Imbalances in the Classroom

Imbalance in a classroom often results in an uneven playing field for students. This makes it harder for a section of the students, especially those in the lower end of the field, to succeed in their educational or even their life endeavors. Teachers, administrators, and education policy makers often struggle with this challenge. The agreed solution to this perplexing challenge is to level the playing field (Esping-Andersen, 2005) for the purpose of giving everybody an opportunity to succeed in their quest to education. Some educationalists believe that providing students equal access to resources will help balance the playing field. They believe that students should be able to take advantage of the resources by just its mere availability. Bell (1976), for example believes that merit and ability are what people need to succeed in a knowledge economy. Although this is true to some extent, is it enough to provide equal access and expect equal results from students? Perhaps equal access in a school where the students are presumably homogenous can and will yield the expected results. Studies have shown that the achievement gap between low income students and high income students is, unfortunately, widening (Jacob & Ludwig 2008), even though efforts ranging from more funding, longer school days are adopted to improve the situation. For instance, if an administration decides to introduce a computer-aided program in a school where a substantive number of the students come from middle income or high income families, a great majority of them will benefit from the resources equivalently. Few students will be left behind. On the other hand, if the same resource is given to a school that has students from diverse backgrounds, not everybody is going to benefit from it the same way. To students who are from middle class families and have personal computers with internet in their homes, they are likely to gain from it. I will go ahead and say that even if they gain from the resource, it might not have a significant change in their development. In this sense, it would seem like pouring a cup of water into the mighty ocean and expecting to see the ocean rise. Conversely, to the students who are from low-income families and hardly have electricity on, let alone a computer and internet, these resources might be as alien to them as giving a fish lessons on how to climb trees.

As I stated earlier, countless measures are taken to ameliorate the situation, but they have not been able to successfully ease the process of educational breakthrough for low income children. This, by all means, does not mean that the educational system is not fixable. It is when you adopt the best strategy. And one of the ways of making sure every student utilizes the opportunity given to them is to distribute those resources equitably rather than equally. Professor Sean Reardon also thinks that school problems should not be seen as just school problems, rather there should be some sort of collaboration with the household (Reardon, 2013).

What is equity then? According to the World Health Organization it “is the absence of avoidable or remediable differences among groups of people, whether those groups are defined socially, economically, demographically, or geographically” In other words, students should be able to benefit from resources regardless of the social, economic, or cultural circumstances. Treating students equitably is not an easy task. That is why most schools just resort to distributing resources equally, as it is easier to execute. Take a school that has a substantial number of refugee children. These students, by virtue of their status, find themselves in the lower income bracket. As such their parents are not able to provide them with extra support they might need. The task then falls upon the schools to provide the refugee children with some form of help for the purpose of easier integration. An average public school, to deal with this situation, would encourage the student to make use of the resources that are available in the school, or perhaps they would be taught using the same curriculum and even assessed and evaluated using the same criterion. This usually does not help the student. However, if the equity is chosen, students from the lower end of the field are understood to need more assistance than the other mates. This benefits everyone, especially the struggling students.

To accomplish the feat of equity, the first point of inquiry is to understand the difference between equality and equity. From all that has been said about them, equality is lumping up all the student body into one and treating them as a unit, while equity focuses on the individual student and supplying them with resources tailored to their needs. The next action to take is to put measures in place to get to know your students individually. Getting to know students beyond the borders of the classroom will aid in the provision of resources and how they can be of specific advantage. Oftentimes children’s mood in school is as a result of the mood back home. When children come to school to meet an environment that will listen to them and help them through their domestic issues like feeding, health, or even socialization, their chances of flourishing in this environment is drastically increased.

References

Bell, D. (1976). The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society. The Educational Forum, 40(4), 574–579

Esping-Andersen, G. (2005). Social inheritance and equal opportunity policies. Maintaining Momentum, 14-30.

Jacob, B., & Ludwig, J. (2008). Improving educational outcomes for poor children (No. w14550). National Bureau of Economic Research.

Sean F. Reardon (2013, April 27). No rich child left behind. The New York Times

https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/no-rich-child-left-behind/#:~:text=The%20Great%20Divide%20is%20a,middle%2Dclass%20or%20poor%20families.