- Fairness.
- Educational models, programs, and approaches that may be considered fair, but not necessarily equal.
***Inequities occur when biased or unfair policies, programs, practices, or situations contribute to a lack of equality in educational performance, results, and outcomes. For example, certain students or groups of students may attend school, graduate, or enroll in post secondary education at lower rates, or they may perform comparatively poorly on standardized tests due to a wide variety of factors, including inherent biases or flaws in test designs.
Forms of Inequity:
- Societal inequity:Some students may suffer from discrimination related to their race, ethnicity, nationality, language, religion, class, gender, sexual orientation, or disabilities.
- Socioeconomic inequity: Low academic performance of students from low-income families compared to their wealthier peers, and they also tend to have lower educational aspirations and enroll in college at lower rates (in part due to financial considerations). In addition, schools in poorer communities, may have comparatively less resources and less funding, which can lead to fewer teachers and educational opportunities—from specialized courses and computers to co-curricular activitiesand sports teams—as well as outdated or dilapidated school facilities.
- Cultural inequity: Students from diverse cultural backgrounds may be disadvantaged in a variety of ways when pursuing their education. Experienced by immigrants and refugees. In addition, these students may struggle in school because they are unfamiliar with American customs, social expectations, slang, and cultural orientations.
- Familial inequity: Students from a dysfunctional or abusive households usually experience this, wherein may receive comparatively little educational support or encouragement from their parents (even when the parents want their children to succeed in school). In addition, parents have not obtained a high school or college degree may, on average, underperform academically, and they may also enroll in and complete postsecondary programs at lower rates. Familial inequities may also intersect with cultural and socioeconomic inequities. For example, poor parents may not be able to invest in supplemental educational resources and learning opportunities—from summer programs to test-preparation services—or they may not be able pay the same amount of attention to their children’s education as more affluent parents—perhaps because they have multiple jobs, for example.
- Programmatic inequity: This is when school programs are deemed unfair for it results to unequal or inequitable result. For example, colored students, on average, to be disproportionately represented in lower-level classes with lower academic expectations (and possibly lower-quality teaching), which can give rise to achievement gapsor “cycles of low expectation” in which stereotypes about the academic performance of minorities are reinforced and perpetuated because they are held to lower academic standards or taught less than their peers.
- Staffing inequity: Richer schools are situated in favorable communities and can hire better skilled teachers so students attending to these schools will likely receive a better-quality education, on average, while students who attend schools in less-desirable communities, with fewer or less-skilled teachers, will likely be at an educational disadvantage. Staffing situations in schools may also be inequitable in a wide variety of ways.
- Instructional inequity: Refers to the way educators teach the students. Some students may experience bias, favoritism or prejudice by some teachers. Some are also taught by less-skilled teachers that may deliver lessons in an uninteresting or ineffective manner.
- Assessment inequity: Students may be disadvantaged when taking tests or completing other types of assessmentsdue to the design, content, or language choices, or because they have learning disabilities or physical disabilities that may impair their performance. In addition, situational factors may adversely affect test performance. For example, lower-income students who attend schools that do not regularly use computers may be disadvantaged—compared to wealthier students with more access to technology at home or students who use computers regularly in school—when taking tests that are administered on computers and that require basic computer literacy.
- Linguistic inequity:Non-English-speaking students may be disadvantaged in English-only classrooms or when taking tests and assessments presented in English. In addition, these students may also suffer if they are enrolled in separate academic programs, held to lower academic expectations, or receive lower-quality instruction as a result of their language abilities.