Diagramming Academic Equity: Exploring Educator Perceptions of Using Student Data to Institute Equitable Academic Programming in Public Secondary Schools

By viewing Adams’ Equity Theory through an educational equity lens, the author intends to demonstrate which data educators feel are most important when designing education plans that offer all public secondary students equitable access to school curricula and resources. Creating equitable educational plans for all students is vital to ensuring students are granted access to the curricular resources necessary to both achieve their respective academic potential, and stimulate engagement through integrating individual student interests into academic planning. Consequently, this study seeks to establish specifically which data points educators feel are most important when instituting equitable education programming for students, and also to better understand why educators rely upon the identified data points. Using Equity Theory to anchor this study, the author intends to explore the balance between the data input, and the programming output, educators must strike in order to ensure equitable academic opportunities for all students. More data does not necessarily equal stronger student programming; this study will demonstrate the lengths to which educators will go to responsibly utilize student achievement data in order to institute equitable academic programming, yet avoid data inundation by setting boundaries between useful, and inadequate input data. The result of these boundaries will manifest themselves as the actualization of equitable academic programs to be instituted for each student on an individual level. In order to facilitate this study, the author utilizes a constructivist lens centered on qualitative methodology and psychological phenomenology. This methodology both enables the author to more acutely identify educator perceptions, as well as demonstrate links between phenomena found in the study