A definition
EDquity
/ˈɛd.kwɪ.ti/
noun
- 1.
A condition in which the quality of the education a child receives is not dependent on the child's intersecting identities and circumstances, including race, ethnicity, national origin, family income, home language, disability, or where the child lives.
- 2.
(proper)The organization that supports historically underserved families in achieving education equity.
Where the word sits
Education equity
EDquity names education equity as a single noun, and it holds the individual child rather than a group average at its center.
Fairness
Personal and social circumstances such as race, income, language, or disability do not stand between a student and their educational potential.
Inclusion
A basic minimum standard of education is shared by every student, whatever their background, characteristics, or location.
The two dimensions follow Field, Kuczera, and Pont (2007), and the test below turns them into something a system can check.
The test
Sense 1 holds only when all four of these are true at once. Any one of them failing is enough to say a system does not have it.
Need met
What a child receives answers that child's need, rather than what the system routinely offers.
No prediction
No single identity or circumstance, and no combination of them, predicts the quality of the education a child receives.
Common floor
Every child holds the same minimum standard of education, whatever their background, characteristics, or location.
Institution absorbs
The system changes its own practice to meet the need, rather than asking the child or the family to make up the difference.
Etymology
ED (education) + equity, fused rather than hyphenated.
Equity spoken without a domain attached stays a value that everyone endorses and nobody has to act on. Education spoken without equity attached describes a system that already serves some children well. Fused, the word names one condition in the domain where a child's future gets settled.
Said plainly, to a family
Your child gets what they need, and the quality of what they get does not depend on your race, your income, the language you speak at home, or where you live.
What the word does not mean
It does not mean equal treatment, since identical service delivered to unequal need reproduces the gap it was meant to close.
It does not mean equal opportunity by itself, since a chance that only some families can act on has not been distributed.
It does not mean measurement, since a school meets this condition or fails it whether or not anyone reads its documents.
It does not ask the child or the family to change, since the practice that produced the shortfall is what changes.
The distance it names
A condition stated as an end state gives nobody anything to close. This one names a distance you can point at for one child, and a school, a district, or a state holds as many of those distances as it enrolls children.
The EDquity gap
The distance between what a child needs and what the child receives.
Derived forms
EDquitable adjective
Providing education of the same quality to every child, regardless of their intersecting identities and circumstances.
EDquity gap noun
The distance between what a child needs and what the child receives.
References
- Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167.
- Field, S., Kuczera, M., & Pont, B. (2007). No more failures: Ten steps to equity in education. OECD Publishing.
- National Equity Project. (n.d.). Educational equity definition. https://www.nationalequityproject.org/education-equity-definition
How we pursue it
Independent audits, the rubric, the Fellowship, and the family reports are how Edquity at the Margins pursues this condition, and none of it belongs in the word itself. A term that required this organization to exist could not be used by anyone else, cited by anyone else, or outlive it.
Equitable outcomes for students, produced by supporting families, educators, and students directly.
We read every program against the same set of conditions, organized across six domains and grounded in research on what makes a program work in practice. A family receives a plain-language report on what their child's program is missing, and a school receives trend data across its own documents showing what its programs consistently miss.