PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION 1994

JUSTICE AND THE THRESHOLD OF
EDUCATIONAL EQUALITY

Randall R. Curren
University of Rochester


There is no one idea of educational equality or equal educational opportunity. Nor, among the many that have been formulated, is there any one idea of it that is obviously superior to its rivals. There are several reasons for this. One is that these ideas are often only vaguely formulated. This breeds confusion. It makes their merits and deficiencies hard to assess without a good deal of analysis, and that analysis is not always forthcoming. Another reason is that it is hard to find decisive grounds favoring any one conception of equal education over and against all the others. This is true, in turn, not only because decisive grounds for interesting conclusions are hard to come by in general, even when one is not particularly confused, but for three special reasons as well.

The first of these special sources of difficulty is that although equality has the appearance of something simple, straightforward, and appealing, it is not attainable in its simple, ideal form by human communities. The forms of equality that are attainable stand opposed to each other along a whole host of dimensions of form.1 One example of this arises from the fact that human beings are not completely alike in what they value or derive benefit from. Since they are not, the simple and appealing idea of everyone having the same valuable things divides into the somewhat opposed ideas of everyone having the same things (which has been called “lot-regarding” equality) and everyone being alike in how much they value or benefit from what they have (which has been called “person-regarding” equality).2 In this and like ways the one gives rise to the many, and in this process of division the appeal of simple equality is spread awkwardly among incompatible alternatives. Thus impoverished by its wealth of progeny, the ideal of equality cannot impose order in its own house. Equality itself can scarcely dictate, in Orwellian fashion, that although all forms of equality are equal, some are more equal than others. It plays no favorites among its offspring. So specifying even just the formal dimensions of a well-defined conception of equality demands recourse to considerations beyond the ideal of equality itself, and this complicates the theorist’s work in a way that is not always appreciated.

A second source of special difficulty in securing the foundations of a concept of educational equality or equal educational opportunity is that questions about the substance of the education or educational opportunities to be equalized will turn on what the aims of the education are to be. Given this role of aims or goals in determining the substance of equality in education, no conception of equality will be adequately grounded unless the identification of the aims involved is also well grounded. Yet the identification of aims almost never is well grounded, either in theory or in practice, and little attention is ever directed toward rectifying this. Many aims are suggested by both theorists and reformers, but almost never on the strength of any serious normative justification.

Indeed, the choice between “equal education” and “equal educational opportunity” is itself substantially determined by the choice of aims, since the most obvious reason for lowering one’s sights from equality per se to mere equality of opportunity is that the kind of thing we aim to distribute fairly is something which cannot be distributed universally. Most notably, if one takes the central goal of education to lie beyond the immediate results of instruction, in something like the broadening of life options or the enhancement of socio-economic status, then one will almost certainly speak of “equal educational opportunity,” and take its substance to be something like the equalization of life prospects or prospects of middle class status, or, more modestly and plausibly, the equalization of opportunity to get an education that will improve those prospects. This latter, more modest notion of equal educational opportunity may itself be understood in at least two ways: as education that makes all children equally likely to enjoy those forms of academic success that facilitate the attainment of the desired social or economic rewards (this is a prospect-regarding form of equality of opportunity), or education which provides all children with the same opportunities or means to achieving such academic success (this is a form of means-regarding equality of opportunity).3

By contrast, to the extent that one is concerned with goals which are more nearly universally attainable, and more directly and immediately attained in the course of instruction, then it becomes possible to speak of “educational equality.” Indeed, the language of equality will sometimes be more accurate than the language of equal opportunity, for an exclusive reliance on the latter idiom would suggest incorrectly that educating is always simply a matter of offering opportunities which children will be left to take advantage of or not as they wish.

