Equity Principles
Adapted from ‘Six Critical Paradigm
Shifts for Equity in Education” by Paul C.
Gorski
www.edchange.org
Equity Principle #1
A shift from
Equality-based principles to Equitybased principles
Equality
 Equal
treatment
 Equal access
 Equal opportunity
Educational Equity
A strategy designed to provide differentiated
educational responses to students who are
different in important ways so that comparable
outcomes may be achieved.
“All learners cannot be treated the same because
their different learning, social, cultural, emotional,
psychological and physical needs or characteristics
naturally give rise to varying interventions for them
to achieve comparability.” Bradley Scott, 1995
Shift
 A focus
on comparable
outcomes,
 Intentional strategies to level the
playing field, and
 Unequal treatment of unequals
Are we ready for the shift?

Ultimately, the key question for us is not just whether
students and teachers can appreciate differences,
though we know that tremendous individual learning
opportunities can emerge from a process of education
that facilitates this sort of appreciation. The key
question,instead, is whether every student who walks
into our schools has an opportunity to achieve to her
or his fullest, to have access to an equitably validating,
supportive learning environment, regardless of race,
ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic
status, religion, home language, (dis)ability, and any
other dimension of her or his identity.
Equity Principle # 2
A shift from identifying “at-risk”
students to acknowledging a
broken system
Who are we problematizing?
Does the problem lie with the students
and their families?
 Are we operating within a deficit
framework where we have to “fix” the
kids based on who they are?

Causes of “the gap”?
Do we recognize that the inequities
(student academic performance- “the
gap”) are actually symptoms, not root
problems, of an inherently racist,
classist, sexist, etc, system?
 There are institutional practices and
polices that contribute to the gap.

We can and will create schools where
equity and excellence is attained.
A place to start:
 Conduct equity audits;
 Confront our beliefs about the
achievement gap;
 Focus on the assets of other cultureswhat the children bring to school;
 Develop strategies that build upon
student strengths.

We are aiming for schools in which there
are no persistent patterns of differences
in academic success or treatment among
students grouped by race, ethnicity,
culture, neighborhood, income of
parents, or home language.

There still continues today . . .to be just an incredible array of
negative stereotypes about native people. . .We have in this
country way too many negative stereotypes about black people,
and about Latin people, and all kinds of people; it’s just an
incredible problem we deal with. . .Everybody’s sitting around
this table, and they’re all looking at each other with stereotypes,
and they can’t get past that. It’s like everybody’s sitting there and
they have some kind of veil over their face, and they look at each
other through this veil that makes them see each other through
some stereotypical kind of viewpoint. If we’re ever gonna
collectively begin to grapple with the problems that we have
collectively, we’re gonna have to move back the veil and deal with
each other on a more human level.
Wilma Mankiller (1993),
former chief of the
Cherokee Nation