Culturally Responsive Approaches to Quantitatively Evaluate Educational Equity

• In Event: Exploring Assessment Practices and Educational Equity in Diverse Contexts

Proposal

In April 2022, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) released its first ever Equity Action Plan to advance equity across their policies, programs, and partner base (USAID, 2022). This action plan entails five priority areas, the fifth of which is to: “…incorporate racial and ethnic equity and diversity into policy, planning, and learning.” This theoretical paper is in response to the question of how USAID, along with other international development agencies and practitioners, can institutionalize equity, particularly in its evaluation and data collection process. I argue that as interest in addressing issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) increases in the US and parts of Europe, Western conceptualizations of equity need to be more carefully examined to deem its cultural appropriateness, lest we impose these values on other regions of the world. Furthermore, we need to be wary of pushing “conventional” methods and metrics that are used to evaluate these values as outcomes.

In the Global North, quantitative evaluations of equity often rest on testing to see if there is proportional equality for less-advantaged groups. Equity is typically evaluated on a large-scale through collecting data and disaggregating results to look for significant differences between demographic groups. Underlying this approach is the notion that there should be fair distribution or parity in outcomes between groups. These conventional norms assume and apply social categories such as race and gender – which are known to be sources of disparities across a wide array of societal outcomes in countries like the United States – to define who the least-advantaged groups are. Individuals are then ascribed to these groups largely through self-reported identification.

However, the key methodological assumption is that we have individual identifiers that enable us to create demographic groups, which is what makes this practice and approach inappropriate to many communities who may be under duress and/or who for the sake of personal protection, need to maintain privacy through non-disclosure. One finding from focus groups in the USAID 200-day equity assessment illustrates this concern: “efforts to understand our partners and beneficiaries must be done responsibly in a manner that will not cause unintended consequences/harm for marginalized individuals; for instance, answering a question on gender identity could put respondents at risk in certain country contexts” (USAID, 2021, p. 11). However, this is followed by a recommendation to “include targeting more granular forms of data collection in programming and planning that account for marginalization within a country context...These include, but are not limited to, data collection on disability and on the full spectrum of gender identities and ethnicity” (USAID, 2021, p. 11). Although the recommendation continues to suggest that “efforts could include appropriate data protection and privacy protocols within the technology solution design” (ibid), I argue that relying on technological solutions to ensure protection does not address the root problem.

Instead, I first draw on multiple cultures to review other ways to conceive of equity in this paper. I then propose alternative approaches to quantitatively evaluate equity that do not require the Western convention of identification. These include: collaboratively searching with partner organizations and host countries for culturally relevant and acceptable forms of identification; drawing on capability theory (Nussbaum, 2000; Robeyns, 2005; Sen, 1999) to change the focus from group disparities to whether individuals have reached their potential capabilities; and finding and measuring proxies of constructs like social belonging that underlie systemic inequalities.

In conclusion, this paper represents a reminder to researchers that a concept like equity, along with the ways it is assessed, is not universal. As Levinson et al. (2022) remind us, it is imperative to first clarify what we are valuing and seeking when we aim for educational equity. And as these Western-centric DEI values are exported, we must go further to reflect on the cross-cultural appropriateness of these practices and consider how else we can evaluate the goal of equity at scale.

Author

• Grace Pai, CUNY Queens College