Equity gaps in education: Nine points toward more transparency

The aim of this paper is to increase transparency in the scientific analysis of equity gaps in education. This should be useful in avoiding common ambiguities and misunderstandings in the discourse and in presenting the analyses results in a constructive way. We focused on a very basic aspect of transparency: Information availability. We identified nine topics related to the constitutive terms: “equity”, “gap”, and “education”, topics for which information is often only implicitly or selectively transmitted or not transmitted at all. Regarding the constitutive term “equity”, and as the possible sources of transparency problems, we analyzed (1) the type of equity model, (2) the underlying distribution model, and (3) the group concept between which equity gaps exist. For the clarification of the constitutive term “gap”, we addressed (4) the applicability issue, (5) the indicator issue, (6) the reference issue, and (7) the significance issue. The last two sources of transparency problems were related to the constitutive term “education” and referred to (8) the location of the equity gap within or outside education and (9) the characterization of the equity gap within education. For each of the nine topics, we highlight the biggest problems of understanding and propose solutions.