“Conceptions of Equity” with Harry Brighouse

Nearly everybody says they are in favor of equity in education. But what are they in favor of when they are in favor of equity? A famous meme using crates, people of different sizes, and a baseball game, contrasts equity, in which everyone gets as many boxes as they need to see the game, with equality, in which everyone gets the same number of boxes regardless of size. But in the cartoon, equity is really equality of outcome, whereas equality is equality of crates. We explore various plausible ways of understanding equity, and demonstrate that different organizations have different and incompatible understandings of equity, and show why understanding the different ways we conceive of equity matters for decision-making.

Supplemental Reading: Conceptions of Educational Equity (2022)

Harry Brighouse is Mildred Fish Harnack Professor of Philosophy and Carol Dickson Bascom Professor of the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

This event is sponsored by the Center for Education Research at Stanford (CERAS).