When we talk about educational equity, we tend to talk about the same things. Funding. Class sizes. Access to technology. The postal code a child grows up in. These are real and important concerns, and they deserve the attention they receive. But there is a dimension of equity that rarely makes it into that conversation — one that sits closer to the heart of what schooling is for. Children deserve to feel like they belong, to see themselves reflected in the curriculum, to be heard, and to experience accomplishment. But these only set the conditions within which learning can take place. Equity is also about the quality of the instruction students receive, and whether the teacher in front of them is prepared to teach. That is the conversation we are not having enough of. And until we do, our commitment to equity will remain incomplete.
Since equity in education is often treated as a structural problem, it tends towards structural solutions, but research into the nuances of teaching and learning offers a fuller story. It invites us to re-ground our thinking in the importance of instruction, why certain approaches work better than others, and why that difference matters.
Economists Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff tracked more than one million school children and found that students assigned to highly effective teachers are significantly more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, and build stable lives. Replacing a teacher in bottom-5% with an average one increases the combined lifetime earnings of that one classroom by around $250,000 — roughly $9,000 per child. All from just one year of better teaching. The effects are largest for students from low-income backgrounds, who have the fewest alternative pathways to success (Chetty, Friedman & Rockoff, 2014). Eric Hanushek’s research reaches the same conclusion from a different angle: disadvantaged schools struggle the most to attract and retain teachers with the strongest instructional preparation, creating a compounding inequity that funding alone cannot fix (Hanushek, 2011; Hanushek & Rivkin, 2010).
Instructional equity, then, is not a soft aspiration or something for which we can let the cards fall where they may. It is a measurable, consequential reality that forces educators to encounter uncomfortable questions: Who gets to think deeply in my classroom? Whose prior knowledge is privileged? Whose voice is elevated?
If the quality of teaching a child receives shapes their life outcomes and that quality is disproportionately determined by how well their teacher was prepared, then who is holding teacher preparation programmes accountable for producing teachers who can deliver high-quality instruction? In many countries, almost no one.
Universities and teacher preparation programmes train the teachers who will spend decades in classrooms. Initial teacher education has a responsibility to shape what graduates know about how children learn, how reading develops, how memory and attention work, and how instruction can reach children who are struggling.
Yet in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, and until recently the United Kingdom, institutions responsible for training teachers have faced minimal accountability for whether their graduates truly understand how learning happens and how that understanding shapes their practice. In the words of Rafael Reif, former president of MIT, “If we don’t know how we learn, how on earth do we know how to teach” (Bothwell, 2017).
An Education Consumers Foundation analysis of Tennessee’s teacher preparation data found that graduates from many programmes were rated “ineffective” more often than “highly effective,” with students gaining as little as half a year of growth across a full school year. A 2023 review by the National Council on Teacher Quality found that fewer than half of US teacher preparation programmes adequately covered the five core components of evidence-based reading instruction and some were actively teaching approaches contrary to what research supports (NCTQ, 2023).
In Canada, the Ontario Human Rights Commission's 2022 Right to Read inquiry found that the province's education system was failing to use evidence-based reading instruction, and called for teacher preparation programmes to be reformed to require instruction in structured literacy and the science of reading (OHRC, 2022). In British Columbia, a motion brought by a teachers' association to the 2024 BC Teachers' Federation AGM called on the government to require all teacher education programmes to include a full-credit course in evidence-based reading instruction (Cherry & Trotter, 2024). In the Netherlands, knowledge-driven instruction grounded in cognitive science remains inconsistently embedded across teacher preparation curricula (Jepma et al., 2024).
Sometimes the regaining of lost ground in teacher preparation comes from individual schools. Sometimes it is entire districts. Occasionally, we find turnaround results are remarkable enough to ask why infusing such tenets of learning are not required more broadly.
In 2019, the Department for Education introduced the Core Content Framework for Initial Teacher Training, followed by the Early Career Framework for newly qualified teachers. Both are explicitly grounded in evidence about how learning works: memory, cognitive load, explicit instruction, formative assessment, deliberate practice. For the first time, what trainee teachers were required to learn and the guidance shaping their continued professional development was tied to the science of learning, rather than left to the discretion of individual providers. Subsequent research has shown how novice teachers experience more consistent preparation, stronger mentoring, and greater confidence in key aspects of teaching as a result.
