Equality versus

Equity In
Education

Submitted to: Sadaf

Submitted by:
Ahmad Fiyaz (2017-CRP-5)

Zunair Ahmad (2017-CRP-6)

Khalid Butt (2017-CRP- )

Iqra Khaliq (2017-CRP-23)

December17, 2018
 Acknowledgement

We would like to show our gratitude to the ma’am Sadaf, the supervisor of our
project, for sharing their pearls of wisdom with us during the course of this research
and we would also like to thank the interviewees for giving us there precious time.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgement .................................................................................................................................... 1
Abstract .................................................................................................................................................... 5
1.0. Introduction: ............................................................................................................................... 6
1.1. What is Equality? .................................................................................................................... 6
1.2. What is Equity? ....................................................................................................................... 6
2.3. Differences and Why They Are Important ..................................................................................... 7
2.3.1. Comparison Chart: .................................................................................................................. 9
2.0. Methodology: ............................................................................................................................ 10
2.1. Participants: .......................................................................................................................... 10
2.2. Design: .................................................................................................................................. 10
2.3. Measures: ............................................................................................................................. 11
2.4. Procedures: ........................................................................................................................... 12
2.5. Results: .................................................................................................................................. 13
3.0. Discussion: ................................................................................................................................. 14
4.0. Conclusion: ................................................................................................................................ 17
4.1. Key Differences between Equity and Equality ...................................................................... 18
5.0. References .................................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
6.0. Appendices: ............................................................................................................................... 19
 Abstract
Among the possible fairness rules, the primary rivals are equality and equity. This
paper reports the results of an experiment. It investigates a large variety of factors
that might affect preferences for equity and equality, including multiple approaches
to examining concepts of culture. We find impersonal third parties, or spectators,
exclusively favor equity. Distributive preferences move incrementally toward
equality. These findings about fairness preferences are robust with respect to a wide
range of non-ethics variables that seldom matter, including race, income, gender,
nationality and culture. We interpret the findings as suggesting that equity is an
impersonal (or impartial) rule of fairness.
1.0. Introduction:
Education is focused on ensuring that each student has the opportunities to find,
figure out, and develop their skills and abilities based on their values and their
communities' values. School and district leaders grapple with a daunting
challenge—they must reform policies and practices that currently contribute to
opportunity and achievement gaps. A just education does not assume the same
means or the same ends for every student. But is that really true? Should our efforts
go toward equality or equity? And what is the difference?

1.1. What is Equality?

The goal of equality is to make sure that everyone has the same things to be
successful. It is similar to equity in that it is seeking fairness for everyone, but it
assumes that everyone starts equally as well. There is an illustration below that has
been done several times by others (Maguire, May2016) of three people standing
behind a fence at a baseball game. The first panel shows three people of different
heights standing on boxes. This represents equality since all have boxes at the same
height. But, as you can see, it doesn’t promote fairness the way we would like, since
it still doesn’t allow everyone to watch the game. That is where equity comes in.

1.2. What is Equity?

Equity is trying to understand where people are coming from and give them what
they need to be successful. This means not necessarily giving everyone the exact
same thing, but rather just what they need to live happily. As seen in the illustration,
the taller person, who can already watch the game, doesn’t have a box, while the
shortest person, who could not see the game with only one box, now has two. The
shortest person can enjoy the game like everyone else. This mentality is harder to
grasp since initially it seems unfair. Since we are always working toward equality and
making sure everyone gets the same thing, we have a harder time seeing fairness in
equity and giving people unequal amounts to help everyone succeed (Maguire,
May2016)

2.3. Differences and Why They Are Important

1) What is educational equality?

2) What is educational equity?

3) What is a just education?

All three concepts are important, but each can easily be misapplied. Misunderstood
or poorly understood ideas of equality, equity, or justice, when enacted in policy, can
inadvertently harm certain groups of students. This is why understanding the
differences between these three ideas—and asking the right questions—is important.
Should per student funding at every school be exactly the same? That’s a question of
equality. But should students who come from less get more in order to ensure that
they can catch up? That’s a question of equity. Yes, making sure all students
have equal access to resources is an important goal. All students should have the
resources necessary for a high-quality education. But the truth remains that some
students need more to get there.

