Abstract
With respect to framework presented in K Shores and S Loeb’s article, I answer two questions: How well does the framework map onto a real-world situation marked by conflict over fair opportunity? What use might the framework be to decision makers?
Recently educational scholars who take normative theories seriously have become more aware of the need as well as the difficulty of making use of these ideas to guide action in the non-ideal world, which is, after all, the world we live in. A few have tried to provide practical guidance by showing how normative ideas can function within constraints under which decision makers operate. One of the most sophisticated discussions of the problem of fair resource allocation is that of Kenneth Shores and Susanna Loeb (2016) in Distributive decisions in education: Goals, trade-offs, and feasibility constraints. Here, the authors set forth a ‘framework’ comprising a set of educational goals and feasibility constraints, a framework deemed to be a useful lens through which policy makers may consider allocative decisions. My aim here is to try to answer two questions: How well does the framework they introduce map on to a real-world situation marked by conflict over fair opportunity? What use might the Shores and Loeb framework be to a decision maker?
First a highly condensed summary of the framework: The primary goal is future ‘welfare’ conceived as ‘how richly individuals can lead the life they want’ (Shores and Loeb, 2016: 110). The notion includes subjective elements (since persons may have diverse goals) as well as objective elements since some goods such as autonomy, security, and so on are desired by all. The opportunity to develop one’s talents is included in one’s welfare. Anna, the name the authors give to the hypothetical decision maker, cares about both the
Shores and Loeb recognize that Anna has little control over ultimate welfare, but she has some control over ‘achievement’ broadly defined, which is a useful albeit flawed predictor of subsequent welfare, and that is her focus. The four constraints introduced are scarcity, community buy-in, the high stakes of achievement, and measurement. Scarcity means that Anna will have to make decisions about ‘how much achievement for welfare she is willing to trade-off in the aggregate so the distribution can be better for those whose prospects are lowest’ (Shores and Loeb, 2016: 113). Since Anna is distributing taxpayer money she has to make sure that her decisions will not alienate taxpayers to the point that they will no longer support her or her decisions. By the ‘high stakes of achievement’, the authors point to the fact that ‘A child’s education is likely to alter her life prospects substantially’ (Shores and Loeb, 2016: 114). The authors recognize the myriad limitations of existing measurements as a guide to allocation decisions. Nonetheless they argue that if one assumes that all groups have the same distribution of potential, measured ‘differences between groups, on average, provide evidence that achievement-based opportunities for welfare from the development of potential are not equally distributed’ (Shores and Loeb, 2016: 116). Shores and Loeb employ their framework to focus on four cases that present challenges to the fictional Anna, a state policy maker seeking fair distribution of financial resources. For stylistic reasons the authors imagine that the resources are allocated to individual children. 1 In the first case, two children with ‘very different socioeconomic characteristics, one very wealthy, the other very poor’, manifest very different measured abilities.
I will focus on this first case, because a recent in-depth New York Times analysis of unequal public schooling in Charlottesville, Virginia appears to mirror it (Green and Waldman, 2018: A1). The article includes substantial data about group differences in background and opportunities in and out of school, and these inequalities are made vivid through a description of the distinct trajectories of two longtime friends, Trinity Hughes and Zyahna Bryant. One of the few black students in a nearly all-white elementary school, Zyahna was selected for the district’s program for gifted students and went on to a stellar academic career, taking more than a dozen advanced-placement and college level courses. Trinity, on the other hand, went to a predominantly black elementary school, was denied entry to the program for gifted students as well to more advanced high school courses, so her high school transcript will not meet the requirements for more selective colleges. The article notes that though Zyahna was a prime candidate for a selective college, her high school principal ‘encouraged her to explore community college’. (Green and Waldman, 2018: A15) The principal said she was focused on college affordability, but Zyahna heard it differently. ‘No matter how high your scores are or how many hours you put into your work, you are still black’ (Green and Waldman, 2018).
How did the two girls have such different elementary school experiences? The article sketches the history of school boundary drawing going back to the city’s response to the 1954 Brown decision when the governor ‘ordered the city to close down two white-serving schools rather than integrate’ (Green and Waldman, 2018: A14).
In addition to the struggle over school attendance boundaries, the article discusses three other contested issues: obstacles to black participation in the elementary schools’ gifted program; access to advanced courses in high school; and, whether to have a single diploma for all or an ‘honors’ diploma for those that take more advanced courses. Behind each of these specific issues lies the underlying question of how to deal with a legacy of racist exclusion and subordination.
Does the framework map reality?
Now, let’s consider the extent to which the Charlottesville situation maps onto the Shores and Loeb framework. Despite superficial similarities, we can identify two significant differences: First, the choices facing Charlottesville policymakers at different levels do not seem primarily to be ones of resource allocation: Contestation over school district boundaries, dual diplomas, and admission to programs favoring the gifted or advanced students are not about which programs merit funding but about who should have access to programs that already exist.
2
Second, the issue of race is salient in the Charlottesville case, and the Shores & Loeb framework makes no reference to race. Now they might argue that differences in ‘socioeconomic characteristics’ include race, which is true, but the point would then be is that the framework takes no account of where those differences come from. History, in other words, plays no role whatsoever. But surely it
Do these two divergences between the proposed framework and the reality of Charlottesville limit or undermine the applicability of the framework to that context or to others in which choices are not about resource allocation and where race is salient. I don’t think so. Why not? On behalf of Shores and Loeb, my reply is in two parts:
While our discussion stipulated that the policymaker’s task was to allocate financial resources to different students, our ultimate focus is not on money but on
As a policymaker, Ms. Atkins is focused on the future, not the past. Should she take the past into account? No and yes. No, because her job is to educate all the children in the community, none of whom is responsible for the community’s history. It would not be moral of her to penalize white children because of the actions and attitudes of their parents or grandparents. On the other hand, Anna will listen to white parents’ protestations of her intention to relax criteria for entry to gifted programs with that history in mind, because she knows that racist policies were often pursued under the guise of benefiting all children.
