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You
are here: Schools Can't Do It Alone:
A Broader Conception of Equality of Educational Opportunity
If education be equally diffused, it will draw property after it, by the strongest of all attractions: for such a thing never did happen, as that an intelligent and practical body of men should he permanently poor. Property and labor, in different classes, are essentially antagonistic; but property and labor, in the same class, are essentially fraternal . . . Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men-- the balance-wheel of the social machinery. --Horace Mann, 1849
The Importance of Equality of Educational Opportunity in American Life
I wish to take the opportunity to inform readers of a book I wrote a few years ago which I still consider highly relevant. The intent of In the Shadow of "Excellence": Recovering a Vision of Educational Opportunity For All (1999; also see articles from 2000-2002 attached to the reference list) is to reinvigorate the national commitment to equality of educational opportunity that characterized the 1960s and the 1970s. Given the historic correlation between educational attainment and occupational opportunities, equal educational opportunity is the logical and operational proxy for the more general ideal of equal occupational opportunity. As a result, the derivative concept takes on the quintessential American passion for the ideal of equal "life chances" for all, and it is our role as educators to make equality of educational opportunity a reality as opposed to a mere slogan.
But before we sign on to such a task, we must understand more clearly what equal educational opportunity actually means and requires, which will be the aim of the next section. I will then assess the status of equality of educational opportunity in the context of current standards-based reform efforts, commonly known as the "excellence movement," and conclude with some final remarks on the questions that drive the book. My hope is that after reading this piece readers will engage the book itself for a fuller picture of the argument, an argument which bears significant attention given the paucity of attention that equity concerns have received in the last two decades of educational reform.
The Story of Equality of Educational Opportunity in American Schooling
As citizens of a liberal and meritocratic state, Americans have always perceived public education as a ladder which the ablest children of all backgrounds can climb toward occupational and economic success. Thomas Jefferson dreamed of replacing the existing aristocracy of inherited privilege with a "natural aristocracy" of talent (letter to John Adams anthologized in Barber & Battistoni, 1993, p. 41). In his "Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge in the State of Virginia," Jefferson outlined a plan that called for three years of elementary education for all children and scholarships to grammar schools, and eventually the University of Virginia, for the most promising working class boys.
Horace Mann and Lyndon Johnson conceived of the purpose of education in similar terms. Mann, as evidenced in the quotation that frames this article, saw education as the single most powerful tool with which to erase rigid class distinctions. Johnson also saw education as the remedy for socioeconomic inequality, initiating compensatory programs like Head Start, Chapter One, and Upward Bound. Unlike his predecessors, Johnson included African Americans and Native Americans in his vision for equalizing educational opportunity. He recognized that improving education for minority children was one of the nation's principal unfinished tasks (Kantor & Lowe, 1995).
Ironically, it was Johnson's faith in education that set in motion a chain of events that sobered Americans' confidence in public education as the "great equalizer." Johnson's Civil Rights Act of 1964 called for a survey and report on "the lack of availability of equal educational opportunities for individuals by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin" in public education (quoted in Aaron, 1978, p. 75). The findings of the Equality of Educational Opportunity Survey (1966), constructed by a team led by James Coleman, surprised everyone, including Coleman himself. In short, traditional measures of school quality-- instructional facilities, curriculum materials, and teacher pay were not as unequal across majority black and majority white schools as had been assumed, and thus did not sufficiently explain significant achievement differences between the two groups.
The Coleman Report, and Christopher Jencks' (et al.) Inequality (1972) and the Rand Corporation's How Effective is Schooling? (1972) after it, concluded that the family backgrounds of students - a variable that was designed to capture racial, economic, cultural, and community impacts on the cognitive development of children - exercised a far greater influence on children's scholastic achievement than their schooling experiences. The Rand study concluded by asking "whether our educational problems are, in fact, school problems. The most profitable line of attack on educational problems may not, after all, be through the schools" (Averch et al., 1972, p. vii). In anecdotal reference to a quip that a Harvard scholar reportedly made to a colleague upon reviewing the Coleman Report, these studies have come to be known collectively as the "schools don't make a difference" research.
