The ideal of equality of opportunity plays an important role in contemporary social and political discourse, and it is one of the few ideals which most people, across the political spectrum, accept. In this article, I argue that the seemingly widespread agreement about the value of equal opportunity is more apparent than real. I distinguish…

This paper reveals how equal educational opportunities, equal job opportunities and equality of opportunity for welfare are related to each other, and how they are related to other demands for justice. There are several important objections to the emphasis on equal educational opportunities. Nevertheless, this paper shows that demanding equal…

Secondary education schools in the United States routinely distribute differential educational provisions to students through a widely implemented tracking system. This article aims to show that this tracking system is unjust. It begins with a characterization of the tracking system as it is typically implemented in the United States, and its…

How can access to public elementary schools of variable quality be justly distributed within a school district? Two reasonable criteria are: (a) that children should have equal opportunity to attend high-quality schools, and (b) school assignment policies should foster an overall increase in the number of high-quality schools. This article…

The expectation that schools resuscitate civic virtues and create a vibrant civic and public sphere competes with a more powerful contemporary demand on schools, namely, that they generate equal opportunity and mobility, especially for poor and minority youth. This equal opportunity is framed solely in the context of grades on standardized tests.…

Many egalitarians believe that there is a pro tanto reason to remedy inequalities of opportunity in access to higher education. This consensus, I argue, masks practical disagreement among egalitarians: in many real-world choice contexts, egalitarians will disagree about which policies are to be endorsed, both from the point of view of equality and…

Two approaches to making judgments about moral urgency in educational policy have prevailed in American law and public policy. One approach holds that educational policy should aspire to realizing equal opportunities in education for all. The other approach holds that educational policy should aspire to realizing adequate opportunities in…

Political liberalism, conceived of as a response to the diversity of conceptions of the good in multicultural societies, aims to put forward a proposal for how to organize political institutions that is acceptable to a wide range of citizens. It does so by remaining neutral between reasonable conceptions of the good while giving all citizens a…

The current debate about student privacy issues raised by education technology focuses on how schools information with private vendors. It neglects a related but different trend, namely, the rise of online learning platforms offering learning experiences and credentials directly to users. These Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Virtual…

Adam Swift objects to private schools on the grounds of equal opportunity and efficiency, and to both private and selective public schools on the grounds of solidarity and improving the academic achievement of less advantaged students. I argue that private schools are not inefficient, and that a meritocratic ideal of equality of opportunity in…

Howard's moral fortification theory of criminal punishment lends itself to justifying correction for children in schools that is supportive. There are good reasons to include other students in the learning opportunity occasioned by doing right in response to wrong, which need not exploit the wrongdoing student as a mere means. Care ethics can…

In this article, I propose and defend a certain model of a fair Educational Standard, where this represents the minimally adequate threshold conditions and resources that any just society will devote to the grade school education of its youth. Starting with suggestions made by Harry Frankfurt, I argue that this Standard may be initially founded…

Selection within the educational domain breeds a special kind of suspicion. Whether it is the absence of transparency in the selection procedure, the observable outcomes of the selection, or the criteria of selection itself, there is much to corroborate the suspicion many have that selection in practice is unfair. And certainly as it concerns…

In this article, I critique the foremost proponents of the adequacy and equity approaches to educational equality. I identify tensions within the adequacy approach related to positionality in education, fostering a democratic elite through higher education, and its defense of private schooling. In contrast, equity theorists are vulnerable to the…

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. (Contains 11 notes.)