Kurt Hatch Says Equal Treatment Is Not the Same as Equity in Schools

• Dr. Kurt Hatch, retired Professor of Practice and Faculty Director of the Educational Administration program in the School of Education at the University of Washington Tacoma, pushes back on the common rule that fairness means treating every student the same way.

Washington, USA, November 11, 2026, ZEX PR WIRE, Dr. Kurt Hatch says that rule is where a lot of good intentions quietly go wrong. Sameness is easy to measure and easy to defend in a meeting. It is also, in his view, a poor stand-in for fairness.

“If two students arrive with different needs and you give them the identical response, you have not treated them equally,” he says. “You have just made sure the gap between them stays exactly where it started.”

Hatch points to multi-tiered systems of support as a case where this gets settled in practice rather than debate. A tiered model does not give every student the same intervention. It matches the support to what a student actually needs, which means two students in the same classroom can be getting very different things at the same time.

“Nobody looking at a well-run tiered system calls it unfair,” he says. “They call it responsive. The confusion only shows up when we talk about equity in the abstract instead of watching how good systems already work.”

That gap between what schools already practice in their support systems and what they still say out loud about fairness is, in his view, worth noticing.

The sameness rule tends to hold up fine when the stakes are low: a shared classroom routine, a common grading rubric, a single school calendar. Hatch says it starts to fail once race, language, disability, or economic circumstance shape what a student walks in needing.

“A policy that looks neutral on paper can still produce very different outcomes for different students,” he says. “Neutral is not the same as equitable. Bias does not require anyone to intend harm. It can live quietly inside a rule that treats everyone identically.”

He is careful to separate this from the idea of lowering expectations for some students and not others. The standard he holds is the same for everyone. What changes is the support needed to get there.

Hatch’s background in systems leadership gives him a different question to put in place of “are we treating everyone the same.” He asks leaders to look at outcomes first, then work backward to the structures producing them.

“If a practice is producing uneven results across groups of students, the practice is the thing to examine, not the students,” he says. “That is a harder conversation than asking whether a rule applies to everyone. It is also the only conversation that actually moves outcomes.”

He also pushes leaders to separate two things that get collapsed together: consistency and uniformity. A school can be consistent in how it decides what support a student gets without being uniform in what that support looks like. In his experience, leadership teams that keep those two words apart make better decisions than teams that use them interchangeably.

Hatch’s view is shaped by work that spans classrooms, district leadership, and state policy. He has spent time watching where policy meant to help students gets simplified on its way into a building, often losing the nuance that made it work in the first place. The sameness rule, he argues, is one of those simplifications: a complicated idea about fairness flattened into something easy to repeat, at the cost of the students it was supposed to protect.

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Dr. Kurt Hatch is a retired Professor of Practice and Faculty Director of the Educational Administration program in the School of Education at the University of Washington Tacoma. His work covers systems leadership, equity and bias, multi-tiered systems of support, and school behavioral and mental health. He has worked as a teacher, assistant principal, and principal in Washington state school districts, and has delivered keynote addresses as well as led professional learning at the local, state, and national level.