Now, one of the proper responses of the educational community to Coleman's discovery was to look inside the opaque box of schooling, beneath macro-inputs such as building and textbook quality, and to begin to examine actual school processes such as cultural bias and curricular tracking that impact minority students in undesirable ways. But I wish to look at a different response, more philosophical than empirical. While in the process of carrying out the Equality of Educational Opportunity study, Coleman proposed what philosophers would call a "consequentialist," results-oriented alternative to the traditional input-based conception of equal educational opportunity: measuring the presence or absence of equal educational opportunity by the equalization over time of average academic achievement between children of different racial and socioeconomic groups; in other words, lessening the achievement gap.
I believe that Coleman was on the right track, as are scholars such as Thomas Green (1974), Kenneth Strike (1988), and Kenneth Howe (1989) who have followed him. Educational rhetoric in the tradition of Jefferson, Mann, and Johnson often had implied that children's total educational opportunities, those arising from family, community, and school, could be equalized by the powerful educative effects of formal schooling. Regardless of whether or not schools could actually deliver on this promise, the equal results standard, equal achievement across different racial and socioeconomic groups, was clearly truer to the American attitude toward education than was equal inputs. Of course, no one expects that schools produce equal scholastic achievement for all individuals or for all individuals within any particular group. Given the obvious differences among persons in ability and aspirations, this is an impossible and even undesirable standard. Finally, no one expects perfect equality of achievement across groups in this generation or any other. As Charles Frankel put it, equality of educational opportunity implies "a direction of effort, not a goal to be achieved" (1971, p. 209).
Following the lead of political philosophers like Onora O'Neill (1977) and William Galston (1986), I have described Coleman's results-oriented approach to equality of educational opportunity as "substantive," as opposed to merely formal. By invoking the familiar dichotomy between form and substance, I aim to help readers understand that the actual chances of educational success for any given child are what is morally important, not the simple provision of schooling. Obviously, the life chances of any particular child cannot be predicted with certainty, but we can attend to the current success rates of those who share her social background characteristics-- attributes such as racial identity, socioeconomic status, or family composition-- and from these aggregate figures draw inferences as to whether she merits special attention.
I do not propose that we obsess about comparisons between social groups defined by the above characteristics, or even that equality of achievement between these groups is a valid goal in and of itself. Attention to data such as this is simply a measure of our progress toward what is a worthy goal: an authentically equitable educational experience for all children born into our society from varying stations. If some are to outperform others, it should be due to superior talent and effort, rather than cumulative social and cultural advantages. When we approach equal educational opportunity in this way, Coleman's discovery becomes strikingly clear: schools cannot do it alone.
The substantive conception of equal opportunity rightfully forces us to separate education from mere schooling. Equalizing educational opportunities will require that entrenched socioeconomic disparities be attacked, and that those children who need it be wrapped up in a web of human-capital related social services that ensure that they arrive at school each day in a physical and mental condition to profit from it. Only then might Coleman's admittedly idealistic vision be approximated, and we should count on it taking more than one or two generations.
The Status of Equality of Opportunity in Recent Educational Policy
As described above, the Coleman Re port and the follow-up studies by Jencks and the Rand Corporation informed Americans that public schools were not as powerful relative to outside educational influences as they had traditionally assumed, and that simply equalizing traditional input measures such as facilities, curricula, and teacher quality could not be counted on to equalize the disparate academic success-rates of different ethnic and socioeconomic groups.
It is difficult to demonstrate a direct causal claim between the "schools don't make a difference" studies and the development of major compensatory education programs such as Head Start, Title One, and Upward Bound because two of these programs predate the publication of Coleman's study. However, the connection between Coleman's thesis and the justification of new compensatory education efforts is clear. As the name implies, the new compensatory education programs sought to make the overall educational opportunities of children of different social groups more equal by "compensating" for inequalities in children's academic preparation that arise from non-school sources such as families and neighborhoods. These compensatory programs are still in existence and are the subject of yearly budget debates on the part of policymakers with different understandings of, or levels of commitment to, equality of educational opportunity.
