Conceptualizations of Equity Across the Landscape of Education Policy

Abstract

Our education system is rife with ongoing work to pursue equity and equitable outcomes, but equity itself is rarely well-defined in this work. To date, little work has been done to examine what definitions of equity exist across this broad landscape and how their alignment or misalignment contributes to our collective capacity to pursue equity or address inequity. I drew on Critical Policy Analysis and Critical Sensemaking Theory to conduct a descriptive case study to examine conceptualizations of equity (Allbright et al., 2019) in teacher cognition, school structures, and local, state, and federal policy. In line with previous research, I found that liberal and democratic liberal conceptualizations of equity–equity of access and equity of outcomes, respectively–were most prevalent in policies at all levels. I demonstrate how my participants’ took up a liberal conceptualization of equity regarding their work and that plausibility played a central role in elevating a liberal conceptualization over a democratic liberal conceptualization. I found that liberal and democratic liberal conceptualizations of equity were embedded in school structures by policies and school leaders and this process influenced teachers’ sensemaking about equity. Finally, I contextualize this in the broader policy context to show that supporting multiple conceptualizations of equity in policy has the potential to address both questions of access and outcomes according to these two conceptualizations of equity. I build on the extant research by demonstrating that conceptualizations of equity become mixed in policy language. This refers to situations when the identified success measure for a policy does not align with the expected outcome measures from the conceptualization of equity framed in that policy. I argue that mixed conceptualizations can undermine or delegitimize efforts to pursue equity and often create difficult or impossible expectations for local actors engaged in equity work.