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Transfer Equity, Pt. 2: Community Colleges
In last month’s blog, I discussed the decision by my daughter’s school district foundation to allocate the majority of their resources to the three poorest schools in the district, which inadvertently created an “enrichment gap” between these schools and wealthier schools like my daughter’s. These funds were used for reading and math support and mental health, which promotes educational equity in one sense, but ultimately created inequities in art, music, STEM, and other enrichment activities since the wealthier schools used the vast majority of their fundraising dollars for these types of activities instead. In other words, the students would all enter high school on an equal footing in math, reading, and emotional wellness; however, even with such equality, the students from the wealthier schools would enter with more “educational wealth.” In this blog, I argue for what I term “transfer equity,” a form of educational wealth building that provides students not only with basic skills and needs but also with the educational opportunities needed for future academic success, in community colleges.

Transfer Equity, Pt. 1
A few months ago, I got an email from my daughter’s school about an Equity Summit being sponsored by the district’s education foundation, the non-profit fundraising arm of the school district. As someone interested in educational equity and as a former member of the district’s equity committee, I decided to attend. As I learned at the summit, the foundation had made the decision a few years ago to shift its financial resources from all the schools in the district to the three schools with the highest proportion of low-income students. This decision was made in part because these three schools do not have PTAs, and therefore, do not have local fundraising capacities.