Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991).

Louis Moreau Gottschalk on education

Those favored by fortune can educate themselves in all countries: and it is for that reason that the American thinkers did not dedicate their cares to the aristocratic element of society, but rather to the lowest ranks of the great mass of the people, whom they have struggled to enlighten; comprehending that education ought not to be a privilege, but something which belongs to all, as much as the air we breathe; and that every citizen has as imprescriptible a right to the light of the Spirit as he has to the light of the sun which illuminates him.

The popular system of education in the United States, in that austere elaboration, which, of a child, makes successively a man, and later a citizen, has, for its principal object, to prepare him for the use of liberty, — that cuirass of the strong, but which frequently, for the weak, is transformed into the shirt of Nessus.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk, 1868 (from Mary Alice Seymour, Life and Letters of Louis Moreau Gottschalk by Octavia Hensel, His Friend and Pupil, 1870).

Chesterton on Dickens on education

It is singular that Dickens, who was not only a radical and a social reformer, but one who would have been particularly concerned to maintain the principle of modern popular education, should nevertheless have seen so clearly this potential evil in the mere educationalism of our time -- the fact that merely educating the democracy may easily mean setting to work to despoil it of all the democratic virtues. It is better to be Lizzie Hexam and not know how to read and write than to be Charlie Hexam and not know how to appreciate Lizzie Hexam. It is not only necessary that the democracy should be taught; it is also necessary that the democracy should be taught democracy. Otherwise it will certainly fall a victim to that snobbishness and system of worldly standards which is the most natural and easy of all the forms of human corruption. This is one of the many dangers which Dickens saw before it existed. Dickens was really a prophet; far more of a prophet than Carlyle.

from G. K. Chesterton's 1911 essay on Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend.

Measures for measures

O, it is excellent
To have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant. (Measure for Measure, II.ii.133)

So…as of this writing more than half the states have been persuaded to sign on to the Common Core Standards. (Those states in the running for federal Race to the Top Phase 2 awards were required to adopt the standards by August 2.) Although there are several non-finalists that have also signed on to the standards, it’s clear that the driving force for adoption was the U.S. Department of Education push, which in turn has revived concerns about the top-down, central-planning role of the feds in school reform. These qualms aren’t likely to have been allayed by the insistence that the Common Core standards be adopted even by states (Massachusetts, California) that already had established standards regarded as superior to the new Common Core.

Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep. (II.ii.117)

Is ED an 800-pound gorilla? Is this a problem? Your mileage may vary depending on your core beliefs about what, why and how big problems best get solved. The manner in which the Common Core standards have been imposed and the intended effect of national educational standards, whether or not seen as heavy-handed and intrusive, are of a piece with the governing philosophy evidenced in other recent reforms. Maybe there’s a measure of futility in attempting to resist the assumptions that propel these initiatives, but there’s value in taking this occasion to examine the question of who (across the spectrum from the hearth to the White House) should decide what should be fixed in education and how.

We must not make a scarecrow of the law,
Setting it up to fear the birds of prey,
And let it keep one shape, till custom make it
Their perch and not their terror. (II.i.1)

One may wonder about the sincerity of ‘buy-in’ procured by quid pro quo. Signing onto the new standards was the easy part; those states will now be called upon to follow through with real work in ensuring that their curriculum tracks the standards, that the curriculum is taught effectively, and that there’s a way to demonstrate—via trustworthy assessments—that standards have been met. It’s little comfort that many of the self-same states that have redefined “proficiency” in ways that evoke the classic response of Inigo Montoya will now be, in consortium, engineering a new assessment system for the new standards.

When vice makes mercy, mercy's so extended
That for the fault's love is the offender friended. (III.ii.266)

Shakespeare has the “bed trick” and the “head trick”; think of faux “proficiency” as the “ed trick.” Perhaps the best sign of good faith and intentions to tell the truth to students (and their parents and their community) about whether or not they are keeping pace educationally would be for states who have been hiding the ball on proficiency standards to follow the lead of New York and just ‘fess up. This won’t be encouraged by gloating, derision or “I told you so”s targeted at the one state that’s (however unhappily) gone public. For now, the silence of other states with similar issues is unsettling, and may not bode well for the integrity of how new nationwide assessments will be established and implemented.

Our doubts are traitors
And makes us lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt. (I.iv.85)

I’m not worried about the new standards resulting in classrooms across the country marching in fantastically coordinated, rigid lockstep through the narrow straits of the new Common Core.  The relative vagueness of the standards and the unsettled nature of the curriculum that will be needed to embody the standards are far more likely to result in bureaucratic busywork from those states who already roll that way as their modus operandi, while the states that do a good job will find a way to continue to do so. Oddly enough, the common currency of national standards may provide an opportunity for educational settings outside conventional public schooling (e.g. homeschooling) to demonstrate that they meet these new officially sanctioned benchmarks, and I can also envision an opportunity for private sector development of disinterested assessments based on the new Common Core standards for parents who want to know where their students really stand.

(Thanks for the idea, and apologies for its execution, are due to this post by Steve Peha, and to The Bard.)

