Inequality in wealth and income is increasing throughout the world, and as it does, our ability to address many of our most pressing problems: poverty, global migration and climate change, is reduced. As poverty and hopelessness increase, growing numbers of people are compelled to leave their homes and risk their lives, migrating to wealthier and environmentally healthier regions and lands.
For many years, research has shown that education can serve as a resource for addressing many of the problems facing modern societies, including economic and social inequality. However, more often than not, individuals and communities that need education to improve their lives are the least likely to receive the kind of education that makes progress and economic development possible. That is, rather than advancing equality and opportunity, too often, education is implicated in the reproduction of inequality.
Part of the problem lies in our inability and unwillingness to embrace strategies and policies that promote equity in educational opportunities and outcomes.
For the last several years, many nations have embraced educational reforms that rely on market-based strategies endorsed by the World Bank and other international agencies that rely on standardised testing and competition to promote accountability, while ignoring the need to provide impoverished and underdeveloped communities with adequate resources to pay educators adequate salaries and improve conditions in schools. Despite the lofty promises made by reformers, we now have clear evidence that the privatisation of schools, top-down accountability, raising academic standards and increasing competition among schools, has not and will not lead to educational improvement on a large scale.
As the global education reform movement (GERM) declines in its appeal, a new equity-centered approach to education reform is gaining support. It’s one that attempts to compensate for the effects of poverty and to ensure that conditions conducive to good teaching and learning are in place. As the equity approach gains support in places as diverse as Ontario, the Eastern Cape of South Africa, California, New Mexico, and New Zealand (Cuba, Sri Lanka, Singapore and the Scandanavian nations have followed such an approach for much longer), it is becoming clear that genuine progress can be made. Preliminary results are quite promising. A recent report by the Learning Policy Institute has identified how equity-based practices are being implemented in a number of school districts that are making progress for all students, and it examines why such strategies are leading to sustainable improvement.
While it is most helpful when an equity-based approach to education reform is embraced by policymakers, even when it is not, educational leaders can make progress at the school and district level by committing to strategically develop the professional capacity of teachers and the institutional capacity of schools to respond to student needs. Capacity building is a process that over time makes it possible for the skills of teachers to be in alignment with the needs of students. This mismatch in skills and resources is at the base of many of the challenges facing schools. With a commitment to capacity building and a clear understanding of how to carry it out in particular schools, educational leaders can move toward creating an environment where all children can learn at high levels.
From poverty to crime, from environmental degradation to economic underdevelopment, we have clear and compelling evidence that as societies make advances in education, many of these problems can be addressed. Educational leaders who succeed in advancing equity and serving the needs of all their students are finding ways to pursue excellence and equity by creating conditions in schools that address the academic and non-academic needs of children (i.e. health, nutrition, safety, etc). For this to occur, educational leaders must have a clear sense of how to systematically build the capacity of teachers and schools to meet the needs of the students they serve.
Such strategies are already being implemented successfully at several schools throughout the world, even in the most disadvantaged communities where needs are great.
We must provide concrete strategies for school leaders to develop effective professional communities that can help schools in furthering efforts to raise achievement and transform the culture and performance of schools.
Pedro A Noguera is the director at the Center for the Transformation of Schools, UCLA. He is speaking at the Inspiring Leadership Conference on 6-7 June, in London. More information can be found here.
