I do not concede

On Equity: A Response to my friend Tim Daly

Tim Daly is a friend, a brilliant thinker, and someone I’ve long admired for his fair-minded approach to education policy. I trust no one more in the education world for advice and insights.

His piece this morning on equity deserves the same careful consideration he typically brings to these debates.

I must respectfully disagree with his central premise: that we should abandon the language and concept of equity because it has become politically toxic.

The Problem with Strategic Retreat

The argument runs that “equity has become politically coded” and “cannot realistically be the foundation for a broad, cross-partisan project.” The solution? Semantics. Find “new vocabulary” that maintains popular support.

This is where we differ.

Framing the equity backlash as the predictable result of language overreach or excessive jargon overlooks a crucial reality: Anti-equity is the latest iteration of a pattern as old as American education itself—organized resistance to targeted efforts that address racial disparities.

The Trump administration didn’t investigate Chicago’s Black Student Success Plan because it used the word “liberatory” too many times. They investigated it because it specifically targeted Black students and committed resources to their success. The education department is attacking programs that help Black students graduate high school and enter college, programs that recruit Black teachers, and minority-serving institutions that have produced more successful students and educators than anyone.

The administration isn’t doing this because too many people in schools read Ibram X. Kendi’s dreadfully dull book on anti-racism.

What the Data Actually Shows

The opening data illustrate why equity language matters. In Chicago:

• White 4th graders gained 13.1 points in reading since 2003 (more than a year of learning)

• White students gained nearly two years in 4th-grade math, more than two years in 8th-grade math

• Black 4th graders are reading worse than in 2003

• Hispanic students made gains, but far less than their White peers

What happens when even saying that draws backlash?

This isn’t about “all” students falling behind. This is about dramatic divergence in outcomes by race. The disaggregation that accountability advocates championed during the NCLB era exists precisely to reveal these patterns—not to obscure them again with universalist language.

The “All Students” Trap

The proposal is to stop using “equity” and focus instead on what “all kids deserve”: high standards, no ceilings on advancement, practical life skills, healthy tech habits, and affordable childhood activities.

Clever. By half.

These are excellent recommendations for maintaining advantages for those already succeeding. They don’t address why Black students in Chicago have made zero reading progress in two decades while their White peers surged ahead.

The whole point of equity is that different students need different things. When White students are gaining two years of math learning while Black students stagnate, the solution isn’t a universal checklist. It’s a targeted intervention based on specific needs. That’s what disaggregated data taught us. That’s what equity means.

We tried the “all students” approach before NCLB. It allowed us to celebrate rising district averages while low-income students and students of color languished. The piece itself acknowledges that “equity as a concept was a huge step forward” because it “moved us beyond broad school and district averages, which disguised the neglect of low-income students.”

So why go backward?

On Concession

The piece declares: “At this point, equity has become politically coded. I concede the point.”

I won’t.

Conceding to political pressure when you’re right isn’t wise pragmatism—it’s situational complicity. The Trump administration’s investigation of Chicago isn’t a good-faith policy disagreement about implementation. It’s an abuse of federal power to intimidate districts from addressing racial disparities. And it won’t stop in Chicago.

I’ve spent years savaging progressives for annoying virtue signaling and liberal racism. I wish we could go back to when that was a bigger problem than what is happening now.

If we abandon equity because conservatives weaponized the term, what happens when they come for “achievement gaps”? For “disaggregated data”? For any language that makes racial disparities visible? The problem isn’t our vocabulary—it’s that some people are fundamentally opposed to naming and addressing racial inequality.

Who’s Missing From This Conversation?

Here’s what may be most troubling: this debate is happening, once again, with essential voices muted.

Black families in Chicago are likely more bothered by ineffective programs than anyone. Do they think retiring the language of equity will fix what ails their schools? Do the parents of those 4th graders who are reading worse than their peers in 2003 think reframing their children’s needs in language more palatable to White moderates and conservatives will produce more graduates?

I don’t see an honest elevation of those voices in the discussion about the anti-equity campaign. This pattern—White people on the left and right negotiating what’s acceptable to say about Black children’s education, without valuing Black perspectives—isn’t new. The cruel paternalism of dictating how we should understand and discuss what is being done to us isn’t surprising. It’s how racial inequality has always operated.

The suggestion that Chicago’s Black Student Success Plan—a response to catastrophic stagnation in Black student outcomes—should be rebranded to maintain “popular support” raises an obvious question: Popular with whom? The families whose children gained two years of learning, or the families whose children fell further behind?

Scholars didn’t choose the word “equity” because it sounded good in strategic plans. They chose it because “equality” was ironically a plan for inequality. Giving everyone the same thing when they have different needs sets everyone up for failure.

And now we’re being told—again, in a conversation primarily among others—that the language needs to change because it’s become “politically coded.”

But coded by whom? And at whose expense?

Yes, There Were Excesses

There’s validity to the critique that equity was applied to unfocused programs disconnected from academic outcomes. Chicago’s plan sets numeric targets for reducing Black student suspensions but includes no such goals for math or reading performance. That’s unacceptable. Period.

But we don’t abandon concepts because they’re sometimes misapplied. We had misguided accountability policies, poorly designed teacher evaluations, botched Common Core implementations, and literacy programs that ignored phonics. The education reform community hasn’t eulogized testing, accountability, standards, or phonics instruction. Why? Because the underlying principles remain sound, even when execution falters.

The same is true for equity.

What We Should Actually Do

Meaningful consensus about schools’ core mission must include the freedom to name problems accurately. We need:

1. Continued disaggregation and transparency about which students are succeeding and which are not, by race, income, disability status, geography, and English learner status

2. Targeted interventions based on specific student needs, even when those interventions help some rather than all

3. Protection from political interference when districts make good-faith efforts to address documented disparities

4. Accountability for outcomes, not vocabulary

5. The courage to call wrong what it is, regardless of who’s doing it

6. Black voices are centered in decisions about how to address Black students’ educational outcomes

No surrender, no retreat

The piece ends with a call for a truce: “Let’s do a better job for students, and people can call it whatever they want. Even equity.”

But that’s not what it advocates. It’s a eulogy for equity that proposes adopting language erasing what makes it essential: the recognition that equal treatment doesn’t produce equal outcomes when students start from unequal places.

Let me be clear: Tim’s piece was written in good faith. I trust his judgment on most things. I take his assessment as an astute warning from someone who understands the people dominating the power grid. If this is his assessment of where we’re at, we’re in real trouble.

The options seem binary, like fight or flight.

My heart breaks for the people of color in education and education nonprofits who suffer the humiliation of scrubbing their grant applications, their websites, and their public speech. They are learning about power. What we call an equity backlash is really just a reminder of lashes on their backs.

It stings to remember.

I feel for the embarrassment they feel now that the power people are determined to put them in their place, to demean them, to steal their dignity, and replace it with a seat in the second class.

To be blamed for their own oppression, even by allies.

To discover which allies were harboring enough frustration during the equity-era discourse that they can now let their hair down and relish inflicting discipline on wayward voices of color, who they think dominated too many rooms.

To think we have progressed to the point of self-determination, only to receive the cold slap of racial reality.

To comply with downcast eyes and blank stares. Some will lose status, pay, and invitations. Some will discover in themselves the costly inability to argue on behalf of their humanity.

The great equity stripping is a lash they thought was a relic before America was made great again.

The best I can say to my people is that you haven’t really lost until your enemies convince you that retreat is actually progress.

Sometimes bad guys win. It’s never forever.