10 Scientifically-Proven Ways to Promote Equity in Education
Equity in education demands that every student, regardless of their background or personal attributes, have access to the resources and opportunities they need to succeed. Promoting equity in schools leads to better outcomes for all students, closes achievement gaps, and strengthens communities.
Find out how you can play your part in promoting equity in education at your school.
Why Equity in Education Matters
Equity in education creates both moral and pragmatic imperatives for communities. It also unlocks the potential of marginalized youth to the benefit of all. Ensuring equitable access to quality education for all students regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, language, disability, family background, or socioeconomic status is crucial for several reasons.
Equal Opportunity
Equitable access to education fosters equal opportunity. When students from disadvantaged backgrounds gain access to great schooling, they have a better chance to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to access higher education and compete for quality jobs. Lack of equity sustains intergenerational cycles of poverty.
Social Mobility
Equity in education enables upward social mobility across generations, allowing children from disadvantaged families to attain higher living standards and occupy better socioeconomic positions than their parents.
Economic Impact
Equitable education unlocks a nation's economic potential, boosting workforce productivity as students gain industry skills and can transition smoothly into skilled employment. Over the course of 40 years, educational equity can raise a country's GDP per capita by 23 percent.
Health
Educational equity has positive health outcomes, including affording health care procedures, access to healthy foods, and more time to exercise.
Social Cohesion
Equity in classrooms allows students from diverse backgrounds to interact, understand differences, cultivate friendships, and appreciate commonalities. Such intercultural experiences foster greater mutual understanding and social cohesion.
Global Development Goals
The United Nations recognizes educational equity as crucial for development, aiming to eliminate gender disparities and ensure equal access to all levels of education. Achieving this accelerates progress toward other goals related to poverty reduction and decent work opportunities.
Positive Classroom Environment
Education equity promotes positive classroom environments where students feel safe, valued, and engaged regardless of individual differences. Students who experience equity in education become empathetic and responsible citizens and leaders.
10 Research-Backed Methods for Promoting Equity in Education
Making small changes now pays huge dividends down the road for students and educators alike. Leaders need to implement plans to address issues and improve outcomes. Here are 10 scientifically proven strategies for advancing equity in education:
1. Cultivate Inclusive School Leadership
Educational leadership plays a pivotal role in determining equity policies and practices. Principals and other leaders set the tone for an equitable or inequitable school culture through their behaviors, communication, and priorities.
Inclusive leaders who actively demonstrate commitment to equity help foster greater belonging, higher achievement, and improved attendance among marginalized student groups. Meanwhile, research confirms that deficit-based mindsets or "color-evasiveness" from leaders perpetuate toxic school cultures and widen performance gaps.
Fostering diverse leadership teams and developing school leaders focused on equity is a crucial starting point. Providing ongoing training in transformational leadership, culturally responsive practices, and anti-racism helps ensure the representation of leaders of color.
2. Evaluate Policies for Built-In Biases
From dress code and hairstyle policies to grading systems, discipline practices, and gifted/talented identification, school policies often inadvertently perpetuate racial and other inequities. Educators striving to promote equity must evaluate current policies with an equity lens to uncover any built-in biases that disadvantage certain students.
Analysis of suspension data, for instance, found that black students lost 103 days per 100 students enrolled due to exclusionary discipline, compared to just 21 days for white students—evidence of implicit biases.
Regularly reviewing and revising school and district policies through an equity lens is essential to removing barriers and ensuring students have what they need to learn at their full potential.
3. Implement Bias-Free Hiring Practices
Educator diversity positively impacts all students, leading to increased academic performance, improved attendance, and higher graduation rates among students of color. Yet, the U.S. teaching workforce remains predominantly white. Unconscious bias often negatively influences hiring decisions, preventing schools from diversifying their staff.
Strategies like blind resume screening during initial application review, intentionally constructing diverse hiring committees, and utilizing structured, rubric-based interview practices can help emphasize applicant merit, essential skills, and cultural responsiveness—key qualities for teachers to engage all diverse learners fully.
4. Provide Ongoing Professional Development
Teachers urgently want better tools, resources, and training to reach and teach all the children in their classrooms more effectively. However, they also frequently need more ongoing support to build skills in culturally responsive, anti-biased, and trauma-informed instructional practices.
Schools committed to equity must prioritize professional development for educators of all experience levels and backgrounds. Workshops, instructional coaching, critically reflective professional learning communities, and teacher action research help develop more inclusive mindsets, strengthen cultural competence, and foster practical techniques for differentiating instruction.