A third and final special difficulty in securing the foundations of a concept of equality is that to succeed one must not only justify some conception of the aims of education, but also justify state control over some relevant domain of allocation or pool of resources which can be distributed. The extent to which the resources justifiably controlled by the state coincide with those required to fully attain the goals which are justified is quite important to the character of the equality one will be able to defend. To insist that a state is accountable for the equal distribution of a domain of goods (a “domain of account”) which it controls only a portion of (its “domain of allocation”) is going to create tensions, especially if there are good reasons why it should not control much more of that domain of account than it already does.4 These tensions will tend to push one away from a strategy of “global equalization” (that is, equalization with respect to the entire domain of account), and towards a variety of less ambitious alternatives. The proper scope of state powers and resources is quite a difficult matter in its own right, of course, and this suggests that the difficulties in establishing the legitimacy or necessity of any conception of equality in education are fairly staggering, all told.

Still, if these are some of the reasons why education theorists have become “bogged down in conceptualizing what educational equality really mean[s],”5 the outlook is not hopeless. Recognizing the variety of difficulties at stake should facilitate progress, and I hope the pages that follow will provide a fruitful illustration of this. I will offer towards the end of this paper an argument in defense of what I will call a threshold of social inclusion. This threshold may turn out to be no more than a component of a properly comprehensive conception of educational equality, for it does justice to no more than one of the educational aims for which adequate defense might be found, but it has the virtues of being both substantial in its practical implications and relatively easy to defend.

I arrived at this notion of educational equality in part through reflecting on the deficiencies of Amy Gutmann’s well-known “democratic threshold” of equal educational opportunity,6 and I think it will be helpful to illustrate the remarks just concluded, and prepare the ground for the defense of my alternative, by explaining what I take those deficiencies to be. That is what I will now do, beginning with the prima facie advantages of thresholds of equality, as an alternative to absolute relational equality. Having done that, I will then present my alternative.

A threshold of equality seems, on the face of it, to be a threshold, or level of investment or attainment, below which no relevant individual will be allowed to fall. Equality under a threshold may thus be no more than a kind of relative equality, since a threshold is a kind of “floor” but not a “ceiling.” To the extent that it mandates efforts to raise those falling below the specified “floor” to a level that is no longer below it, it may reduce inequality, but it does not aim to eliminate it. It imposes no upper bound on permissible variations in investment or attainment above the floor it imposes. An ideal of equality cast in the form of a threshold is thus a weaker or less pure form of equality than a strictly relational one, which would impose pair-wise equality between all the individuals or blocks of individuals in a population or segment of a population.7 It would also appear to be a more easily attainable form of equality than its purely relational counterpart, unless the threshold is set so high as to eliminate any variation above it. (That is, unless it is set so high that it would impose pure relational equality on the population in question. I’ll call a threshold of this kind a maximal threshold, and one that is so low that no intervention is required to bring every member of a population above it a minimal threshold.) Ease of attainment is an advantage of considerable importance because equality of educational outcomes in particular is often regarded as generally unattainable,8 but also more significant in important ways than equality of inputs. The relative equality mandated by an outcome threshold that is moderately difficult to attain seems an attractive compromise by this measure. A related advantage is that equalization up to such a threshold would also appear to be less vulnerable to the charge that any prospect of attainment would depend upon unacceptable infringement of individual and family autonomy. Thus, there are apparent general advantages to thinking in terms of thresholds of equality somewhere on the scale between the minimal and maximal endpoints I have described.

The best known attempt to develop a view of this kind is Gutmann’s notion of a “democratic threshold” of equality, but I will argue that her vaguely delineated “threshold” does not have the virtues which thresholds might generally be expected to. In fact, the “threshold” she describes is vulnerable to exactly the objections which she makes against one of the alternatives she rejects, the so-called “equalization” view of equality. Thus, I will clarify and object to the form which her concept of equality takes. In doing that, I will also pave the way for some doubts about the substantive foundations of her threshold.

