Equity is increasingly seen as a core value for higher education systems around the world. (In)equity is often measured through construction of achievement gaps, quantifying the relative outcomes of two populations of students. Institution-level gaps are embedded in the policy landscape of HE, becoming performance metrics in their own right. These…

I grew up on free school meals and now work as a school improvement adviser. In this article, I address discontinuities within my 'support and challenge' role, a role that can be constrained by educational policy enacted within a performative and panoptic culture of fear. Successive governments have concerned themselves with promoting equity…

Over the past few decades, the call for fairness in education has shifted from a plea for equality to a plea for equity. However, there is a need to consider the warrant for equity on a scale that is larger than the classroom. School choice, as simple as it may seem, requires equity to provide minority students and those with low socioeconomic…

The Australian "National Indigenous Reform Agreement" (Closing the Gap) aims to address inequalities in various aspects of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' lives. Scholars have repeatedly critiqued its failure to tackle structural inequalities. The agreement was revised in 2020. The current study adopts Carol Bacchi's…

This book offers a novel and up-to-date exploration of the common belief that increasing conventional school resources will increase academic achievement and help close gaps between various advantaged and disadvantaged students. Taking the scholarship around this question, such as James S. Coleman's 1965 report on the Equality of Educational…

Educational outcomes from traditionally underrepresented groups are generally worse than for their more advantaged peers. This problem is typically known as the awarding gap (we use the term awarding gap over 'attainment gap' as attainment places the responsibility on students to attain at equal levels) and continues to pose a challenge for…

This qualitative study examines the lived experiences of both first-generation (FG) students and employees of an Upward Bound (UB) program. The purpose of this study is to explore how an UB program at a private university in the Midwest can aid in bridging the educational gap for FG students while faced with obstacles such as reaching, engaging,…

The relationship between academic tracking and exclusionary discipline actions has only been studied in a limited number of empirical studies. By placing students at the lower strata, schools deprive them of the educational opportunities, widening the educational opportunity gap in a process we define as "opportunity stratification."…

This paper studies mathematics learning gaps within Indian children at two points in time. Dividing them into two groups, better performing and the rest, we investigate the causes of the difference in the average learning gap between them at those two points. We explore this question using the threefold Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition at these survey…

The underrepresentation and underperformance of low-income, first-generation, gender minoritized, Black, Latine, and Indigenous students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) occurs for a variety of reasons, including, that students in these groups experience opportunity gaps in STEM classes. A critical approach to disrupting…

English learners' (ELs') opportunity gap in U.S. K-12 schools is well known. While many of us in the field of applied linguistics are committed to achieving greater parity for ELs, the field as a whole has a propensity to approach this opportunity gap by addressing ELs' linguistic needs. This response, however, is siloed in nature, resulting in…

Despite much empirical evidence highlighting the harmful effect of socioeconomic disadvantage on educational outcomes, there is a relative lack of understanding of how different risk factors impact upon attainment. Importantly, it has yet to be established what effect, if any, austerity cuts have had on the most disadvantaged students. Using rich…

The Expert-based Collective Advising Mechanism (ECAM) was embedded in the open online tutoring project to provide free tutoring for rural students and to help them improve their academic performance, and thus, to solve education inequity. Taking urban and rural students in Tongzhou District of Beijing as the objects, this study gathered data on…

Some people in Japanese society have been classified as 'invisible' because they could not complete their compulsory elementary school education and have failed to assimilate into mainstream society. The 2010 Japan Census identified about 1.3 people per thousand over 15 years old who had not graduated from elementary school. However, the…

In 2022, the Center published "Student/Learning Supports: A Brief Guide for Moving in New Directions. The guide discussed the need for system changes to end the fragmentation, overspecialization, and marginalization of student/learning supports and outlined first steps to take in pursuing the changes. As the 2022 guide emphasizes,…