Education policy of late has strongly emphasized equity. I do not believe policymakers have purposefully subordinated excellence in public schools, but too often that has been the result.
Emphasizing equity over excellence means that top-achieving students are not pushed as much as they should be. This is bad for them individually and bad for society, given how much we depend on top performers to drive economic growth and fund the government.
Worse still, new research by Farah Mallah shows that emphasizing equity at the expense of excellence can also be bad for equity.
Why? If public schools do not provide the opportunities that high-achieving students and their families want, some will go elsewhere—whether to another public school, another district, or a private school. If we believe low-achieving students benefit from attending school alongside more advanced peers, failing to provide advanced opportunities can have equity consequences too.
Mallah examines this issue using the introduction of Advanced Placement (AP) courses in Texas high schools. Rather than measuring integration by achievement, she measures it by income, which is strongly related to achievement. She shows that adding an AP course increases the share of high-income students in the school.
One concern is that adding advanced courses might attract high-income students while also separating them from low-income students within the school. Indeed, Mallah finds that this happens: adding an AP course increases sorting by income across classrooms. However, the increase in high-income enrollment schoolwide more than offsets the increased sorting, and on net the share of high-income classmates in low-income students’ classes increases by about 12 percent. Moreover, low-income students also take advantage of the new opportunities themselves: their AP enrollment increases by about 6 percentage points.
The broader lesson is that efforts to promote equity cannot ignore families’ choices. Failing to ensure that advanced opportunities are available in a school can change which families choose that school in the first place.
Equity and excellence are not competing goals. If we want more equitable schools, we cannot afford to neglect excellence.
