Fair Opportunity in Education: A Democratic Equality Perspective

Abstract

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. 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 state— and 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