Well-Being and Equity: A Multidisciplinary Framework for Rethinking Education Policy

• In Event: Thinking Ecologically in Educational Policy and Research

Abstract

In an era dominated by neoliberal individualism, how can education researchers, policy makers, and practitioners (re)conceptualize equity in a way that centers the humanity of individuals, recognizes the import of community development, and challenges systemic inequality? Currently, schools’ success (e.g., test scores, graduation rates) is measured much in the same way as economic success (e.g., GDP, employment rates), driving market- oriented improvement efforts. The predominant narrative posits that individual academic achievement is the key to a better life and closing the opportunity gap is wholly within schools’ purview. This misguided and ahistorical notion of equity fails to account for the nested nature of students, families, communities, cities, and the nation at large and disregards centuries of policy decisions that have shaped unequal conditions in communities and schools. While education has only more recently seen the influence of policies informed by neoclassical economic theory, it has long driven national and international economic development.

We know from research in the fields of human, community, and sustainable development that this economic approach does not attend to the spectrum of non-economic needs that allow for individuals and communities to thrive, nor does it attack the roots of structural inequality. This paper draws from those fields to present a conceptual framework that can guide school, district, and state leaders; policy makers; and researchers to (re)consider the ways policy decisions challenge inequity. It does so by asking these stakeholders to center individual and community well- being and recognize that policy consequences are multi-directional. Further, it highlights the capacity of schools to serve as driver of community uplift and political advocacy (Anyon, 2014). This alternative framework pushes policy actors and practitioners to participate in cross-sector collaboration to design policies that allow individuals, communities, and schools to flourish.

Well-being is particularly useful as a construct for expanding equity because it focuses on the multidimensionality of people’s lives. Equity-centered policy making, then, attends to these various dimensions at an individual and collective level. Further, because well-being is about more than achievement or economic success, using well-being as the foundation of policy- making urges redress for structural and race-based inequality, as improving well-being requires ameliorating the consequent physical and psychological needs, deprivations, struggles, and burdens. Though there is no single consensus on the definition of well-being, I have grouped the most common features into three key inter-related dimensions: opportunity, trust, and agency. Each of these dimensions contain multiple indicators of both objective and subjective well-being—in which individual and group perceptions are equally important to the tangible factors that make attaining well-being possible (Diener et al., 1999). The purpose of this framework is twofold: to suggest an alternative way of thinking about equity and human flourishing, particularly for policy makers and researchers in education; and helping those involved in formal and informal policy-making think deliberately about tradeoffs when making policies that influence equity and well-being for individuals and communities.

Author

• Emily Germain, Michigan State University