Theory and Research in Education

This article criticizes the view that, if cultural factors within the black community explain poor educational outcomes for blacks, then blacks should bear all of the disadvantages that follow from this. Educational outcomes are the joint, iterated product of schools’ responses to students’ and parents’ culturally conditioned conduct. Schools are not entitled to excessively burden such conduct even when it is less than educationally ideal. Cultural capital theory illuminates the ways schools may unjustly penalize the culturally conditioned conduct of blacks and the poor. However, it must be refined to take into account normative differences between arbitrary and educationally important forms of cultural capital. Differential impact analysis offers a useful tool for revealing when schools’ responses to students’ and parents’ conduct reflects unjust racial stigmatization and ethnocentric bias.

The most common lay explanation for the racial gap in educational achievement in the US is the ‘oppositional culture hypothesis’, which holds that Black students tend to undervalue education and stigmatize their high-achieving peers, accusing them of ‘acting White’. Many believe that, insofar as this hypothesis is true, Black underachievement is unproblematic from the perspective of justice, because Black students are simply not taking the fair opportunities presented to them. This article offers a systematic critique of the normative aspects of this view and some conceptual clarifications regarding the nature of opportunity.

This article compares a demanding conception of educational adequacy with the Rawlsian idea of fair equality of opportunity. It defends fair equality of opportunity against criticisms, but argues that it needs to be explicitly anchored in a theory of equal citizenship.

This article examines the rationales for school choice, and the significance of choice mechanisms for racial disparities in educational opportunities and outcomes. It identifies tensions between liberty-based rationales and equality-based rationales, and surveys research findings on the outcomes of school choice policies, especially with regard to the racial composition of schools and distribution of opportunities. It concludes that school choice policies are multifarious and lack cohesion, that many existing mechanisms of choice lack proper public justification, and that the outcomes of these policies and mechanisms are at odds with most of the goals identified by their advocates, particularly for minority families.

A long tradition in the philosophy of education identifies education’s most fundamental aim and ideal as that of the fostering or cultivation of rationality. In this article I relate this tradition in philosophy of education to recent work inspired by Wilfred Sellars on ‘the space of reasons’. I first offer a very brief overview of the tradition just mentioned, after which I briefly lay out Sellars’ notion and discuss its place in the work of some of those influenced by Sellars, especially John McDowell. I next address recent work in philosophy of education that suggests that there is a tension between Sellars’ notion and the traditional educational ideal as I have developed and defended it in my own work, or that the Sellarsian view as developed by McDowell resolves outstanding difficulties with my version of the traditional view. I will argue that there is less tension than there appears to some of my critics to be and that the Sellarsian notion is in fact compatible with the traditional view as thus developed, but that it leaves out an important aspect of that view that should not be lost.