Equality of Opportunity and Equality of Outcome (original) (raw)

Equality of Educational Opportunity A 40 Year Retrospective

International Studies in Educational Inequality, Theory and Policy, 2007

Guess what Coleman's found? Schools make no difference; families make the difference.-S. M. Lipset to D. P. Moynihan, as quoted by Hodgson (1975, p. 22) These words captured the popular perception of the new report by James Coleman and his colleagues, Equality of Educational Opportunity (Coleman et al., 1966). Released on July 4, 1966, in a vain attempt to avoid publicity for what were regarded as politically intemperate findings, the report was supposed to document what most assumed to be true: poor and minority children performed poorly in school because their schools lacked resources. Instead, the Coleman report (as it became known) discovered that differences among schools in average resources were not nearly as great as expected, and the impact of school resources on student achievement was modest compared to the impact of students' family backgrounds. Of course, this did not mean that "schools make no difference"; in fact, as subsequent research has shown, schools matter a great deal for student learning. However, Coleman's findings indisputably documented that variation between schools in their resource levels mattered little for variation among individual students, a result that remains the seminal finding in U.S. sociology of education.

Equality of Educational Opportunity: A Myth or Reality in U.S. Schooling

2000

P ublic schooling is often regarded as "the great equalizer" in American society. For more than 100 years, so the story goes, children all across the country have had an equal opportunity to master the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. As a result, any student willing to work hard has the chance to go as far as his or her talent allows, regardless of family origin or socioeconomic status.

What is equality of opportunity in education

There is widespread disagreement about what equality of opportunity in education requires. For some it is that each child is legally permitted to go to school. For others it is that each child receives the same educational resources. Further interpretations abound. This fact presents a problem: when politicians or academics claim they are in favour of equality of opportunity in education, it is unclear what they mean and debate is hindered by mutual misunderstanding. In this article, I introduce a framework to ameliorate this problem. More specifically, I develop an important but neglected framework for the concept of equality of opportunity and apply it to examine particular conceptions of equality of opportunity in education. In doing this, I hope to produce a piece of applied conceptual analysis that can both help clarify existing positions within the equality of opportunity in education debate and allow those seeking to produce new positions to express them more clearly.

Fair Opportunity in Education: A Democratic Equality Perspective

Ethics, 2007

Recent work on justice in the distribution of educational opportunities has focused on two phenomena. The first is the shift in the United States from an "equality" to an "adequacy" standard of fair educational opportunity. Instead of making the state provide equal educational inputs to rich and poor children, advocates for the disadvantaged, courts, and policy makers have been trying to make the state educate all students to at least an adequate threshold of achievement. 1 The second is the fact that education is not just an intrinsic good for the individual but an important instrumental good with positional features. It opens up access to the most rewarding careers and leadership positions in society in virtue of endowing individuals with relatively superior qualifications. Because such high payoffs are attached to an individual's relative academic achievement in the competition for rewarding careers, one person's gain in educational achievement is another's loss of socioeconomic prospects. This consideration has led many egalitarians to reject adequacy standards for educational opportunity and insist that the stateand even parents-should constrain their educational investments in children according to an equality standard. Only so, it is argued, can individuals have genuinely fair opportunities, and only so can the state avoid unjustly injuring the already disadvantaged by effectively closing

Educational equality versus educational adequacy

Some theorists argue that rather than advocating a principle of educational equality as a component of a theory of justice in education, egalitarians should adopt a principle of educational adequacy. This paper looks at two recent attempts to show that adequacy, not equality, constitutes justice in education. It responds to the criticisms of equality by claiming that they are either unsuccessful or merely show that other values are also important, not that equality is not important. It also argues that a principle of educational adequacy cannot be all there is to justice in education.

Putting educational equality in its place

Educational equality is one important value of justice in education, but it is only one. This article makes a case for a meritocratic principle of educational equality and shows that certain arguments against that principle do not justify rejecting it. It would be wrong to, for the sake of educational equality, undermine the value of the family or economic growth in ways that damage the prospects for flourishing of the least advantaged. But insofar as educational equality can be improved without harming those other values, it should be pursued; in practice, educational equality can be pursued effectively within the limits set by those values.

Opportunity to Learn and Conceptions of Educational Equality

Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 1995

Focusing on the equity aspect of proposals for making opportunity-to-learn standards integral to an accountability system, this article discusses conceptual issues surrounding determination of equal educational opportunity and explores ways that these issues manifest themselves in empirical formulations of opportunity to learn (OTL). Using two databases, OTL measures are developed according to three alternative conceptions of equality-the Libertarian, Liberal, and Democratic Liberal conceptions-and the influence of these conceptions on the information provided is compared. This examination shows the intimate relation between values on equality and measures of equality and brings these issues to the fore for discussion by educators and policymakers.