Equity and Excellence in American Public Schools
Published October 18, 2023
Excellence, not mediocrity, provides the key to achieving greater equity in education. The view of equity as a zero-sum game requires limiting high achievers and is unpopular, misguided, and wrong. It is misguided to embrace policies or practices that put a ceiling on any child’s achievement.
Educational equity should mean providing all children, regardless of financial means, with excellence. Excellent instruction, excellent curricula, excellent teachers, excellent enrichment. However, the greatest enemy of equity is mediocrity, it's the everyday bureaucratic dysfunction that remains all too common in American education. It's the decisions that public officials take that block excellent charter schools from growing or replicating.
It's the refusal to intervene when a principle is not up to the task of creating a culture of excellence. Yet some equity advocates argue that anything that helps a subgroup of children achieve at high levels is at war with equity, these advocates see equity as a zero sum game.
Rather than focus on helping every child achieve his or her potential, which inevitably varies from individual to individual, they seek equality of outcomes by leveling down the high achievers. It is misguided to embrace policies or practices that put ceiling on any child's achievement. Just as it is wrong to block efforts to get all students to a floor of basic literacy and numeracy.
Excellence is not the enemy of equity, it is the antidote to inequity.