Pillar 1: What is “educational equity” and why do we need it?

The term “educational equity” has been the latest buzzword in higher education, replacing predecessors such as “metacognition,” “affective pedagogy,” and “adaptive learning,” and like these other terms, the definition of educational equity can be quite nebulous and hard to understand. This is the problem with jargon. However, educational equity, unlike these other educational movements, is high stakes for so many of our students, particularly those who come from traditionally marginalized groups, including, but not limited to, women, people of color, religious minorities, and members of the LGBTQ community. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that educators not only understand what the term means but why we need to shift our practices to more equity-centered ones. This process can be long, tedious, and, honestly, very uncomfortable, but if we are willing to re-examine our profession and pedagogies through an educational equity lens, we can truly start to close the stubborn “achievement” gaps that exist in higher education.

First things first . . . what is “educational equity”? Unfortunately, the dictionary definitions of “equity” are generally not helpful in understanding its relevance to education. For example, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, equity is “the quality of being equal or fair . . . something that is fair and right.” Not only are these definitions abstract, but they also seem to affirm what we are already doing. Most of us would argue that we are “equal” and “fair.” And while most of us certainly do treat our students with equality (which is different from equitably) and fairness, the data suggests that this simply isn’t enough. Let me be clear: I believe most educators want their students succeeding and prospering. It’s just that some students are not, and that deserves closer analysis. But more on that later.

The definition above exemplifies why it is so hard for most educators to understand what educational equity is, and this confusion is compounded when a simple literature review fails to provide a clear definition. It would seem that many academic articles assume the reader has this knowledge, which is problematic since many educators do not, and if we are actually going to promote meaningful change, everyone needs to be on the same page.

As a result, it is easiest to start with a simple definition of educational equity, which has two primary components, both of which I will discuss in more detail below. The first is the recognition that many of our students have access to very different levels of educational resources, housing security, and reliable transportation, and they come to our institutions with very different lived experiences and very different educational needs. The second component is responding to these needs, which includes both teaching to our students’ strengths and supporting them in ways that respond to the above obstacles. In other words, educational equity is meeting our students where they are and uniquely interacting with each student based on his or her needs.

Before we jump into why many of our students are struggling in college, we need to first understand the data, or the so-called “achievement gaps,” which will help us grapple with the first component of educational equity. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) report “Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Groups 2016,” postsecondary graduation rates vary widely by race and ethnicity: 63% of White students graduate within 6 years while 41% of their Black, 53% of their Latinx, and 50% of their Pacific Islander classmates graduate in the same time frame. These inequalities are even starker when we look at graduate programs. According to the same report, during the 2012-13 academic year, 69% of Master’s degree recipients and 72% of Doctor’s recipients were White compared to 13% and 8% for Blacks, 7% and 7% for Latinx, and 7% and 12% for Asian/Pacific Islander. Furthermore, tremendous gaps exist between men and women in STEM fields. In the same academic year, only 35% of STEM degree recipients were women while women comprised 57% of all degree earners.

We can interpret these data in four very different ways:

1. The first, and the most pernicious, is that the students just are not capable of achieving the same success rates as their peers. However, this interpretation is steeped in prejudice. For example, if we believe that women in STEM just aren’t as capable of succeeding in math or science as their male counterparts, that is flat out sexism. Unfortunately, educators with this viewpoint are likely not interested in educational equity (and are therefore on the wrong website). Also, on a side note, the term “achievement gap” is a byproduct of this type of thinking because it frames the gaps as a problem with achievement (a problem with the students) rather than opportunity (a problem with how we educate our students). This is why many educators have replaced the term “achievement gaps” with “opportunity gaps.”

2. The second interpretation is that the students just aren’t motivated. In other words, they may be capable of succeeding but they just don’t have the willpower or habits of mind. This approach may seem less malignant than the first though still quite problematic because it again blames the students for the gaps in success. We need to really think about what we are arguing here. Using the example above again, if we believe that women as a group are not succeeding in STEM because they are not motivated, we are making a group-based assumption, which is again, sexism. This is where we need to look inward, and at least entertain the possibility that the students are not motivated because we don’t present our curricula in a way that excites them. We need to ask ourselves how we can make our lessons more engaging for all our students. More on this later.

