Educational Equity

Below is my recent comments in front of our board of Prince William County Public Schools. Whether or not there is ongoing equity focused conversations or PDs, this is important work to fulfill the needs of every student, to advance together and to balance the society as a whole.

After serving on the superintendent’s advisory council of equity for 2 years, I would like to share some of my insights from this journey. 

First of all, what does equity actually mean? For me, the answer started to form a long time ago. My dad was born in an extremely impoverished small village. For generations, he was the only one in his family who was admitted to a 4-year college. After he was well established with a job, he continued to give back to local schools in his rural community while raising our family. His actions planted a seed of “equity” in my heart, even though at that time, I had no idea what educational equity was. I sometimes even saw his actions as irrelevant to my own educational growth. As I grew, I learned fitting various individual needs into the bigger picture of societal needs – and reconciling all of them – is a challenging work that we call equity. I learned that there is no single definition of equity because equity is context-dependent. 

Equity conversations and PD sessions are important, especially at the beginning phase of this work. But what becomes truly impactful is when equity becomes the mindset and backdrop for all work we do. I explained to my kids, just like “I love you” as the backdrop of our family. It directs how we balance everything on a daily basis. It does not make sense to say: “I am too busy to love you.” In the same way, equity work is NOT some extra task. It is how we do everything, in an equitable approach. 

Next, I would like to use this data graph to illustrate how equity should look like when we try to quantify it. We would love to see that every single student in this distribution grows to their next level by providing the right scaffolding in their zone of proximal development, regardless of their English proficiency level, family economic status, ethnicity or learning disability types. The only thing that should matter the most are our programmatic factors. What do I mean by that? We should have one or multiple research-based programs/strategies/actions to help students get where they need to be. If we consistently do the right thing, over time, we should be seeing less impact of those so called “barriers” on student outcomes but more impact from our programs. 

So equity is not just another meeting or another PD. Let's make it the backdrop for everything we do.