.7 Elements of Equity

Another problem is simply selfishness and prejudice, its the kind of problem that comes from the right to have bad schools. If we could eliminate selfishness and prejudice we would have better school systems and we would all have better education's. But you have the DINKs (double incomes and no kids). If you have a lot of DINKs in a school district, they are not likely to vote for higher taxes to tax themselves to pay for education because they don't have any kids. They find all sorts of ways to justify low tax rates for support of schools or lack there of. That is just one example of a relatively affluent group of people who have a vested interest in not supporting schools and that'sselfishness and that's prejudice. Often times there is a prejudice against putting a lot of money into schools where there are substantial minority populations. Finally, the barrier of ignorance. This is even more important than selfishness and prejudice, because it is the ignorance of not realizing that bad schools penalize all of society. We are penalized by having to build more jails, by having more welfare, by having people who just don't fit into the society and that punishes all of us. The ignorance of the reality of what makes a society work and lack of foresight is perhaps one of the biggest barriers to effective education. It is just ignorance for example that people don't realize global interdependence. It is just plain ignorance. Now what are some of the elements of equity? What goes into making things equitable? First, is funding equity. If you have equity of funding, you are going to do better. Secondly, you are going have a better school if you have staff equity. If you have the good teachers spread out to deal with all of the kids rather than the good teachers teaching the easy kids. You are going to have a better school if you have organizational equity. This means that everything from equity of facilities to supplies and materials to the kind of support you need in terms of vice principals and curriculum developers and all that kind of thing, organizational equity is a big factor. Equity in terms of remediation so you have access to remedial help when you need it. And one of the things we talked a lot about earlier is equity in terms of homework. Here, if I had to make a decision right now one way or another, I would make the decision to eliminate homework and require schools to reorganize themselves to not have homework. I would still like to find ways to have parents involved, but I don't think having kids complete homework is the only way to get parents involved. I want access to school. Here, if the school is really concerned about equity, for example they would organize teacher's days so that at least one day a month teachers would come in at noon and be available until eight or nine in the evening, because parents who work all day don't have access to school unless you have a teacher who is willing to make themselves available in the evenings on their own time. The average teacher's work week is fifty-four hours. The image to the public is that teachers have a really short work week.

Another issue is equity in transport and we don't have a lot of equity in transport. In some school districts the bus goes home at three and then if the kid participates in extracurricular activities the parent has to provide transport. Another element of equity is parent access. We need to give parents more access to schools, but we also need to give schools more access to parents. Right now schools don't have access to parents. We need curriculum equity. There are some schools that offer four or five languages and others that offer just one language. There are just a whole range of places where there is not curriculum equity. Finally, facilities equity. There are all sorts of horror stories about leaky schools and roofs and they are true and in the same school district there is a diversity in quality between school buildings. Some of that diversity is inevitable because you can't build all of the schools new at the same time and you kind of have to phase things in, but it would be more credible if the phasing in were done in different schools for different things. Usually the same schools always phase into the new things first.

	What are the elements of equity?	Answer Here
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