The question of equity in education

The notion of equity is an example of a complex concept whose historical evolution agrees with the assertion of the French philosopher and epistemologist Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) when he stated that “a notion is always a moment in the evolution of a thought.”

Within the framework of political philosophy, reflection on what should be considered a just society has evolved from the Welfarists, who defended equality in well-being, to the Post-Welfarists, who, without renouncing the ideal of a just society, they are committed to equal opportunities and incorporate, in various ways, the idea of ​​individual responsibility.

Different authors have specified equality of opportunity in education in various expressions, such as “leveling the playing field” so that everyone “plays” in similar conditions; “doing as much as possible with the individual’s inherent talents”; ensuring as close a “starting line” to adulthood as possible to all; or, resorting to an expression from the French Revolution, consider it as «Une carrière ouverte aux talents».

The truth is that, in the practical implementation of the notion of equity in advanced societies, attributes have been progressively added to the concept, although, in any of these cases, it is a question of introducing humanity into the social order.

Located in the group of post-welfarists, John E. Roemer has made a clear theoretical approach, which facilitates the quantitative treatments typical of economists. As we have noted elsewhere, equality of opportunity, according to Roemer, concerns a context in which individuals are partly the result of morally arbitrary circumstances and partly the result of variables linked to individual responsibility. which fall under the ‘effort’ category. Circumstances and effort have, therefore, different moral status, since it is considered that the individual differences generated by the ‘circumstances’ are ethically unacceptable, while those due to different ‘efforts’ are correct.

One of the relevant nuances of the position of Roemer and his followers consists in recognizing that circumstances and effort are not always separable variables, but that, in certain contexts, the effort itself can be influenced, to some extent, by the circumstances.

The OECD’s concern for equal opportunities and its quantitative expression has been manifested, among other areas, in the exploitation of the results of the PISA tests and in the presence in it of equity indicators of the educational systems; indicators that have been progressing over time. Roemer’s own theoretical framework of post-welfareism has been assumed by the OECD and projected on a conception of equity that is described in their texts as a characteristic of those educational systems oriented to “ensuring that the results of education are the product of the abilities of the students, their will and their effort, rather than their personal circumstances”.

The relatively recent developments in the genetics of human behavior have come to add arguments that affect the very conceptualization of equity in education and its practical meaning. The essential ideas can be summarized, in a tight synthesis, in the following way: the genetic endowment of the individual (genotype) is built randomly by effect of the recombinations of the genetic endowments of their parents; This kind of “genetic lottery” influences both cognitive abilities and character traits (non-cognitive abilities), both strongly related to educational success; environmental factors, along with their interactions or intertwining with inherited genetic factors, significantly condition the educational outcomes of the individual first, and then the socioeconomic ones. There is, however, a remaining parcel of influence in which the free will of the individual operates for the construction of his self. (For a full discussion, see Paige Harden, K. (2022), The Genetic Lottery.)

One of the results of rigorous research in this field, and of special interest for the subject at hand, indicates that students with low genetic endowment (polygenic index) related to mathematics, who have been enrolled in schools with a high socioeconomic level , they do just as well as students with intermediate endowments who attend low-status schools.

This fundamental scientific panorama makes Roemer’s perspective good -at least in part-, but reinforces the importance of environmental inequalities whose effects must be addressed through effective compensatory policies that generate enriched school contexts, from the point of view of the development of both skills cognitive and non-cognitive. Lowering levels for less gifted students has been revealed, also from the genetics of human behavior, counterproductive.

John Rawls, one of the prominent representatives of post-welfareism, warned: «The natural distribution is neither fair nor unfair (…). These are merely natural facts. What can be fair or unfair is the way in which the institutions act with respect to these facts.” Getting this question right is a major challenge for Spanish educational policy.