The most plausible alternative to Gutmann’s threshold which she considers is what she calls the equalization view of equal educational opportunity. According to this view the state must “use education to raise the life chances of the least advantaged (as far as possible) up to those of the most advantaged.”9 It must pursue prospect-regarding equality with respect to life outcomes, in other words. Since those prospects are presumably influenced by factors other than the amount and quality of educational resources bestowed by the state, equalization entails a strategy of compensatory inequality in the distribution of those resources. This gives rise to Gutmann’s most fundamental objection, which is that this compensatory strategy may entail that children with better than average prospects will receive no state education, if the resources available do not raise the worse off to either parity or some plateau short of it. This she takes to be unacceptable, as she does the interference in family life and homogenization of children which a full or global equalization of prospects would arguably require. These are problems which arise from insisting on global equality in the face of morally significant barriers to expanding a relatively limited domain of allocation.

Gutmann’s alternative to equalization has two parts. The first is her democratic authorization principle, which grants authority “to democratic institutions to determine the priority of education relative to other social goods.”10 The second is her democratic threshold principle, according to which “inequalities in the distribution of educational goods can be justified if, but only if, they do not deprive any child of the ability to participate effectively in the democratic process.”11

Having stated these principles, she then reveals an important feature of her “threshold” principle when she observes that it limits the discretion which may be exercised under the “authorization” principle, by “imposing a moral requirement that democratic institutions allocate sufficient resources to education to provide all children with an ability adequate to participate in the democratic process.”12 This makes it clear that when the threshold principle refers to “the distribution of educational goods” this does not mean merely “the distribution of those educational goods which the state chooses or is presently able to distribute” (that is, the presently available domain of allocation). For in that case, given the way the principle is formulated, it would have distributive implications which are quite restrictive at low levels of investment in education (specifically, it would demand equality in the enjoyment of whatever educational goods the state made available, if those goods were insufficient to enable everyone to participate “effectively” in democratic processes), but no implications whatsoever for how much should be invested. Since Gutmann does take it to have such implications, we must understand the threshold principle to cover every form of educational good present in a society, whether or not the state itself has had anything to do with its distribution.

If this is true, however, then there is first, and most trivially, an inaccuracy in Gutmann’s description of the baseline of resource allocation which this creates. Given the terms of her threshold principle, what must be allocated is enough educational resources to ensure that everyone is enabled to participate effectively in democratic processes, not simply that they be enabled to participate, as she says. This, then, is the baseline part of her democratic threshold, represented by the horizontal line b indicated in Figure 1. It is an absolute or non-comparative threshold, which represents some minimum level of ability to participate “effectively” in democratic processes.

FIG 1

FIGURE 1.

To this baseline Gutmann later adds the complicating observation that “the threshold of an ability to participate effectively in democratic politics is likely to demand more and better education for all citizens as the average level and quality of education in our society increases.”13 Educational adequacy is thus relative and “dependent on the particular social context,” she says, and she suggests that since this is true “the best way of determining what adequacy practically entails may be a democratic decision-making process that follows upon public debate and deliberation.”14 Ignoring for the moment this last suggestion, the idea seems to be that some gap between the most and least democratically capable members of society is compatible with universal “effective” participation, but that this gap cannot become too big or the effectiveness of the less capable will be compromised.

The effect of this observation is to define a composite threshold consisting of an absolute or non-relational baseline segment (b in Figure 2), whose length corresponds to the acceptable gap or distance between the most and least capable citizens, and a relational segment (r in Figure 2) which rises from the baseline and runs parallel to the line of strict equality (e in Figure 2) at the fixed distance from it corresponding to that acceptable difference in democratic capabilities.

FIG 2.

FIGURE 2.

The relational component of this democratic threshold is just what one would expect, given Gutmann’s original statement of the threshold, and the plausible premise that participation in democratic politics is a competitive form of activity. But this means that her threshold is defined in a way that is parasitic on the concept of equalization, and differs from it only in establishing a baseline of mandatory education and tolerating some deviation from strict equality. The form of equalization which she rejects is one with a different goal from her own, of course, but even the combination of these differences leaves her threshold vulnerable to the criticisms she brings against equalization. Simply put, one cannot escape the difficulties inherent in global equalization simply by opening up a modest zone of acceptable deviation from pure equality and lopping off the lower end of the curve.