Here’s where equity comes in. The students who are furthest behind — most often
low-income students and students of color — require more of those resources to
catch up, succeed, and eventually, close the achievement gap. Giving students who
come to school lagging academically (because of factors outside of a school’s
control) the exact same resources as students in higher income schools alone will
not close the achievement gap. But making sure that low-income students and
students of color have access to exceptional teachers and that their schools have the
funding to provide them with the kind of high-quality education they need to
succeed will continue us on the path toward narrowing that gap.

Equality has become synonymous with “leveling the playing field” (Mason, 2006)So
let’s make equity synonymous with “more for those who need it.”

The ideas of equality and equity are often misunderstood and misused. Each concept
carries implicit underlying assumptions about what is “fair” as they relate to the
types of schools children should attend. Each concept also carries implications about
how students should be treated and how resources should be distributed. A
common understanding of educational equality is that schools should offer all
students the same education. This way all students will have an equal chance. A
common understanding of educational equity is that all children should be given the
education they need to achieve certain outcomes. Both of these ideas make sense at
first glance, and they clearly connect to ideas of fairness. However, when these ideas
are used to orient policy approaches, undesirable consequences might arise. We
often speak about equality and people being created equal, but that isn’t completely
true. People are born into different economic classes, have different personalities,
talents and interests as well as different races, cultures and backgrounds. All of these
things play a role into the success of each person.

In a recent article on Odyssey we get a glimpse of how equality and equity are
played out in a classroom (Darling, july 2016)

“If Jimmy gets thirty minutes of recess, every other child gets thirty minutes of
recess (barring any disciplinary action restricting recess time). Okay, that’s equal and
fair. Now imagine a classroom of students with a writing test prompt in front of
them. The instructions are printed on the first page of the exam, but while the
majority of the class reads them, one student has a pair of headphones to listen to
the instruction. This upsets one of the students, claiming it is unfair that the other
student gets to listen while he has to read.”

This is where the issue comes in. Equality is about treating everyone the same
whether or not it will help them succeed. Equity, on the other hand, is giving people
the things they need to do well. Would the student that got upset do better on the
exam if they could listen to, instead of reading, the instructions? Or are they just
upset because someone else is doing something different and it seems unfair.
Everyone should have the chance to be successful and live a fulfilling life. We want to
be treated equally and have the same opportunities for everyone. Unfortunately we
don’t all start off in the same situations and have different lifestyles, backgrounds,
wants and needs. And if each person was given the same things, no one would really
benefit. Instead of focusing on the method and making that fair, we need to focus on
results and increasing equity for everyone. The educational equity orientation
reframes the policy discussion and orients it around ensuring that schools help all
students to achieve, even if that means distributing resources “unequally.” There are
problematic assumptions inherent in the idea of a just education. The first issue is
that it is difficult to know what justice is and looks like for each student. Expanding
definitions of success is complicated because success defined broadly does not allow
for the same methods to measure student academic achievement—standardized
tests. Standardized tests are controversial for exactly the reason asking questions
about educational equity are not sufficient; testing limits the definitions of success
and homogenizes the diversity of skills and experiences that students enter school
with, as well as the variety of skills, knowledge, and abilities they can develop with
the caring help of teachers and their communities. The focus on equitable education
is an important part of any educational policy, but another step remains to be taken.
It may not be politically feasible at the national level, but local authorities, teacher
leaders, and policy makers may be in a position to think of creating policies that offer
quality education while still ensuring that students have the liberty to reach their
own unique potential, the core strength of a democratic society. In other words, a
just education ensures that each citizen has agency in their own education.