Steubenville, Ohio, is one of those cases. Consider that more than 80 percent of its students are economically disadvantaged. Now set that within the context that, nationally, only around one-third of American children learn to read well by third grade. Yet in Steubenville, virtually all of them do. The difference is not funding or demographics. It is that Steubenville built a coherent approach around Success for All, a whole-school reform model anchoring early reading in systematic phonics and ongoing teacher training that the U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse rates as evidence-based (Slavin et al., 2011; What Works Clearinghouse, 2017). The district trained its teachers in it, tracked results year after year, and refused to let ideology override evidence (Education Consumers Foundation, 2026). What Steubenville did, in effect, was establish the coherent, evidence-grounded preparation its teachers had not received during initial teacher education.
A strikingly similar story is unfolding in Manitoba, Canada. The Evergreen School Division, serving eight schools across rural Interlake communities, has — without any provincial mandate — overhauled its approach to early reading. It replaced ineffective methods like Reading Recovery and balanced literacy with structured literacy grounded in systematic phonics, invested heavily in teacher professional learning, and built a residency-style coaching model. Roughly 80 percent of grade 3 students in Evergreen are now reading at grade level, at a time when less than half of grade 3 students across Manitoba meet that benchmark. In 2024, the division was honoured with a Dyslexia Canada Educational Excellence Award (Dyslexia Canada, 2024). Evergreen has not stopped at fixing its own classrooms. Its trustees successfully passed an emergency motion at the Manitoba School Boards Association convention calling on education faculties to ensure that new teachers are trained in systematic phonics — an acknowledgment, made by people closest to the problem, that the deepest fix lies upstream.
These are systems that did not wait for the educator preparation programs to catch up. They didn’t wait for a magic bullet curriculum or off-the-shelf professional learning offering. They built their own instructional systems, grounded in evidence and achieved for disadvantaged children what the broader system was failing to deliver. This is both inspiring and deeply troubling. Inspiring, because it shows how socioeconomic disadvantage is not destiny. Troubling, because what these districts had to do for themselves is precisely what teacher preparation programmes should be doing at scale. The fact that a small district in Ohio and a rural division in Manitoba had to engineer their own solutions is not a success story for the system. It is an indictment of it.
Accountability often calls to mind notions of more measurement, more inspection, more initiatives — and yet, without a clear, shared sense of how best to teach and how to know whether it is being taught well, we end up producing conditions of compliance rather than deliberate improvement.
Consider a comparative analysis of 20 professional leadership standards across the US, Canada, and Australia. Researchers found that fewer than 15 percent explicitly referenced principles grounded in the learning sciences, with the vast majority focused on management and compliance (Tokuhama-Espinosa, 2019). These findings paint a worrying picture in which more of the expectation for what school leaders ought to know and be able to do resides within the domain of organizational administration, rather than seeing them as leaders of learning. For if the frameworks we use to prepare develop school leaders barely mention what it means to learn, it is little wonder we find leaders ill-equipped to evaluate the instructional preparation of the teachers they hire and hope to continually support.
When it comes to teachers and leaders being adequately supported to perform their roles, we need something more precise, more intentional. Yes, we need educator preparation programmes and systems of ongoing professional learning to be held to account for their support of pre- and in-service teachers. But around what conception of teaching and learning are we organizing that accountability? Does it rest on a thin, underdeveloped appreciation of what good instruction looks like? Or perhaps worse still, does it fall foul of a Tower of Babel effect in which definitions and applications of good practice are so diffuse and incoherent as to render any move towards sustained improvement futile? These are the questions we need to have been asking ourselves for some time, but positive steps are also being made.
The Maryland State Department of Education has made the science of learning a statewide priority by enshrining into state law the expectation that every Maryland teacher to complete foundational professional learning in the science of learning, with all new teachers receiving it within their first year. The goal: ensuring every educator shares a research-based understanding of how students learn, so instructional decisions are consistently grounded in the best available evidence. Maryland’s aim is clear, and it is one to which we all should aspire: students taught by professionals who understand how learning happens, and who get to thrive as a result.
We know that teacher quality is the most powerful in-school factor shaping children’s life outcomes. We know its effects are largest for those with the least, and the institutions responsible for producing that quality face almost no accountability for whether they are doing so.
England has shown that change is possible when the will is there. Steubenville and Evergreen have shown what is achievable when instruction is taken seriously at the school and district level. Maryland has shown that systems can make bold policy choices to ensure students are taught by professionals who understand how learning happens. And Ontario is acknowledging through its formal review of student achievement across the province that the current trajectory is not good enough (Government of Ontario, 2025).
