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Equity in Schools: What, Why and How?

By Cindy Povall and Jessica Smedley | October 2019

As school counselors, we hear the word “equity” thrown around quite a bit. You’ve probably heard it at a faculty meeting, as part of the superintendent’s opening address, or maybe even been told that your SGO/PGO for the year needs to have an equity component. What does it mean for a school counselor to be focused on equity?

Equity in schools means being fair and inclusive for all students. It encompasses funding, resources, academic support and outcomes. Equity in schools requires putting systems in place to ensure that every child has an equal chance for success. This requires cognizance of the specific challenges and obstacles faced by students and then providing them with additional supports to help them overcome those barriers. Equity in schools matters because it provides each student with the support, programming and opportunity to meet with success. With this success, they can find positive, lifelong careers that support economic stability and personal fulfillment.

School counselors play an important role in advocating for equity in schools and equity for their students. School counselors recognize each student's individual uniqueness. The ASCA position statement on Equity states, "School counselors recognize and distinguish individual and group differences and strive to equally value all students and groups. School counselors are advocates of the equitable treatment of all students in school and in the community.” It further shares 11 areas in which school counselors promote equitable treatment including using data to identify gaps in achievement, opportunity and attainment.

To examine our role and responsibilities as school counselors to provide for equity to all students, we need to commit to examining ourselves, our work and the entire school system through a social justice lens. School counselors’ unique positionality in the school system allows for advocacy work, but the counselor must be knowledgeable about how the various systems and individuals interact. School counselors will benefit from learning more about the Multicultural and Social Justice Competencies (MSJCCs), which give a framework to understand the developmental domains. Of the four domains identified in the model, we argue that school counselors must commit to focusing on the first two, counselor self-awareness and client worldview. We can only be helpful to the diverse student population when we have a better understanding and awareness of our own identity, beliefs and values. We must also understand the identities, beliefs, and values of our students. Our work to do is to examine critically important but deeply personal and emotionally-charged topics including racism, biases, privilege and oppression.

The work begins with each one of us examining our own identities and their intersectionality. This means we must reflect on our beliefs and values around race, ethnicity, gender expression, social class, religion and disability status. We encourage school counselors who have not had a recent formal opportunity (such as taking a multicultural counseling course or workshop) to engage in readings and reflective activities in which you examine yourself first and then think about how your many identities – including your school counselor and educator identities – intersect and are woven into each other. We have suggested some readings and resources below that may help you start this work. We also encourage you to do this work with others because it can be challenging. Once you begin reading or watching, you may find yourself needing to process and talk about what you’re experiencing.

Alongside the work of examining our identities and belief systems, we encourage all school counselors to take an inquiry stance about their students’ worldviews. This requires learning and understanding about students who are different from us. The MSJCC “calls on counselors to explore client problems within the context of an oppressive society and to intervene more contextually and systematically.” Only when school counselors look from the students’ worldview can they begin to truly address equity issues at the individual, school or systemic level.
 
Resources for School Counselors