2.3.1. Comparison Chart:

BASIS FOR EQUITY EQUALITY

COMPARISON
Meaning Equity is the virtue of being Equality is described as
just, even-handed and a state, where everyone
impartial. is at the same level.
What is it? Means End
Distribution Fair Even
Recognizes Differences and attempts to Sameness and treats
counteract unequal everyone as equal.
individual opportunities.
Ensures People have what they need. Providing everyone, the
same things.
Table 1: Comparison Chart (Mann, March 2014)
2.0. Methodology:
This section describes the way in which the study was conducted. It should be
thorough enough that someone could replicate the study based on the description
given in the paper, but there should be no excess information. There are four main
subsections: participants, design, measures, and procedure. The headings and
division of the subsections may slightly vary, but the content should remain similar.
All our team members went through various unswerving and relentless efforts to
achieve these results. The facts and figures given below are based on the research
conducted by our team members. Here is a brief note that how our research on this
topic went and the all the facts and figures are described below:

2.1. Participants:

This subsection includes demographic information that pertains to the current study.
Information is about participants’ age, gender, ethnicity, year in school, marital
status, etc. Here you have also been provided with the data such as percentages,
mean, and standard deviation:

2.2. Design:

In this subsection, the design of the current study is detailed. This was a survey
conducted among people of different ages and belonging to different aspects of life.
Some of them were doctors, engineers some of them belonging to the beaurocracy
and other people from other areas of life. Here is how our design works for this
survey and the design we adopted to conduct our survey to which people responded
greatly. This design of us clearly describes the meaning of both equality and equity
and there remains no more obscurity in the mind of the readers:

2.3. Measures:

Information about the measures used to record observations and responses is

discussed in this subsection. Examples of measures could be checklists used for
behavior observation, interview or survey questions, or experimental materials. For
more detail, examples of the items in the measure, such as a sample question from a
questionnaire or a couple of items from a checklist are also given here:

Following checklist was used in measures section:

The above is an example of the research paper checklist we used for conducting
survey.

2.4. Procedures:

Here I am going to briefly explain how the whole section of the methodology went.
First of all the participants were selected not only from the university but also from
the other areas and professions. The range of our survey was in the whole city
Lahore. We consulted people of various fields in the age of 15 to 65 for our research
and conducted survey among these selected people. The next challenging task in
front of us was to choose a design for our research which could clear everything in
the minds of the people without any further thinking so we chose a logo with three
children standing on the stool. Once with equality while all having the same number
of stools, on the other hand once with equity; having number of stools which they
needed. In this way our design section completed. After this we adopted the suitable
measures to conduct our survey which included a checklist and some questions from
the questionnaire.

2.5. Results:

In this section I will describe the result and finding of the study research we
conducted.

As we can see here that most of the people voted in favor of equity. So now it is
obvious that what the point of view of people is in this regard. As the highest
percentage in the self i.e 2.52 % while in self it was 3.05 % which a great figure than
in self and need. So what does it mean? It means people support equity more than
equality, and this is what they want in their daily lives to be happened. We have
another graph obtained on the basis that how much this rule of equity and equality
applied in our daily lives and what we get is that the prediction bar is always high
than the actual and standardized one. This bar graph depicts the practice of equity
precedence rule in our practical life. While the actual bar is lower than the others
more than 2 times. So to sum up this graph shows the contrast in the words and
deeds of our society.