3. The third interpretation is that these groups of students experience far more obstacles outside of school than their peers. This can include food and housing insecurity and a lack of access to reliable transportation or technology (like the Internet). These obstacles truly do exist. I must admit that for a long time, I fell in the school of thought that our students’ personal problems were not ours. I would venture to guess that many of us take this position, but it is too easy to shrug off these obstacles because they are our students’ personal However, I would further guess that we are also so tired of seeing so many of our students, particularly our good students, fail. For those of us who are fed up with this attrition and failure, we need to explore ways of helping our students succeed. Unfortunately, as educators, we have little to no power over our students’ housing and transportation needs. However, many of us have student support staff on campus who probably can help students identify resources, and many of our colleges have the resources to provide assistance. As a faculty, we should pressure our administrators to create programs and earmark funds to assist students with “personal” hardships that are affecting their academics. And as mentioned above, we have the ability to promote change in our classrooms. How can we create or change policies that break down barriers in our classrooms? How can we build more accessible curricula to help students who, for example, miss a class due to car issues or bouts of PTSD?

4. Finally, the fourth response to the above data is acknowledging that these students face systemic obstacles, inside and outside of school, that have and do prevent them from excelling in higher education, and that we have an obligation to evolve our pedagogies and policies to account for them. I have slowly transitioned from seeing the opportunity gaps as the result of the students’ “personal problems” to this approach. My hope is that many more of our colleagues will make a similar journey and see the reality of our students’ experiences and understand our ability to work with our students to overcome “personal” hardships. More on this below.

In order to best serve all our students, we need to recognize that many of them experience poverty and the resulting housing and food insecurity, phobias associated with their identities as LGBTQ or transgender people or their religions, and prejudice and discrimination based on their race, gender, immigration status, and ability. It is difficult to quantify how these lead to hardships in the education system, but we do have some data that illustrate that these difficulties do exist. According to the 2015 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development report “Barriers to Success: Housing Insecurity for U.S. College Students,” 56,000 college students indicated that they were homeless, and 52% of independent students (meaning they do not live with family and they support themselves) live below the poverty line, which has implications for housing, food, and transportation.

Furthermore, according to the report “Campus Climate for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender People: a National Perspective” by the Policy Institute of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 19% of LGBTQ students in college fear for their physical safety due to their sexual orientation, and 51% of them have concealed their sexual orientation to avoid harassment. The same report also indicated that 80% of these students were victims of derogatory remarks associated with their sexuality or gender identification. Transgender students were the most likely, 71%, to be harassed on campus.

On a similar note, many of us have heard of or known students who can’t afford textbooks, who don’t have access to the Internet, or who have to rely on sometimes unreliable and labyrinthine public transportation to get to school. However, many of us don’t believe the students when they share their struggles. I, too, have had the classes where it seems like a third of the students have broken computers or deaths in the family. Admittedly, it becomes hard to believe, and, chances are, some of the students are fibbing to get extensions on essays and tests. But we become so consumed with catching the cheats (and perhaps so cynical) that we forget that most of our students are telling the truth, and when we adopt “zero tolerance” policies around late work or tests, we are actually harming many of our honest students, sometimes beyond repair. I would never advocate that we lower standards or give some students “free passes.” However, I am arguing that we need to take the time to get to know our students better and to find creative ways to work with them when a crisis hits without giving preferential treatment or compromising our values.

There still exists a plethora of complex questions as to why are our students are struggling in college and why they seem so ill-prepared for the demands of higher education. The answers are just as complex, but I’d like to offer three for closer study – poverty, academic trauma, and college curricula that don’t reflect our students.

