CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – There’s no better example of the difference between equality and equity than what’s happening in the Culver City, California school district.
They’re eliminating honors classes at their high school. The honors classes are almost exclusively made up of white and Asian students. Black students, who make up about one-third of the enrollment in Culver City, are underrepresented in honors classes.
So, of course, the solution is to cut the class altogether.
And there’s a strange irony. At Culver City, the honors classes are open to anyone. Even average students who think they’re up to the challenge can enroll.
One student said to a newspaper reporter, that she felt embarrassed and interior and “unable to break out of the molds that they established when they were 11.” Well, no, cupcake. The opportunity for more academic rigor was right in front of you. You might have to work harder than you ever have before, but the opportunity was there for you.
The Culver City schools committed the sin of equality instead of equity. There was equal access to advanced classes for each and every student; equality. But in some classes, no minority students signed up. Whites and Asians got a superior education, which they worked for and earned. But, no equity. Equity demands equal outcomes, not equal opportunity.
The tragedy of this is that societies have always been stratified. And it is the exceptional people, those who rise to the top, who bring advances to the group as a whole. Average students do not become engineers, doctors, astronauts, scientists or researchers. Only by putting extra educational resources into those individuals do we, as a whole, reep the benefits of what they create.
So the best, most talented students will get an inferior education so that other students can feel better about themselves. All of us are poorer for it.
Chris Conley
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