Nina Svirsky's Critical Conversation Response

To start off answering this complicated question, I looked up the actual definition of educational equity, which, according to Google, is as follows: "Educational equity, also referred to as equity in education, is a measure of achievement, fairness, and opportunity in education." Now, this opportunity and fairness in education stems more from the quality and effectiveness of the educational system itself rather than the actual ethnic makeup of the student population. Without a question, diversity in schools, which will be the inevitable result of attempting to install school integration, matters for a variety of other extremely important issues, whether it be the socio-emotional development of a racially-conscious child or the exposure of different views and opinions to children who might otherwise be surrounded by cultural homogeneity. However, this diversity can and will be accomplished as an inevitable result of something much more important at hand: providing educational equity to students by changing the system that's stacked against them. By creating this equal opportunity not just in resources and funding but in teacher quality, administration effectiveness, educational parameters OTHER than higher test scores, and various other improvements, there will no longer be as wide a gap in school quality across the city and country. Since this achievement gap has been inextricably linked with racial and socio-economic factors, closing this gap by improving the system will also rid the necessity of school zoning restrictions and other policies that perpetuated the kind of de facto segregation prevalent in schools both today and just prior to the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas court case in 1954. If we remove the stigma of low-quality education associated with those schools that have high minority populations, we are thus helping to remove the stigma present in white parents who harbor fears and thus avoid sending their more well-off children to those schools. As a result, schools will hopefully and naturally diversify when equity is truly provided through an educational system that does not discriminate against certain racial or socio-economic factors.