1. The first response I tend to hear when I mention childhood poverty as an obstacle to college success is that the opportunity gaps are an issue even for colleges and universities that offer free tuition or award substantial need-based scholarships. This is true, but the expense of attending college is only part of the financial equation. In fact, the connection between poverty and the ability to succeed in college has more to do with the resources available to students in the K-12 system than the costs of tuition and books in college. As the data show, students who live in high poverty neighborhoods or attend majority-minority schools do not have access to the latest textbooks and educational technologies and their schools tend to employ brand-new, un-credentialed, or straight up ineffective teachers. According to Linda Darling-Hammond in “Unequal Opportunity: Race and Education,” low-income students have “fewer and lower-quality books, curriculum materials, laboratories, and computers; significantly larger class sizes; less qualified and experienced teachers; and less access to high-quality curriculum” (30). Furthermore, she cites The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future in that “new teachers hired without meeting certification standards (25 percent of all new teachers) are usually assigned to teach the most disadvantaged students in low-income and high-minority schools, while the most highly educated new teachers are hired largely by wealthier schools” (31). Hence, it is important that we transition the conversation around poverty from one of tuition to one of social and educational inequities, and we need to think more broadly about our students’ academic histories. An equity-minded educator will not only acknowledge that her students contend with poverty as they attend college but that they may be coming from impoverished neighborhoods and schools. An equity-minded educator will respond accordingly.

2. Prejudice. In addition to a systemic lack of resources, many of our students, especially our minoritized students, experience prejudice and discrimination, often in the form of what are called microaggressions, which are defined by Dr. Derald Wing Sue in “Microaggressions: More than Just Race” as “the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership.” For example, it would be considered a microaggression to ask an African American male student which sport he plays. Though this question is clearly not hateful, the student has to process the stereotype that Black men can only play sports. Furthermore, this student will have likely been asked that question numerous times over the course of his academic career, akin to a verbal form of water torture. To be clear, instances of microaggressions are usually not malicious. The teacher mentioned previously may have just wanted to start a conversation. Educational equity, then, asks us to be more cognizant of how we interact with minoritized students, which can include students of color, members of the LGBTQ community, students with disabilities, and students who practice Islam or Judaism, among many more. Furthermore, these microaggressions can sometimes lead to macroaggressions, which are outright instances of racism, misogyny, and other forms of hate. This could come in the form of racial or gender slurs, insensitive jokes, or a clear belief that some students can’t succeed because of their identity. Unfortunately, these types of aggressions are more widespread in education than we’d like to believe. Furthermore, microaggressions “can significantly interfere with the target students’ attempts to acquire an education, leading them, for instance, to avoid certain classes and certain geographical spaces in educational institutions” (in Caplan and Ford 35). As equity-minded educators, we need to recognize that many of our students have experienced both micro- and macro-aggressions throughout their K-12 schooling and within our colleges. We need also realize that these aggressions have turned our students off to school, which could explain why some of them seem disengaged, or “unmotivated,” in our classrooms.

3. Finally, we need to reflect on what happens when our students step into our classrooms, and there is no better place to start than our curricula, the one piece of higher education that faculty have full control over. It is important to understand that the U.S. system of higher education is modeled after a centuries old European system meant to serve wealthy, noble white men, particularly doctors, lawyers, and clergymen. Even our early American adaptation was established to exclusively serve wealthy, white men, a model that only changed for poor whites after World War II and for minorities and women after the Civil Right Movement (and in 1990 for people with disabilities). But our student demographics are changing. According to the aforementioned NCES report, in 1990, 79% of college students were White, 10% were Black, 6% were Latinx, 4% were Asian/Pacific Islander, and 1% were Native American. In 2013, however, 58% were White, 15% Black, 17% Latinx, 6% Asian/Pacific Islander, and 1% Native American. Unfortunately, our curricula don’t reflect our changing student bodies, their values and politics, or their lived experiences. We need to ask ourselves whether we are only including dead white men in lessons or whether we are being more inclusive of other voices. The Founding Fathers and 44 out 45 U.S. Presidents were white, but in the background, people of color, women, Indigenous people, people with disabilities, religious minorities, and members of the LGBTQ community have all contributed to fields including politics, business, biology, medicine, engineering, literature, and philosophy. It is time that we bring these folks to the forefront in every single discipline that we teach. If we want all of our students to be engaged with our classes, we need to represent all our students in our curricula.

This leads me to the final component of educational equity: responding to our students’ pasts and needs. It is a great first step to recognize that our students face systemic barriers that hinder them later in their college pursuits, but this is meaningless unless we do something to respond to them. As mentioned above, the easiest way to do this is in our classrooms, both in how we teach and what we teach. I think it is worth discussing each of these in a little more detail in addition to a couple of other practices.