Old school

I said, "Dad, I'm so excited about my studies at Brown. I think I'm going to major in philosophy." So my father slowly turned the car and put it off to the side of the road—he looked back at me and said: "Hey, when you finish your residency, you can study anything you want." He said: "Look, you are a Chinaman"—that's how he used to talk—"You're a Chinaman. And you are not going to make it in this world if you study philosophy. If you think this country owes you anything, you're crazy. You have to get a skill."

"On Leadership: Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim",* The Washington Post, via Ask A Korean!

It’s time to get practical about college. It’s only been for the past generation or two (if that) that going on to college has become the de rigueur step after high school for anyone and everyone so inclined. For some, it’s the ultimate badge of upward mobility (for my college—and me—the high number of first-generation college-goers on campus was a special point of pride). For many others, it’s a culturally expected rite of passage (those halcyon days! four years of me time). But now, as galloping college tuition inflation and nondischargeable student loan debt collide with uncertain prospects for jobs and the economy, it's sensible for students and their parents to question what their time and money is going toward and what they should expect to get from their investment.

The idea that college should be an option for everyone is a worthy one. It's been a way to correct the pervasive mismatch (in years not too long past) between those who had the access and the means to get a college degree and those who had the talent but were shut out through demographic happenstance. But with "universal" higher ed,  the absence of a college degree closes the door to too many career paths, even those for which a college education is of dubious relevance. And now that colleges are increasingly having to step in to catch up students on what they missed in K-12, the college degree, not the high school diploma, may be becoming the new threshold of basic academic achievement. In my wildest dreams, I'd like to think that (since it looks like productivity gains through workforce reductions have been pretty much all wrung out) there's now an opportunity for new productivity gains to come from "talent scouts" who can suss out smarts, drive and potential, independent of higher ed pedigree...but unless and until that happens, the college credential, in all its overrated and exorbitant glory, is a necessity.



"Look upon me! I'll show you the life of the mind." (Barton Fink, 1991)

College (although not all colleges, nor all majors, nor all classrooms) is now just one place, and not the only place, for curious minds (though not all minds, not that there's anything wrong with that) to inquire and broaden their learning. Intellectual ferment isn't restricted to high-priced ivy-covered halls any more, now that open source and public domain resources are proliferating and fine minds (from inside and outside the academy) are actively engaging online. Choose a college that's your best buy for getting a credential at a price that won't indenture you to a job that you can't leave. In college, learn to be resourceful and pursue a skill that will provide practical sustenance while you learn what you love or love what you learn, all the days of your life. 

(*Jim Yong Kim went to med school, got a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and co-founded Partners In Health. 아버지 knows best.)

Euclid, Newton and Adam Smith

I missed the hubbub over the piece by Mark Slouka in Harper’s last fall (“Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school”), but came to it after reading a few mentions of it recently. Its title does a pretty good job of giving the gist of it, which (roughly restated) is that priorities of commerce have hijacked American education policy, shutting out the humanities, and unduly elevating math and science (or “mathandscience,” in Slouka’s formulation). It’s an interesting polemic, although its attention-seeking rhetorical feints (which you'll get the full flavor of if you read the whole thing) leave me outside the choir to which it preaches.

I worry about young people who can't find work. The unemployment numbers from last summer were discouraging; I expect this summer's numbers will be worse. The kids from demographic groups that are the least successfully served by our educational system fare worst in the job market. They won't have the social capital to draw on to get a foot in the door, to get helped onto the first rung of the ladder. Where will they be without employable skills?

Slouka's piece is profoundly wrongheaded not just because it treats as trivial the matter of how one puts bread on the table, but also in its claim that skills that are useful and knowledge that is valuable are mutually exclusive things. If we can get public education back to basics—to teach kids how to read and write, do math, and think critically, in a school that is safe—is there any reason why that education could not, and should not, teach its students the beauty of Euclid's Elements, the philosophical and theological origins of Newton's science, and how Adam Smith understood human nature and ethics in The Theory of the Moral Sentiments?

Do you often come across people for whom, all their lives, a "subject" remains a "subject," divided by watertight bulkheads from all other "subjects," so that they experience very great difficulty in making an immediate mental connection between let us say, algebra and detective fiction, sewage disposal and the price of salmon—or, more generally, between such spheres of knowledge as philosophy and economics, or chemistry and art?

Dorothy Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning” (presented at Oxford University in 1947).

The student revolution has thus come full circle and joined those who were originally its worst enemies: those who willingly corrupt the present in any degree necessary to achieve an imagined future, those vicious establishment constructors of the rat-race who reduce the lives of students and workers to mere means.

Wayne C. Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent (1974).

But the world as revealed by its scientific discoveries is also reality, regardless of how it may appear, and people in John's dimension are going to have to do more than just ignore it if they want to hang on to their vision of reality. John will discover this if his points burn out.

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (1974).

The question of what a good job looks like—of what sort of work is both secure and worthy of being honored—is more open now than it has been for a long time. […] The meta-work of trafficking in the surplus skimmed from other people’s work suddenly appears as what it is, and it becomes possible once again to think the thought, “Let me make myself useful.”

Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work (2009).