How the Left’s idea of ‘equity’ exacerbates inequality
Kaylee McGhee White
The Left’s vision of “equity” is one in which every single person is guaranteed the same outcome, regardless of one’s ethnic or economic background. This might sound great in theory, but it’s as impossible to achieve as the socialist utopia from which it draws its ideals.
In fact, when put into practice, far from balancing out some of the disparities that exist within society, leftist equity exacerbates and widens those disparities to an alarming degree. One need only look to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for an example of how this works.
BIDEN’S DEFICITS THREATEN ECONOMIC DOOM
Cambridge Public Schools began phasing out advanced mathematics courses for middle schoolers in 2017 because officials were worried about racial disparities in these classes. The students in these upper-level courses were predominantly white and Asian, while those in lower-level math classes were black and Latino, according to the Boston Globe. Rather than reforming the system to provide additional learning and tutoring opportunities to students who were further behind, the school system decided to pull everyone else down to their level.
But the school district’s attempt to force learning equity hasn’t gone to plan. If anything, it has deepened the achievement gap between high-income and low-income families within the school system. Families who could afford to do so enrolled their children in private extracurricular programs geared toward high-achieving students, while those who could not were stuck with the public school system’s underwhelming options.
“The students who are able to jump into a higher level math class are students from better-resourced backgrounds,” Jacob Barandes, a Cambridge Public Schools parent and Harvard physicist, said. “They’re shortchanging a significant number of students, overwhelmingly students from less-resourced backgrounds, which is deeply inequitable.”
Not only has Cambridge Public Schools exacerbated the achievement gap they were trying to redress, but they’ve also resigned hundreds of students to a life of struggling to close it. Students’ inability to take higher-level mathematics courses in sixth through eighth grade will make it much harder for them to take advanced classes in high school that could prepare them for college. The consequences of Cambridge’s equity experiment will be felt in the community for years to come.
This shouldn’t need to be said, but the ideological corruption of our schools has made it necessary: A school’s primary responsibility is to help students learn and succeed — not to prevent them from doing so in order to advance the whims of activist administrators. And as long as schools such as Cambridge’s opt for the latter, students will suffer.
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Kaylee McGhee White is the editor of Restoring America for the Washington Examiner and a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.