Does Solving Inequality in Education Mean Embracing ‘Birth Equity’?
EdSurge
Sanaa Sharrieff, a mother based in one of North Carolina’s largest school districts, Guilford County, is certain that where her son was born limited his education.
Her son, Kendrick, an 8-year-old in third grade, was diagnosed with autism last year. But she says she’s had her suspicions about his condition since he was 2 or 3.
Confirmation took so long, she says, because her area doesn't have as much support for health care as other places. And the delayed diagnosis left her without access to resources that would have allowed her son to be pulled out of his classrooms for personalized instruction time.
It meant, pre-pandemic, driving up to his school to help educators deal with his behavioral and other issues, when the “the overstimulation in transitioning was just too much for him,” Sharrieff says. Without the framework provided by his diagnosis, the teachers and administrators just didn’t quite get it.
“It was not there. Literally, prior to everything closing for the pandemic, I would have to go to his classroom every single day and assist with his transitions from room to room or from activity to activity,” Sharrieff says.
Her son’s troubles have improved over the past year and a half. But, she says, it might have happened sooner if she’d had the resources she needed.
The education system has begun to think of itself as a pipeline, from pre-K through to the workforce. But there are those who think that it begins earlier—when a child is born. That’s the moment shaping a lot of health issues that are intimately linked to educational performance.
For example: There’s a disparate rate of preterm births particularly between Black and white communities, and preterm births are affiliated with increases in the likelihood of cognitive or behavioral challenges, says Iheoma Iruka, a research professor in the public policy department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose publications often cover early childhood education. And those challenges are associated with more educational trouble, she adds.
But, Iruka indicates, the challenges linked to preterm births are also less likely to get timely interventions in the very communities that suffer most from birth inequities. Interventions are linked to improvements in gains throughout a person’s life.
The result? Delayed interventions, forcing some students to try to play catch up during their whole education.
It’s a story that Sharrieff, who is a Black mother, sees mirrored in many of the other families around her. Yet she has noticed a difference in the stories she hears from white, wealthier mothers, who tell her their kids were diagnosed around age 3.
“And my eyes are popping out of my head. Like, I've been asking this since my son was 3. How? Why? What's the problem?” she says.
