The Unappreciated Rejection of Equal Educational Opportunity
We take public schooling and compulsory education laws for granted, a fixed star in an otherwise highly politicized and contested public policy universe. We also take for granted the idea that schools are an engine of opportunity, a vehicle for realizing the American Dream, the ticket for talented and hard-working children out of poverty. Yet something very important has changed over the past generation, at least in the United States, about how public education is provided to children and the role that schools play in a society dedicated, at least in principle, to opportunity for all.
We have left behind the aspiration to equal educational opportunity, and we have substituted for it the far less inspiring ideal of adequacy. Should public schooling strive to give every child an equal educational opportunity? Or is the state’s obligation to ensure that every child receives an adequate education? Over the past thirty years, education law and policy has answered these questions by saying adequacy is good enough. This is a big mistake: adequacy is inadequate when it comes to the provision of primary and secondary education.
In 1954 the United States Supreme Court famously held in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education that when a state provides children an education, such an opportunity
“is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.”
Nearly twenty years later, a school finance case came before the United States Supreme Court, in San Antonio v. Rodriguez. The Court found that the U.S. Constitution did not treat education as a fundamental right and that it was no violation of “equal protection under the law” if one school district spent $5,000 per student per year while a neighboring district spent $15,000 per student per year. This was the first step away from making education available to all on equal terms.
Thurgood Marshall, the legal architect of the Brown case, had become a Supreme Court Justice. He recognized the significance of the Rodriguez decision and issued a stinging dissent.
In my judgment, the right of every American to an equal start in life, so far as the provision of a state service as important as education is concerned, is far too vital to permit state discrimination on grounds as tenuous as those presented by this record.
It’s no simple thing to define what “an equal start” in life would be. But the fact of the matter is that we no longer even try to do so. Schools now aim for an adequate start in life, not an equal start. We live in an era of education policy that seeks to guarantee educational adequacy, not educational equality. Educational advocates attempt to specify what would constitute “enough” education to satisfy the law: is it attaining a high school diploma? reaching proficiency on state subject matter tests? learning enough to serve knowledgeably on a jury?
There are many reasons why the shift from equality to adequacy in education is a bad development. Explaining why is the focus on some of my recent scholarly work.
The most obvious reason why adequacy is inadequate is that an adequate education gives official state sanction to massive inequalities in funding and in achievement above whatever the state sets as the adequacy threshold. Adequacy is complacent public policy, all the more so in an era of record and growing income and wealthy inequality. It cements into place enormous inequalities in public funding, resources, facilities, and even academic achievement.
I write about this in detail in “Equality, Adequacy, and K-12 Education” in a new book I put together with Danielle Allen.
Beyond this particular topic, the book has some fantastic contributions from economists, political scientists, philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists. It attempts to steer the conversation about educational policy away from its current debased state of political sniping about whether the Common Core represents an overreach of the federal government. Instead, the contributors focus attention on what matters most in educational policy: clarity about the aims we have in funding public education in the first place and compelling children to attend school.
Getting clear about equality and adequacy within educational policy is just one approach to a better conversation about education.
