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Longtime readers will know that I post at this site much less often than used to be the case, what with writing at Forbes and elsewhere instead.\u00a0 One of my projects is running for school board, which, for the moment, consists largely of collecting signatures for nominating petitions due in December (yeah, I have to get moving on that \u2014 you don\u2019t really need all that many, but they have to be exactly right to not get stricken), and following the district more closely, in particular, in the form of a website and a blog \u2014 Bauer214.com \u2014 since, having moved my personal website away from the training wheels of WordPress.com to a shared hosting site, Dreampress.com, adding new websites is a lot easier.\u00a0 As further background, the school district had had a plan to open up with parental choice between returning to school full-time and learning remotely (or parents could elect a hybrid of some classes at home, some at school), but with a week left before school was to start in August, they abandoned that in favor of fully-remote learning, and only in mid-October did they begin to allow students into the buildings, on a rotational basis, 1\/3 at a time \u2014 but in a manner that cynics would say has been deliberately managed to deter students from coming in, with teachers directing their attention to the remote zoom-ers, so that my son reported that in some classes he was the only student present.\u00a0 And last Thursday there was a board meeting for which we recorded the livestream (the district does not make recordings available \u2014 one of my multiple complaints is their lack of transparency) and I wrote about and, for the key bits, transcribed what the superintendent had to say<\/a>.<\/p>\n And, when asked about bringing more students into the buildings, what he said was this:<\/p>\n We have right now approximately, depending on the school, anywhere from 85 kids coming in on a daily basis up to I think 356 was the high in one of the buildings.\u00a0 And so one of the challenges that I\u2019m trying to work through with the team is depending on which school you\u2019re in, you might be able to have different levels and numbers of students come in or come in on a more frequent basis.\u00a0 And so trying to just work through equal vs. equitable and what that looks like for the different schools in our communities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Equal vs. equitable \u2014 what\u2019s that mean?<\/p>\n Back when they first announced that school would be all-remote, they had said they would prioritize bringing back kids with unsuitable home learning circumstances:\u00a0 internet connection issues, homeless students.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t say but presumably also intended that students with other issues \u2014 such as crowded apartments without study space or without quiet rooms \u2014 would be prioritized.\u00a0 Students with special needs were also supposed to get priority \u2014 but it was never clear whether that meant that kids in the specialized schools or with impairments so great they weren\u2019t mainstreamed were to be moved to full-time sooner, or whether that also included kids with IEPs or 504 accommodations.\u00a0 And, again, there\u2019s no transparency, so we still have no idea whether there are some kids coming more frequently than 1 out of every 3 days.<\/p>\n So is he referring to kids having an equal shot at coming in vs. the more \u201cequitable\u201d solution of giving kids with greater needs more time in-building?<\/p>\n The superintendent\u2019s reference to differences at different schools suggests this is not what he has in mind.<\/p>\n There are, as it happens, six \u201ccomprehensive\u201d high schools in the district, plus some \u201calternative\u201d or \u201cspecialized\u201d schools.\u00a0 Of the 6 schools, two have almost entirely white upper-middle-class student bodies, with 7% and 12% low income, and 13% and 14% Hispanic, respectively.\u00a0 At the other extreme are two schools with 29% and 37% low-income, and 44% and 63% Hispanic, respectively.\u00a0 (See my blog post on the schools\u2019 test scores<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Which means my guess is that the schools with more low-income\/Hispanic students were also the ones with more students taking advantage of the ability to come in to class, because of unsuitable-for-learning home environments.\u00a0 If each school were to do the math and say, \u201cX% of students able to attend in-person, are choosing to do so, so we can offer more students the opportunity to come up to the point at which we reach a maximum of Y students in the building,\u201d then, due to the different likelihoods of students accepting the opportunity to come to school, each school could offer the opportunity to different proportions of the student body.\u00a0 \u201cEqual\u201d numbers of students in-building would thus not be \u201cequitable\u201d because students at some schools would have more of a chance to attend than others.<\/p>\n But \u2014 assuming that my interpretation is correct and there\u2019s no way of knowing because, again, the school administration is very nontransparent \u2014 an effort to be \u201cfair\u201d can mean that the kids at the \u201cmiddle class\u201d schools lose out, because too-low numbers of students in person is not just sub-optimal but actually detrimental; my son himself observed that, in his first rotation in, there were 4 or 5 kids in a classroom; in his second time in-building, he was the only kid in a couple classes.<\/p>\n So that\u2019s my first observation.<\/p>\n Second observation:\u00a0 today Kamala Harris tweeted a video about \u201cequity\u201d<\/a> \u2014 finishing with the line that \u201cequitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.\u201d\u00a0 The first couple times I saw this on twitter I assumed she was just re-tweeting someone else\u2019s video, but, no, it turns out that this is a Biden campaign video, narrated by Harris, and meant as a sort of \u201cclosing argument.\u201d<\/p>\n The initial premise of the video, that it\u2019s not sufficient to promise \u201cequal opportunity\u201d when individuals\u2019 starting points are so disparate, is generally accepted.\u00a0 In this case, the illustration is two people trying to scale a mountain, each given a rope of a certain length, but the disadvantaged mountain-climber starting out in a valley from which the rope is too high to access.\u00a0 The animation then shows \u201cequity\u201d by means of lifting that climber\u2019s stand-point so he can reach the rope and make it to the top.\u00a0 The other more common illustration is that \u201cequality\u201d is giving each of three people with different heights a crate to stand on, which is insufficient for the shortest of the three to see over a fence, but \u201cequity\u201d gives the shortest two crates so they are all at the same height and can all see over the fence.\u00a0 (See this tweet for the picture<\/a>; a third tweet-er posted a picture of a third scenario in which the fence is removed<\/a>, and a fourth cynically questions the premise that being unable to see a baseball game over a fence \u2014 rather than buying tickets \u2014 is an injustice that should be remedied.)\u00a0 And the usual written analogy is that of a race in which one person has a heard start, or is outfitted with better running shoes, or the like.<\/p>\n But these analogies all fall short because there is a difference between the remedying unequal starting points and \u201cending up at the same place.\u201d\u00a0 To be honest, I am even getting a bit irritated with the label \u201cequity\u201d (and especially the buzzword \u201can equity lens\u201d) because it seems to be contrived and invented, and its adopters don\u2019t seem to be able to differentiate between \u201cremedying inequality in starting points\u201d and \u201cending up at the same place\u201d \u2014 because, I suppose, it is an article of faith that the only reason why one person could have more success (financial, occupational, etc.) than another is by having had a head start.<\/p>\n