This article explores the ways that philosophy and evidence interact in the exploration of normative questions in philosophy of education. First, the authors provide a description of reflective equilibrium, a central method in normative philosophizing. They proceed to describe three tasks of normative philosophy, each of which requires engagement…

Collaborative community-based research can bring a range of benefits to universities, communities, and the public more broadly. A distinct virtue of collaborative community-based research is that it makes the ethical-epistemic intersections and challenges in research a focal point of its methodology. This makes collaborative community-based…

Educational thought and research often operates with whole-race ("Black", "White", and "Asian") and whole-class ("low-income") categories. For both explaining disparities and assessing them normatively, it is essential to pay attention to subdivisions within those groups. Regarding affirmative action, on…

This article argues that in divided societies, civic education fails to fulfill one of its most important social role: creating a more inclusive society that allows a democratic dialogue to flow across different ideological, religious, and cultural communities. This failure is grounded in two main reasons. First, civics teachers are socially and…

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…

This article explores some general considerations bearing on the question of whether virtue can be measured. What is moral virtue? What are measurement and evaluation, and what do they presuppose about the nature of what is measured or evaluated? What are the prospective contexts of, and purposes for, measuring or evaluating virtue, and how would…

A major objection to the study of virtue asserts that the empirical psychological evidence implies traits have little meaningful impact on behavior, as slight changes in situational characteristics appear to lead to large changes in virtuous behavior. We argue in response that the critical evidence is not these effects of situations observed in…

The neo-Kohlbergian model revises and extends Lawrence Kohlberg's model of moral reasoning development to better reflect advances in research and theory. In moving from Kohlberg's global stage model to a multi-process description of moral functioning, these modifications are most evident in the ways in which moral thinking is described,…

The ethics assessment industry is currently dominated by the second version of the Defining Issues Test (DIT2). In this article, we describe an alternative assessment instrument called the Sphere-Specific Moral Reasoning and Theory Survey (SMARTS), which measures the respondent's level of moral development in several respects. We describe eight…

"What are you doing?" and "How is it going?" are foundational questions we can ask of agents. They elicit answers that illuminate aspects of well-doing, or felicitous action, by directing attention to an agent's personal projects. Personal projects are constitutive elements of daily existence and are consequential for a…

Poor construct definition has characterized research on virtue, beginning with Hartshorne and May's honesty studies and continuing to the present. Recently, scholars have begun to define virtues in ways that improve the prospects for measuring virtue constructs, but a coordinated, programmatic approach is necessary for success in virtue…

In this article, I suggest that the question whether the proper place for philosophy of education is in the domain of philosophy or the domain of education cannot be resolved as long as we think of the connection between philosophy and education in terms of the idea of "philosophy of education". To substantiate this point, I look into…

This article largely agrees with John White's characterizations of the relationships among philosophy of education, philosophy more generally, and the conventional world. It then extends what White identifies as the fundamental problem that should now be occupying philosophy of education--the irreconcilable opposition between education for…

This essay takes up John White's argument for an engagement and collaboration of philosophy of education with other disciplines, and in particular with other forms of educational research. It examines the benefits and risks of "situated" or "embedded" philosophy as well as Hannah Arendt's claims about the separation of…

John White offers a provocative characterization of philosophy of education. In this brief reaction, I evaluate the characterization and urge the maintenance of a strong connection between philosophy of education and philosophy.