Putting this more concretely (if no less graphically) one can assert that there could be enough privileged and highly influential people to render the political capabilities of others comparatively ineffectual, perhaps by shaping the terms of public debate in unseen ways, thereby placing their society to the right of r in Figure 2. Even though the problem is somewhat less acute than it would be for strict equalization, the solution which is called for is the same, if this influential minority has secured its influence even without the advantage of any public schooling: either pour public resources into the least capable, while excluding the more capable, or interfere with families and children in ways that Gutmann rejects. Unless one can confidently say that even very large differences of political efficacy are tolerated by her threshold, one must concede that the relative equalization which it demands will entail essentially the same problems as equalization.15

Of course, this raises the question of how well defined this threshold is in the first place. Perhaps the most important difficulty in this regard is what could possibly be meant by “effective” participation in democratic processes. To do something effectively normally means to do it in such a way as to produce the effect one desires, but it is hard to see how this could be a standard for participation in democratic processes, unless one is contemplating a citizenry with very low expectations. Even if all one hopes for is that the votes one casts be effective in the sense of being the ones most consistent with one’s interests, there would seem to be no end to the education that would be necessary.

Gutmann hopes to sidestep demands to produce a clearer standard by suggesting, as I noted above, that the job of producing such clarity is best left to the democratic decision-making process itself. This will seem to many an appropriate concession, but I think it is not. This threshold of democratic equality is meant to establish a democracy-preserving limitation on the discretion of democratic majorities. Majoritarian deliberations about the setting of this threshold would be suspect in the same way that such deliberations regarding encumbrance of minority voting rights would be. If Gutmann is on the right track in the first place, then voting rights and politically significant education must both meet some fair standard of equality as a precondition for democratic processes being fair.

This brings us, finally, to the foundational argument that politically enabling education is essential to the effective use of constitutionally recognized rights to speak and to vote, and thus should count as a constitutionally recognized fundamental interest. Without discussing the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of this argument in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez,16 Gutmann does try to find evidence that some such argument as this has gained a foothold in the law.17 The case is not a strong one, however. In Rodriguez, the Court acknowledged that education is relevant to the effective use of constitutionally guaranteed rights to speak and vote, but it did not concede that any “identifiable quantum of education is a constitutionally protected prerequisite to the exercise of either right.”18

Again, one might argue not from the U.S. Constitution, but from fundamental principles of political morality, or a morally grounded conception of democracy, that a legitimate political system, or a proper democracy, requires the threshold of educational equal opportunity which Gutmann recommends. She does not produce any such argument, however, and I don’t think it would be easy to do so. So, although the idea of a democratic threshold of equality is an intuitively attractive idea, it is less secure in its foundations, less substantively determinate, and less attractive in its form than one might have hoped.

This having been said, I will state my own argument, then comment briefly on it:

  1. No state exists without law, and its enforcement.

  2. Compliance with law rests in some measure in education, broadly conceived, and can be secured neither in fact, nor justly, through force alone.

  3. More specifically, there are a number of distinct ways in which good education contributes to a child’s capacity for compliance, and likelihood of compliance, and corresponding ways in which bad education contributes to the risk or likelihood of criminality. These bear on the extent to which a person is socially marginalized within and beyond the school, and include the quality of teacher-student relationships (which is known to be related to the rate at which crimes are committed in schools),19 and the influence of education on employment status and on socio-economic status relative to the standards of one’s society (since unemployment is a significant predictor for criminality, as is low status in a highly stratified society).20

  4. In order to establish a just rule of law, then (in light of 2), a commonwealth must assume responsibility for ensuring that whatever education is essential to general compliance takes place.

  5. Punishment under any system of law involves a loss or suspension of fundamental rights, so compliance with law is a condition for the secure enjoyment of those rights.

  6. A fundamental requirement of justice is that the state not put some citizens more at risk than others of suffering a loss or suspension of fundamental rights through unequal distribution of goods whose distribution it has a duty to oversee.
  7. Therefore, it is a requirement of justice that those educational goods fundamental to securing general compliance with law be equally distributed.