1. This includes everything we do in the classroom, but let’s cover curriculum later and instead focus on the “soft skills” of teaching. Knowing now that our students carry academic and social burdens before they even step inside the classroom, an equity-minded educator will ask herself how her policies and practices affect the students’ abilities to succeed in her class. For example, when a student tells her that he couldn’t submit an assignment online because he has unreliable Internet access, rather than brushing this off as an excuse, she will direct him to campus resources where he can access the Internet, such as the tutorial center or library. As mentioned above, this is not about lowering standards or giving preferential treatment. This educator should not necessarily accept a late assignment (and if she does, it should come with some caveat about the next one). The difference is that she acknowledges the student’s dilemma, which includes trust in the student’s word, and responds in a way that will allow the student to complete future assignments and to see that his teacher actually cares about his success. Educational equity is about recognizing obstacles and responding in ways that allow the students to flourish. Furthermore, we need to be more cognizant of how we interact with students. We need to make sure that we are not stereotyping or making assumptions about the students, as pure as some of our intentions may be. And, finally, we need to let our students be themselves in class. If a Muslim woman wants to wear a hijab, we need to allow it, no questions asked. If a trans student uses a different name than the one on the roster and uses different pronouns than his/her biological gender, we need to respect that and do everything we can to remember to use those pronouns (we also need to make sure that the other students are using these pronouns as well). And we need to do everything in our power to memorize and properly pronounce our students’ names.

2. At the very foundation of an equity-centered curriculum is the realization and acceptance that our disciplines have been designed by and for white men. This was very clear to me when I met with an astronomy colleague to organize a Black History Month planetarium show on my campus. In recognition of Black History Month, I asked him if his show could focus on the contributions to astronomy by the Dogon, an African tribe. He was very excited about this approach, but his initial response was “I will try.” Apparently, the software used in his planetarium projector was based on Greek astronomy and constellations. This is one instance where an educator was pigeonholed into a Euro-centric curriculum that erased the contributions of other civilizations and cultures (The Dogon were contemporaries of the ancient Greeks). However, as mentioned above, our student demographics are changing, and we need to evolve as they do. In other words, our curricula need to reflect the diversity of our students, and we need to celebrate the contributions and accomplishments of people of color, the LGBTQ community, religious minorities, veterans, and other minoritized groups in our disciplines’ histories. For example, my British literature curriculum has evolved immensely in the last several years, from one that focused solely on canonical works and authors (who were almost entirely white men) to one that is more inclusive of “other” voices, such as those of slaves, the colonized (e.g. Jamaica and India), women, LGBTQ writers, and people with disabilities. To be clear, this is not “tokenizing” people or cultures. It is simply creating a curriculum that is representative of the students sitting in my classroom. The last time I taught British literature, I happened to have three African American students in the class, all of whom told me that they appreciated voices like Olaudah Equiano’s and Derek Walcott’s. And just imagine how the African American students felt in the Black History Month planetarium show when they learned that the Dogons were some of the earliest astronomers. Imagine how Muslim students might feel in a biology class when they learn that the Byzantines created the foundation for modern medicine. Imagine how the student with a learning disability will react when her teacher celebrates the accomplishments of Helen Keller. These students won’t only see themselves reflected in the course material, but they will feel a sense of pride or accomplishment, not unlike a white student who learns about the founding fathers or some of our greatest presidents. These are minor revisions to our curricula that could mean the world to our students.

3. Campus Resources. We need to familiarize ourselves with our campus’s resources. We may not be familiar with all the student support services that exist at our colleges, which can include disability resource centers, housing assistance, money for textbooks, bus passes, legal aid, immigration services, safe spaces for LGBTQ students, personal counseling, and many more. It is on us as equity-minded educators to learn about these resources, to build networks with their employees, and to direct our students to these contacts as needed. Lastly, recall your first year in college and how overwhelming it all was. Personally, I was fortunate enough to have two faculty advisors who were able to direct me to the appropriate offices for things like registration as well as to valuable experiences like work-study, internships, and apprenticeships. Much of my own success can be attributed to the professors who made the decision to go above and beyond to help me. From what I have observed, this was a common experience for many educators. It is up to us to pay it forward.