3.0. Discussion:
In this section we are going to discuss some facts from the previous research as well
as we will depict various aspects of equity and equality also the effect of umpteen
types of equity and equality on our lives. And then we will also do some literature
review. Equity and equality are important for student success in different ways.
Equality denotes how people are treated, such as providing students an equal
amount of respect or students an equal amount of instruction. But equity, on the
other hand, is about giving each the tools he or she specifically needs to thrive. Some
students need additional individual attention from educators in order to fully
understand a concept, and even more broadly, many students have different
learning styles. Some students prefer learning by voice (audio) while others are more
visual learners. Others are tactile learners, preferring a hands-on approach. And
outside of the learning environment, some schools fail to provide equitable
education to their students because of a student’s socioeconomic situation, or how
the student’s home life is Decades of research have found that the first five years of
a child’s life are crucial for brain development. Children who begin learning at a
young age, whether from parents reading to them, learning alphabet letters or how
to identify zoo animals, have a head start compared to students who weren’t
afforded that privilege growing up. For example, we can look at a case of two
five-year old children. One student had access to books before kindergarten and
another didn’t. Since the former student received a head start in his reading
comprehension and vocabulary from his or her parents before entering traditional
education, the latter student will likely be starting from behind when he or she
enrolls. Similarly, a research paper by Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University titled
The Widening Academic Achievement Gap between the Rich and the Poor showed
that students who attended preschool prior to kindergarten performed better than
those who didn’t. With the lack of early cognitive development, students who didn’t
attend preschool come to kindergarten with a disadvantage. Another example of
student inequity is when a student is living near or below the poverty line. Reardon
found the gap is widening between students raised in households with incomes in
the 90th percentile of the family income distribution to households with incomes in
the 10th percentile. Compared to data from the early 1940s, Reardon found that the
income achievement gap between the 90th and 10th percentile students born in
2001 increased to around 75 percent, with steady growth widening the gap since the
mid-1970s. In addition, it’s common that households around the poverty level have
parents who are struggling to pay bills, and they may have to work long hours that
prevent them from placing an increased focus on their children’s academic future.
The recent boom of technology in classrooms across the country is also another
example of student inequity. While many schools across socioeconomic levels have
been able to provide tablets, laptops or other electronic devices to students, there
are some schools that have yet to provide this technology to their students.
Technology gives students the opportunity to learn even when they’re away from
the classroom. They can learn by viewing a PowerPoint presentation, or video via
Blackboard or another program. Teachers can even ‘flip the classroom,’ which has
students first review a lesson at home and then working on what they learned in
class the next day. But students without access to technology could be left behind.
Lastly, there are examples of discrimination against certain students that could hold
them back and fail to help them reach their potential. In some cases, minority
students are discriminated against and not provided with the equity they may need
to succeed.

Bridging the Gap

Between 2009 and 2018, several federal initiatives were rolled out in the interest of
bridging academic inequity. Here are a few examples:

Title I: This formula grant program provides financial assistance to local education
agencies (LEAs) and schools with high numbers or high percentages of children from
low-income households to ensure that the students meet challenging state
standards.

IDEA: The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 2004 (IDEA) (Andrew M.I.Lee,
2004)

authorizes formula grants to states and discretionary grants to institutions of higher

education and other nonprofit organizations to support research, demonstrations,
technical assistant and dissemination, technology, and personnel development and
parent-training and information centers.

Promise Neighborhoods: This discretionary and competitive grant program provides

funding to support nonprofit organizations, including faith-based nonprofits,
institutions of higher education, and Indian tribes in order to give all children
growing up in “promise neighborhoods” access to great schools and community
support.

Investing in Innovation: This grant program provides funding “to support LEAs and
nonprofit organizations in partnership with one or more LEAs or a consortium of
schools.” The grants are set to be awarded to schools with a record of improving
student achievement and attainment with innovative practices, among other
qualifications.

Veteran teacher Shane Safir has developed a series of strategies to provide more
equity in the classroom (Safir, december 2015)

Know every child: When a teacher gets to know all of his or her students, the teacher
can learn what learning style works best with the student and help them reach their
potential.

Become a warm demander: Have high expectations of your students, but also back
that up with a commitment to every student’s success.

Practice lean-in assessment: As teachers get to know their students, they can begin
to put together their student’s learning story; i.e. how he or she approaches tasks,
what his or her strengths are as a learner, and what the student’s struggle with.

Be flexible with routines: Be willing to “flex” or set aside your class-wide plans to
focus on individual instruction.

Make it safe to fail: Usually, when a child fails a test or feels shame about a grade, he
or she will either sit quietly or act out with bravado. In an equitable classroom,
provide an atmosphere where it’s okay to fail and make mistakes.

Culture is a resource: Take advantage of each of your student’s individual cultures.

The differences among your students are to be celebrated and valued.

