Educational equality is a catch phrase that has been thrown around in circles of influence lately. Although a decades-old concept and continuing struggle, it is something that has most recently shaped legislative and executive decisions in both federal and state governments. The lynchpin of the accountability-touting, government-aggrandizing No Child Left Behind Act, the notion of providing an equal educational opportunity to all children has become a pawn in the political arena of education reform.

Perhaps my inexperienced mind has trouble comprehending this concept, but I believe “equal” simply means that everyone is given a fair chance. I also believe it means that no one is given preferential treatment. If you would ask any first-grade student in Missouri, he or she would tell you that “equal” means “the same.” So why do bureaucrats and lawmakers have such a hard time defining the word?

It seems as though, in the spirit of education reform and government intervention, we have given in to the notion that in order to provide an equal educational opportunity, we must not maintain a level playing field. Instead, we must identify groups of students – by race, socioeconomic status, learning ability, etc. – that have traditionally felt marginalized by the education system, and customize the services provided to them at the expense of those groups that have traditionally been successful in the existing setting.

In Missouri, we have subsidized a failing inner-city school system where the grip of teacher’s unions has stifled improvement measures, forced desegregation has depleted the quality of the student base, and district and city leaders have resisted real reform. While the St. Louis Public Schools system spends $9,500 per student, in Southeast Missouri, a small school struggles to maintain quality programs due to decreased funding, spending $7,650 per student and yet out-performing the city schools.

The Missouri legislature currently has a view of educational equality based on the data from one test and the amount of state aid given to certain districts. In their view, the funding formula that they developed is equal for all districts. They do not consider the inequity introduced by the dollar value modifier, which funnels an exponentially greater amount of money to St. Louis city and the districts in its surrounding counties and in some cases provides hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional funding to one district and not its immediate neighbor.

If the big-heads in Washington, D.C. and Jefferson City would sit down and come up with a definition of “educational equality” from the literal meanings of the words, I believe they would examine the policies that are currently in place and realize that much inequality currently exists in the very measures that they tout as creating equality. We are at a point in the history of our democracy where politicians base much of their rhetoric on their influence in public education – no matter their level of experience in classroom instruction. When conservative ideologies of educational accountability, liberal social agendas, and spending tactics of both sides of the aisle enter the equation, the mess that can result from their ignorant approaches at “fixing” problems is catastrophic.