Consider another community, Madison, Wisconsin, whose racial gap in school achievement is also the subject of an article in a local newspaper (Elbow, 2018: 34) Must school superintendent Jennifer Cheatham (Madison’s Anna) – deploy the very same policies as Rosa Atkins? Of course not! Shores and Loeb (2016) explicitly say, We do not provide solutions to the cases, as solutions involve decisions about how to weight average welfare against welfare gains for the least advantaged and how to weight current against future welfare, as well as knowledge of the particular empirical constraints faced by individual communities. (pp. 122–123)
Indeed it is even possible that Madison’s more liberal political climate might generate substantially
I think this putative response of Shores and Loeb is persuasive, but if so, it cannot help but raise my second question: The authors claim to ‘have introduced a framework for deciding how to allocate resources given a set of feasibility constraints and goals for students’ (Shores and Loeb, 2016: 123). But how, exactly, does the framework help the decision maker?
Is the framework useful?
Let’s begin by asking with what a ‘framework’ might be contrasted. An algorithm or a checklist, perhaps? No one to my knowledge believes an algorithm could exist for adopting normative ideas or principles and then simply plugging in empirical information to generate appropriate action conclusions. Every theorist now recognizes what policymakers take for granted: there are always tradeoffs, which vary with circumstances, calling for difficult judgments. A checklist can be thought of as guiding a set of actions that must always be performed in certain settings. In surgery for example, surgeons (or their surrogates) must be sure to mark the surgical site, to ask their patients about allergies, and so on. Clearly a ‘framework’ is different from either an algorithm or a checklist. How and when might it offer guidance?
A way to approach the question is by looking at a framework from another field. Although not labeled as such, a much-cited article in The New England Journal of Medicine on the ethics of organ donation by living donors demonstrates the usefulness of a framework, which I would define as a way of structuring one’s thinking when confronted with a difficult problem (Truog, 2005). When the article was published, the donation of organs by living donors was a relatively new and rapidly growing phenomenon due to improved surgical techniques and a new means of connecting recipients with donors, the Internet. I think it fair to say that those trained in ethics have the requisite background to identify new ethical challenges generated by a technological advance and can help policymakers to organize their thinking by supplying a ‘framework’. Truog analyzes organ transplants by living donors into three different types, each with distinctive ethical challenges. One of his categories, ‘directed donation to loved ones’ raises problems because intense pressure can be put on people to donate, and those who are reluctant to do so may feel coerced. He argues that in these cases, simply obtaining informed consent from the donor is insufficient, ‘. . . physicians are obligated to prevent people from making potentially life-threatening sacrifices unless the chance of success is proportionately large’ (Truog, 2005: 2) He identifies a solution to some of these problems, having the transplant team identify a plausible medical reason to exempt a reluctant donor. A second category is directed donation to a stranger, facilitated by web sites that try to match those who need organs with those willing to donate them. This raises two quite different kinds of problems: One is the development of a market for organs which has a number of potential risks. The other problem has to do with fairness: The patient able to tell the most compelling story may not be the one with the highest need, and some donors may wish to direct their organs to (or away from) individuals from particular social or racial groups, potentially violating norms of anti-discrimination. Truog proposes a stronger, more centralized regulatory regime to mitigate some of the risks associated with the categories he identifies. The point is that Truog’s simple schema orients the policy maker to the potential benefits and costs of a new and challenging practice, facilitating transplants from living donors. The benefits are obvious, but some of the risks are subtle and gradual and might easily escape the policymaker’s attention.
Now contrast this with Shores and Loeb’s framework. To begin with the problem of educating children with diverse socioeconomic characteristics has been recognized for decades. The tension between supporting the education of all children while at the same time providing needed additional assistance to the children of the least advantaged, especially victims of racial exclusion, has been on the policy agenda at least since James B. Conant (1961) Slums and Suburbs and the 1965 launching of Head Start. Almost every ‘Anna’ living in a multi-racial school district recognizes both that poor, black children are likely to begin school academically behind their white peers and that it would be immoral to simply ignore the white children or hold them back until the others have caught up. Anna could hardly help being aware that she must balance two conflicting commitments. Now it’s true that she is unlikely to use the term ‘welfare’, but she will understand that ‘how richly individuals can lead the life that they want’ (Conant, 1961: 110) is the ultimate goal. Of course Anna will realize that her contribution to that end is limited, and that ‘achievement’ broadly defined is a moderately good predictor of future ‘success’, also broadly defined. Nor will Anna be ignorant of the fact to that existing measurements are flawed, that they don’t capture all the qualities that might support or inhibit future flourishing. And if anyone is aware of the political risks of going too far in focusing on and investing in the least advantaged to the detriment (whether real or perceived) of investing in the children of more advantaged parents, it is Anna.
The Shores/Loeb framework may be likened to a map of the normative and empirical territory which Anna must navigate. There is nothing wrong with the map, and I respect the mapmakers. My point is, rather, that theirs is a map of a
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.