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Chapter 6 Equity and Inequality:From Static to Dynamic Conceptions THE FIRST FIVE chapters of this book were principally about the effectiveness of school resources, but expanded the conception of resources well past the simple resources that preoccupy most policy discussions. Of course, the results reported in those chapters also shed a great deal of light on inequalities in outcomes, since inequalities in school resources (and nonschool resources like family background)—the inequalities described in table 1.1— create inequalities in educational outcomes as well.As mentioned in the introduction , the test scores for fifteen-year-olds measured in the Program in International Student Achievement (PISA) data are more unequal than in virtually any other developed country, and inequalities in educational attainments —comparing high school dropouts to those with advanced professional and academic degrees—are enormous as well. Figure I.1 revealed that, with a broader measure of learning—the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS)— inequality in the United States is the highest of all developed countries, as is inequality of earnings.The irony is that concern about unequal educational outcomes should be so high in a country of such high levels of inequality. Whether inequalities in education are also inequitable is a different question , since equity is a normative issue that cannot be established without conceptions of equity. However, the results in chapter 4 about family background —the finding that outcomes differ systematically by several measures of class—and the effects of race and ethnicity on outcomes generate the suspicion that inequity and not just inequality is at work in our schools. The black-white test score gap has come to represent basic inequities in this country (see, for example, Jencks and Phillips 1998), and the lower rate at which Latinos andAfricanAmericans complete high school represents other crucial outcomes that are inequitably distributed. But in a formal sense, we must establish conceptions of equity before we can make the leap from evidence of inequality to conclusions about equity. Concerns about inequality and inequity in formal schooling have extended over at least two centuries, back to the charity schools for poor children established in the early nineteenth century so that they could have access to at least basic schooling.Similarly,the movement for common schools in the first half of the nineteenth century—with a common curriculum for all students—was intended to establish public support for grammar schools through grade 8 so that all students might have access to a basic education regardless of family background. Even though schooling did not yet have an important economic or vocational role, Horace Mann’s description of public schools as the “great equalizer of the conditions of men” at least introduced the idea that schooling might overcome the differences among children that they brought to school with them. Subsequent efforts to equalize funding—starting with Cubberly’s discovery after 1900 of inequalities in district spending and continuing through the long struggles over racial segregation in the 1940s and 1950s, the development of Great Society programs like Title I and Head Start, and the lawsuits after 1970—have also been heirs to the idea that the schools ought to establish greater equity in an inequitable society. The most recent efforts to improve the test scores of low-performing students, in state accountability systems and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, constitute part of a continuing series of efforts to establish greater equity through schooling. However, on closer examination, these different initiatives against inequality have defined equity in different ways. Drawing on the history of equity in this country, as well as on the ideas of the improved school finance, I develop a matrix or “landscape” of equity concepts in the first section of this chapter. One of the problems in achieving equity in this country, then, is not only the fierce political opposition to the policies that might move toward equity, but also the serious disagreements about what equity might mean. Clarifying the varying conceptions of equity may not deter individuals and partisan groups from disagreeing about equity, but it can at least identify the sources of disagreement and the cases in which certain forms of equity cannot lead to other forms. A further problem is that most of our conceptions of equity and our measures of inequality are cross-sectional. For example, those concerned with test score gaps usually compare the scores of white students with those of African American and Latino students at one moment in time (see, for...

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