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Equity & Diversity Opinion

Equity and Educational Justice

By International Perspectives on Education Reform Group — October 13, 2013 2 min read
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This post is by Helen Janc Malone.

Welcome to our third blog week!

Equity and educational justice are critical goals of most nations. Governments around the world, in partnership with the private sector and the public, are working to address both educational inputs and outputs in hopes of creating equal access to high quality education for their young people in order to prepare the next generation for the demands of the 21st century global society. However, as we all know too well, equity and educational justice remain illusive, as disparities in access and opportunity persist across a demographic spectrum both here, in the United States, and abroad.

This week, the blog contributors will focus on the contextual factors that promote equity and educational justice. They will address: how teachers can collaborate within and across schools to increase quality of instruction and thus, offer students of any demographic background a chance to engage in rigorous learning; how students and educators can begin to ask the right questions to get to the underlying problems that impede equity in learning; how student voice and engaging and innovative college preparatory programs can support college access and retention among disadvantaged and traditionally underrepresented youth; and how focus on inputs, quality, and outputs can lead to educational justice for all students.

This week’s contributors are: Mel Ainscow, a professor of education and the co-director of the Centre for Equity in Education at the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom; Amanda Datnow, a professor and the chair of the department of education studies at the University of California, San Diego; Sherry L. Deckman, an assistant professor of social and cultural foundations of education at Ithaca College in New York; Jonathan D. Jansen, vice-chancellor and rector of the University of the Free State in central South Africa; Silvina Gvirtz, the general executive director of Conectar Igualdad (Connect Equality), and Esteban Torre, an adviser to the general executive director of Conectar Igualdad in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

As always, we encourage you to join in the conversation by sharing our posts and commenting on the individual contributions.

Helen Janc Malone is the Director of Institutional Advancement at the Institute for Educational Leadership and the editor of the book Leading Educational Change.

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The opinions expressed in International Perspectives on Education Reform are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.