5. Ensure Curriculum Representation
The texts students read and the content they analyze profoundly shape what they learn to value and whose narratives they see affirmed in the official school curriculum. Yet students of color rarely find themselves positively represented in textbook accounts and class materials.
Antiracist and culturally responsive teaching practices counter such curricular exclusion and marginalization. This includes critically evaluating current materials for biases and deficit-based perspectives, then strengthening identity-affirming representation across subjects by intentionally incorporating #OwnVoices texts from diverse authors whenever appropriate and possible.
Increase self-esteem, school belonging, intrinsic motivation, and critical thinking skills for students by allowing them to analyze relatable multicultural content. An inclusive curriculum signals to all students that their lives and cultures have inherent worth and value.
6. Listen to Marginalized Students
Without intention, schools often prioritize and reflect the priorities of the community's most affluent and privileged families. Counteract this tendency by developing structures that allow space for vulnerable and marginalized student populations to express their school experiences, concerns, and needs.
Establishing representative professional learning communities and student advisory councils and conducting regular student focus groups, empathy interviews, and school climate surveys help capture student perspectives. However, individual educators also play a role by proactively building relationships and trust with marginalized students and families to fully understand the barriers faced.
Next, schools must respond to identified concerns through substantive policy changes, integrating student feedback into new programs, practices, and procedures so schools can become more culturally affirming places to teach and learn.
7. Implement Restorative Approaches
While often well-intentioned, zero tolerance and overly punitive discipline policies have historically pushed struggling students of color out of school at disproportionate rates, contributing to racial disparities in graduation outcomes, dropout rates, and youth incarceration.
Culturally responsive alternatives like restorative practices emphasize collective accountability, personal growth, community healing, and redemption over harsh punishments like suspension and expulsion. Peer mediation, victim-offender dialogue, and opportunities to redeem themselves after mistakes show students that second chances matter.
8. Support Mental Health
The COVID-19 pandemic's extensive disruptions to emotional stability and support systems have had a disproportionately negative impact on disadvantaged students who have never had access to healthcare or counseling services.
Strategically integrating socio-emotional wellness checks and supports alongside academic instruction demonstrates to struggling children that their needs matter. Proven interventions include:
Establishing regular teacher check-ins
Implementing district-wide early warning systems to identify at-risk youth
Referring underserved families to expanded community counseling partnerships
Intentionally hiring diverse student support staff
When students know their schools care about nurturing their socio-emotional development and stability, they gain skills, relationships, and resources and can focus on learning.
9. Bridge Technology Divides
As student learning increasingly requires participating in online activities, navigating digital tools, and troubleshooting tech problems, digital divides related to family income, language barriers, and uneven broadband access threaten to leave vulnerable student groups behind.
Equitable schools work proactively to bridge the unintended consequences of the digital revolution on their campuses. This means providing devices and subsidized internet access to enable e-learning engagement from home. However, even when every child logs on, equity barriers persist around utilization for marginalized families who are uncomfortable navigating school apps and platforms.
10. Engage Families
Too often, cultural, linguistic, and scheduling barriers prevent schools from moving beyond surface-level gestures to adequately understand and integrate diverse families' perspectives. Substantive outreach and collaboration with parents and drawing upon families' rich cultural funds of knowledge demonstrably boost student achievement.
Schools should consider flexibility for working parents when scheduling events, provide interpreters and translators for multilingual communications, hold neighborhood-based parent meetings to reinforce community cultural wealth, and create welcoming visitor support centers on campus.
Moving from simply receiving community input to distributed leadership models where families participate in the decision-making process ensures policies reflect the lived realities in students' homes and neighborhoods. Further empowering students to lead academic conferences builds crucial trust and conveys to families that their partnership has value.
The Bottom Line
The path to equity in education requires school leaders to roll up their collective sleeves and do the hard work necessary to dismantle systemic injustice. Each positive step leaders, educators, families, and communities take to promote greater opportunity and inclusion brings true equity closer.
Students deserve schools where everyone feels safe, known, and inspired to learn without arbitrarily imposed limits on their potential. Implement one or more of these research-backed strategies and enact lasting positive change in your school.
Learn how Schools That Lead helped North Carolina educators create their own strategies for managing the students in their care and improving student outcomes, such as a greater decline in chronic student absences than the state average.