The lessons are clear. We must reground equity as something that plays out in the details of instruction. We need a shared commitment to understanding how learning happens and to teaching as a result. And we need bold policy shifts that hold people accountable for making more evidence-informed decisions, more of the time.
Educational equity is shaped not only by the resources available to students, but also by the quality of the instruction they experience every day. That quality depends on professionals who understand how learning happens and who can translate that knowledge into purposeful classroom practice.
How Teaching & Learning Happens supports teachers in building this essential knowledge base. It connects insights from cognitive science and educational research with practical questions about instruction, including memory, cognitive load, explicit teaching, practice, motivation and formative assessment.
By strengthening teachers’ understanding of how students learn, the programme helps them make more informed instructional decisions and create learning experiences that give every student a better opportunity to succeed.
For schools and teachers seeking to turn the science of learning into everyday practice, How Teaching & Learning Happens offers a meaningful next step.
Learn more about How Teaching & Learning Happens and explore how a stronger understanding of learning can lead to more effective teaching and greater educational equity.
BC Teachers’ Federation. (2024). 2024 AGM motions: Literacy instruction in teacher education programmes. BCTF.
Bothwell, E. (2017, March 23). President turns MIT’s research might to study of how people learn. Times Higher Education. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/president-turns-mits-research-mightto-study-of-how-people-learn
Cherry, K., & Trotter, H. (2024). The future of literacy instruction. Teacher, 37(1), 6–7. BC Teachers' Federation. https://www.bctf.ca/docs/default-source/publications/publications-teacher-magazine/sept_oct2024-teacher.pdf
Chetty, R., Friedman, J. N., & Rockoff, J. E. (2014). Measuring the impacts of teachers II: Teacher value-added and student outcomes in adulthood. American Economic Review, 104(9), 2633–2679.
Department for Education. (2025). Evaluation of the national roll-out of the early career framework induction programme: Year 3 annual report. Department for Education.
Dyslexia Canada. (2024). Empowering education: Evergreen School Division’s commitment to literacy. Dyslexia Canada. https://dyslexiacanada.org/en/blog/evergreenschooldivisioneea2024
Education Consumers Foundation. (2026). Unaccountable teacher training is crippling disadvantaged students. Education Consumers Foundation.
Government of Ontario. (2025, December 8). Ontario appoints advisory body to improve student achievement [Press release]. https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1007111/ontario-appoints-advisory-body-to-improve-student-achievement
Hanushek, E. A. (2011). The economic value of higher teacher quality. Economics of Education Review, 30(3), 466–479.
Hanushek, E. A., & Rivkin, S. G. (2010). Generalizations about using value-added measures of teacher quality. American Economic Review, 100(2), 267–271.
Hewitt, J., Guérin, L., Heal, J., Hendrick, C., & Sachdeva, N. (forthcoming). How teacher accreditation policy represents research-based understandings of learning: An international comparative document analysis [Manuscript in preparation].
Jepma, I., Willemsen, M., Haagsman, A., van den Berg, E., & de Groot, J. (2024). Kennisgedreven onderwijs: Onderzoek naar evidence-informed werken in het funderend onderwijs. Sardes / SEO Economisch Onderzoek.
Maryland General Assembly. (2021). Maryland Code, Education § 6-1011: Professional development system. https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Laws/StatuteText?article=ged§ion=6-1011
National Council on Teacher Quality. (2023). Teacher prep review: Reading and teacher preparation. NCTQ.
Ontario Human Rights Commission. (2022). Right to read: Public inquiry into human rights issues affecting students with reading disabilities. Government of Ontario. https://www.ohrc.on.ca/en/right-to-read-inquiry-report
Slavin, R. E., Lake, C., Davis, S., & Madden, N. A. (2011). Effective programs for struggling readers: A best-evidence synthesis. Educational Research Review, 6(1), 1–26.
Tokuhama-Espinosa, T. (2019). A comparative analysis of regional standards for school leaders. Frontiers in Education, 4, Article 136.
What Works Clearinghouse. (2017). Success for All: Intervention report. U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences.
At Academica, we believe that evidence-informed professional development is not a luxury, it is the foundation of genuine instructional equity. Our Master for School Leaders and Research for Impact programmes are built on the conviction that strong leadership, grounded in learning science, is the most powerful lever available to schools, especially those serving the children who depend on it most.