Abstract
Equality of opportunity is an ideal that finds a place in almost all theories of a just society. This ideal is also prevalent in our own political discourse, especially in debates about education policy. Given the myriad and significant dimensions of individual and collective well-being that flow from education – including health and access to health care, rewarding employment, income, leisure time, and civic participation – equality of opportunity matters deeply in the education realm. And it is within this realm that the meaning of this ideal is perhaps most deeply contested. How should limited educational resources be distributed to best honor equality of opportunity (e.g. by merit, by need)? What inequalities in educational opportunity, if any, are permissible? Can equality of educational opportunity be secured when large inequalities in educational inputs and outputs remain in place?
The papers in this symposium focus on different dimensions of these questions. This symposium is part of a larger multi-year project at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford, funded by the Spencer Foundation, which examined the relationship between the ideal of equality of opportunity and the public provision of education. The impetus for this issue, and the larger project of which it is a part, is that despite widespread agreement that equality of opportunity is an essential ideal, its meaning, goals, and application to education are highly contested. Gaining greater clarity about this fundamental ideal is especially urgent given mounting evidence about the increasing scope of income and wealth inequality, and the role of educational disparities in exacerbating those inequalities.
The symposium begins with a paper that enters the debates about the conceptual meaning of equality of opportunity of education and proposes a framework to remedy confusion surrounding the ideal. In this paper, ‘What is Equality of Opportunity in Education?’ Hugh Lazenby distinguishes equality of opportunity through education from equality of opportunity for education. Lazenby also considers the different possible scopes of equality of opportunity in education and their implications for whose duty it is to realize this ideal. He does not argue for a particular conception of equality of opportunity in education, but rather provides a systematic framework for developing a more compelling account of it.
The next two papers address civic dimensions of educational opportunity. In ‘Democracy, Equal Citizenship, and Education’, Eamonn Callan compares and assesses principles of equality and sufficiency with respect to the distribution of civic educational goods. Callan finds that sufficiency is a better principle than strict equality for distributing civic educational opportunity since this opportunity is not positional. He recognizes that educational opportunity for labor market success, by contrast, is highly positional and could point toward greater equality in its distribution, but he deflates the difference between these different distributive principles in education by appealing to Lesley Jacob’s concept of ‘stakes fairness’. If we have stakes fairness, he argues, the positionality of labor market success would be weakened. Kendra Bischoff, in ‘The Civic Effects of Schools: Theory and Empirics’, describes how schools actually function as civic institutions. By drawing upon the school effects literature, Bischoff considers two dimensions of civic learning in schools – student diversity and a school’s micro-political climate – and analyzes their consequences for equality of opportunity. She concludes by identifying key challenges for empirical analysis of the civic effects of schooling and underscores the importance of overcoming these challenges so that we may move beyond education policy’s singular focus on academic achievement.
Finally, Kenneth Shores and Susanna Loeb, in ‘Distributive Decisions in Education: Goals, Trade-Offs and Feasibility Constraints’, offer a framework for decision makers tasked with determining how to allocate scarce educational resources. Their framework is highly attentive to key feasibility constraints that decision makers must actually contend with: resource scarcity, community buy-in, high-stakes consequences of skills development, and the ability to measure desired outcomes. Through the presentation and analysis of four common cases, they employ their framework to demonstrate how to optimize distributive decisions in non-ideal conditions.