  8. This establishes a baseline threshold of global lot-regarding equality in the enjoyment of those educational goods which are necessary to creating a reasonable prospect of compliance with law. The criterion for the prospect being a “reasonable” one is that comparable prospects for all will suffice to produce general compliance.

  9. This will include, in the first place, an assurance that the psycho-social conditions essential to the progress of moral development be available to every child, and this may entail both a greater attention and commitment to enabling families to provide those conditions themselves, and a similar commitment to enabling schools to do so. The latter would focus on factors related to the moral climate of the school and classroom, and to the continuity and tone of teacher-student contact. These factors would include school size, classroom organization, the total number of students taught by each teacher, the role of any security personnel in the school, and the number of periods in the school day.

  10. To satisfy this threshold it may also be necessary to untrack schools that are tracked, if tracking undermines the cohesiveness of the school community, or if it contributes to the demoralizing stratification of the larger society. It may well do both. We know that the classrooms into which lower-SES students tend to be tracked are notably lacking in trust, cooperation, and goodwill. Moreover, there is some evidence, noted by Jeannie Oakes and others,21 suggesting that the characteristics of those classrooms contribute to the higher incidence of misconduct and criminality among students assigned to them.

  11. Finally, in light of the relationship between criminality and unemployment, noted in proposition 3, this threshold would seem to demand at a minimum that all students be adequately prepared for at least one viable occupation. It should be noted well, however, that this minimal implication for educational policy follows only in conjunction with a policy of full employment. Without full employment what justice would seem to require is some form of full equalization, since without full employment there is no educational good sufficient to insure employment which could be universally distributed. Full employment is a preferable solution, however, and might be defended through modification of the foregoing argument.

This argument demands more elaboration than I will be able to give it here, but in closing I would note first that it has the advantage of turning on the idea of state action, putting one at risk of losing a right altogether, at least for a time, rather than the more elusive notion of the “effectiveness” of one’s use of a right. This puts the appeal to a principle of equal protection of the law on a more secure, if not uncontroversial, footing. Secondly, it has the advantage of identifying a simple baseline threshold, which has the attractions noted at the start, which Gutmann’s threshold turned out not to have. Finally, though a modest proposal by many standards, it has real teeth, for it speaks to the crises of our time in a way that a “democratic threshold,” laudable as it is, does not.22

For a response to this essay, see Howe.

1. Douglas Rae and his coauthors develop a highly illuminating analysis of the dimensions along which equality divides in Equalities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), Ch. 2.

2. Ibid., Ch. 5.

3. Ibid., 64-76.

4. Ibid., Ch. 3.

5. Jeannie Oakes, Keeping Track (Hew Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), xiii.

6. Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 136-39.

7. See Rae, Equalities, Ch. 2.

8. See, for example, James Coleman, Equality and Achievement in Education (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990), 63-65.

9. Gutmann, Democratic Education, 131.

10. Ibid., 136.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., 139.

14. Ibid., 137.

15. Except that the aim which her threshold rests on is decidedly more compelling than the one at stake in the form of equalization she critiques.

16. San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1 (1973).

17. Gutmann, Democratic Education, 137.

18. San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S., 36.

19. The impact on crime rates within schools of school size, teacher attitudes, and factors related to the extent of teacher contact with individual students is borne out by studies of school crime summarized in the California State Office of the Attorney.

General’s School Security Handbook (Sacramento, 1981), 12. I would suggest that these factors make a difference, at least in part, through the difference they make to the moral socialization of students, and that one should therefore expect them to play a role in the incidence of crime not only within schools but outside of them.

20. See Elliott Currie, Confronting Crime (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 104 ff. and 144 ff.

21. Oakes, Keeping Track, 134; and California State Office of the Attorney General, School Security Handbook, 12.

22. This paper was written with the support of a grant from the Spencer Foundation, and benefited from conversations with John Bennett, Marion Dwyer, Richard Feldman, and Tyll van Geel.

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