Achieving Educational Equality

“Educational equity” may be defined as a state where each individual has access to educational resources that they need to develop and actualize their academic and social potential. I believe that educational equity is not present today in most parts of the world due to the key barrier of financial resource constraints or disproportionate poverty, among others. This is particularly true in developing countries and emerging markets where the economic disparity within the population is high, leading to an extremely unequal and inequitable access to scarce educational resources. We can think of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, where economic, racial, and gender equality in education is lacking.?

In more advanced industrialized economies, this problem is less poignant due to higher levels of resources, but not absent by any means. Inner cities and slums are present in most major cities around the world, where lack of economic prosperity precludes young children from pursuing high quality education. It remains one of the most significant moral dilemmas within our society, as people who are more fortunate have access to high quality educational resources while the poverty-stricken don’t. The financial or economic barrier to educational equality is driven primarily by a lack of funding in education, lack of trained and qualified teachers, lack of classrooms and learning materials, exclusion of children with disabilities, gender stereotypes, living in countries in conflict or at risk of conflict, etc.

We need to identify the problem and analyze its root cause(s) before attempting to solve it. I would take a top-down approach, and first isolate the geography or country, and region or community which is the subject of the analysis. Data collection will be at the aggregate macro-economic level to start with, where I would seek to identify consumption and savings data, government spending and taxation-based revenue data, and balance of payments data related to remittances and unrequited transfers as part of the current account. The respective government policies need to be reviewed, so that we can understand the key goals of the government at the federal, state, and local levels with regard to the targets and goals of sustainable educational equity.?

While educational equity may sound aspirational, it is always useful to keep best practices in mind, and conduct research on countries that have achieved a high degree of educational equity, such as South Korea, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Hong Kong (China), and Macao (China) that have achieved high performance and high equity in education opportunities. What these countries did right needs to be understood. Their education systems share the goal of equipping students, irrespective of their socio-economic status, with the skills necessary to achieve their full potential in social and economic life.

Another set of data I would seek to gather relates to demographics and psychographics of the population vis-à-vis the demand and supply of key skill-sets that need to be developed in order to serve the needs of the respective countries. I would also seek to gather stakeholder data, both qualitative and quantitative, in order to understand the key challenges faced by each relevant stakeholder group. In this context, the student population needs to be stratified into relevant segments: primary schools; secondary schools; high schools; universities; and vocational training and skills-development institutions.?

Stakeholder feedback will need to be gathered from each of these groups or population segments by way of stratified sampling, thus understanding their key constraints, aspirations, and barriers. Stakeholder sentiment analysis is a data-analytic technique that may be applied, using artificial intelligence-driven cognitive analytics which provides additional insights on how positive or negative is the average sentiment expressed on critical success factors. In terms of finding solutions to the specific problems or challenges that are highlighted by the stakeholder feedback and economic analysis of the data, I would ask the stakeholders what they would recommend, and that would be a rich source of innovation and creativity for problem solving. One of the key aspects of problem identification and solutioning would be leveraging ‘collective intelligence’ through stakeholder engagement.

If we think of educational equality in a micro organizational setting , with direct stakeholder feedback data, decision-makers now get access to unfiltered intelligence from the edges of the organization, not just its center. Through stakeholder engagement, the organization can leverage the collective intelligence of employees, customers, and partners which affords them a holistic and contextualized understanding of what's going on deep within the organizational fabric. The ‘collective intelligence’ approach serves as a regulatory mechanism for management cybernetics and continuous monitoring and control. Hidden risks are exposed and brought to the surface, and management teams can rapidly act on them. In addition, informal networks and information flows are leveraged in the state of synthetic resonance, thus engendering a holistic and contextualized understanding, and enabling ‘System 2’ thinking characterized by the availability of more complete information, application of complex analysis, and deeper reflection; albeit slower in terms of the speed of decision-making.?

However, while innovative ideas are gathered from stakeholders, innovation diffusion is a process that occurs over time and can be seen as having five distinct stages. The stages in the process are knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation, and confirmation. This is a history-contingent adaptive cycle since dominant resonant frequencies drive the organizational convergence to the attractor state. Now the organization dynamically shifts towards a stochastic resonance topology, albeit leveraging distributed intelligence. Innovation diffusion takes place due to digital collaboration platforms and asynchronous in-context collaboration, as part of the stakeholder engagement process, leading to autonomous idea synthesis. Both unfiltered intelligence and autonomous idea synthesis naturally lead to reduced failure propagation. Amid various environmental and economic constraints, educational equity helps societies leverage collective intelligence in order to ensure rapid innovation diffusion, and higher levels of total factor productivity.?

In order for societies to ensure fair and equitable distribution of income in an intergenerational perspective, educational equity is a necessary, albeit not sufficient condition. This is because educational equity needs to be supplemented with social adaptability against discrimination, xenophobia, and prejudice. ?