Make an Impact in Your Local School System

You’ve taught in classrooms for years, but now you’re ready to take the next step
into educational administration to help administer policies to improve students
across the board. King University can help you achieve your professional goals with
its fully online M.Ed. in Instructional Leadership. You’ll learn from a challenging but
stimulating curriculum on the cutting-edge of the changing educational landscape, as
well as learning how to manage complex problems and applying theory to practice in
the classroom.

Now let’s come to the point that what is more preferable to practice in the
educational system:

Often in education, we tend to focus on standardization and compliance. The very

notion of fairness, while closely related to concepts like equality or impartiality,
assumes that students will have an equal opportunity regardless of their individual
circumstances and will all benefit from the same provisions. This flawed notion does
not account for the deficits that might prevent access to opportunities for one
student that may not be a deficit for another. An assumption of sameness is the
basis for this approach.

On the other hand, Equity in education requires that conditions are created that
eliminate the obstacles to opportunities regardless of factors like race, gender,
family background, language and poverty. The hard truth is that some students will
need more. There are students who lack the necessary requisite skills to ‘do’ school
by no fault of their own, due to circumstances out of their control.

4.0. Conclusion:
Equity cannot be achieved; through treating all the people equally rather it can be
achieved through treating all the people in an equitable manner, i.e. as per their
circumstances. Moreover, equality works, only if the starting point of every
individual is same. Here we describe our conclusions in a systematic form I.e. in the
form of bullets so that our idea becomes more clear, so following is a conclusion of
our research paper conducted on the topic equity versus equality

4.1. Key Differences between Equity and Equality

The differences between equity and equality can be drawn clearly on the following
grounds

1. Justness and fairness in the manner of treating individuals are called equity.
Equality is what we call, the state where everyone is at the same level.

2. Equity is a process while equality is the outcome, i.e. equity is the necessary
condition to be fulfilled to achieve latter.

3. While equity represents impartiality, i.e. the distribution is made in such a

way to even opportunities for all the people. Conversely equality indicates
uniformity, where everything is evenly distributed among people.

4. In equity, the differences are recognized and efforts are made to counteract
the manner in which individual opportunities are not equal. On the contrary,
equality recognizes sameness and so it aims at treating everyone as equal.

5. In equity, all the people can have access to what they need. The equality, in
contrast, all the people get the same thing, i.e. rights, resources and
opportunities.

5.0. References

Bibliography
1. Andrew M.I.Lee, J. (2004). The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of
2004 .
 2. Darling, A. (july 2016). equity vs equality in classroom.

3. Maguire, A. (May2016). illustration of equity versus equality. IISC.

4. Mann, B. (March 2014). comparisn chart for equity vs equality.

5. Mason, A. (2006). Levelling the Playing field. Oxford University Press.

6. Safir, S. (december 2015). Promote Equity in Classroom.

5.0. Appendices:
https://edtrust.org/the-equity-line/equity-and-equality-are-not-equal/

http://sgba-resource.ca/en/concepts/equity/distinguish-between-equity
-and-equality/

https://publichealthonline.gwu.edu/blog/equity-vs-equality/

http://www.growthandjustice.org/news/2013-04/the-difference-betwee
n-equity-and-equality

http://www.ajeforum.com/the-difference-between-educational-equality-
equity-and-justice-and-why-it-matters-by-joseph-levitan/

http://www.publichealthnotes.com/equity-vs-equality/

https://online.king.edu/news/equality-vs-equity/

https://www.thinkinclusive.us/equity-versus-equality-in-the-classroom/

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00131727909338346?jou
rnalCode=utef20

http://www.theinclusionsolution.me/equity-vs-equality-eliminating-oppo
rtunity-gaps-education/

https://www.teachermagazine.com.au/columnists/geoff-masters/what-i
s-equity-in-education

https://www.edutopia.org/blog/practices-promote-equity-in-classroom-
shane-safir

https://www.hanoverresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Equity-
in-Education_Research-Brief_FINAL.pdf