The ethos of equality that characterized educational policy-making in the 1960s and 1970s was dramatically overwhelmed by the rise of "excellence," typically interpreted as higher standards for all students, as the reigning ideal of the early 1980s. During the earliest wave of excellence-oriented reform, the idea of raising standards was intertwined with a "back-to-the-basics" motif. Frustrated by what they perceived as an undemanding, relativistic, individualistic curricular trend throughout the 1970s, many reformers called for longer schooldays and school-years, increased instructional time in core subjects like English, Mathematics, and Science, and more frequent tests of students' academic achievement. Or, as Gretchen Guiton and Jeannie Oakes put it: "more of the same as a way to improve education" (1995, p. 324).
A more recent wave of excellence-oriented reform, encompassing the late 1980s up until now, is more sophisticated than the first. The emphasis on higher academic standards has remained, but higher-order thinking and problem solving skills have replaced basic skills mastery as the pedagogical targets for all students, both "remedial" and advanced. While the question of whether or not bureaucrats in state-houses should construct universal curriculum standards and thus determine what all children in their respective states should know (to say nothing about recent aspirations to a national curriculum) is an interesting one, I fully support the more general move toward identifying as clearly as possible what students should be learning in school, and then testing to see if they indeed learn it.
However, the concern that motivates the book is that the architects of the new educational standards and high-stakes tests have not simultaneously held state and local school systems accountable for ensuring that traditionally disenfranchised populations receive the support they need to make passing the tests as likely as it is for their more fortunate peers. Equality of opportunity is typically mentioned in the reform documents that have framed the excellence movement, but in the absence of sustained attention one can conclude that it is mainly lip-service.
The fact that equity issues have received mere lip-service in the context of recent standards-based school reform was not inevitable. At the federal level, the recently expired Goals 2000: Educate America Act (1994), which has set the reform agenda in recent years, might have looked very different if the executive office and liberal Democrats in Congress had gotten their way. The original legislation proposed by Clinton's Department of Education included a third type of standards to stand by the familiar curriculum and performance standards: opportunity-to-learn (OTL) standards. Under the original proposal, states desiring to avail themselves of federal funds to support standards-based school reform were obligated to include a set of equity standards, addressing such matters as school finance equity, the quality of facilities and curriculum materials, and ongoing teacher training, that would ensure that all children from both wealthy and impoverished communities would receive the necessary support to meet the new academic standards.
The lessons of the Coleman Report described above informed policymakers that these changes would not in themselves equalize achievement across racial and socioeconomic groups, but Republicans and Southern Democrats in Congress would not even go this far. They successfully vanquished the OTL proposal, and states were not required to give evidence of attention to equity in the process of "reforming" their schools.
Now, one might protest that just because the states were not pushed by the Goals 2000 act to attend to equity issues does not mean that they would not take equity considerations seriously under their own volition. Sadly, three independent inquiries into the current status of equity concerns across the 50 states, conducted by such diverse entities as the American Federation of Teachers (1997), the Council of Chief State School Officers (1997), and the Consortium For Policy Research in Education (CPRE) at the University of Pennsylvania (1997), have all revealed that these issues have indeed received scant attention. Concerning opportunity-to-learn standards specifically, the CPRE study concluded that "in most of our states, as in most of the nation, opportunity- to-learn standards specifying the various learning conditions to which all students should have access were not on the policy agenda" (1997, p. 9).
My suggestion that we take OTL standards more seriously at the federal and/or state levels is fleshed out by five broad recommendations I make at the conclusion of the book:
1. Enhance the multicultural literacy of practicing and prospective teachers.
2. Reassess conventional ability grouping and tracking practices.
3. Reduce K-3 class size and elementary and secondary school size.
4. Expand and improve federal compensatory education programs.
5. Incorporate school reform into broader social and economic reform.Given the distinction made earlier between formal and substantive understandings of equal educational opportunity, I must clarify that while these recommendations operationalize both interpretations, my emphasis is on the latter. The first two recommendations, concerning multiculturally literate teachers and a proper caution against ability-- grouping practices respectively, can be justified by either interpretation. The importance of multicultural curriculum for our increasingly multicultural student body, and especially for historically marginalized populations, is clearly a formal access issue, as are ability grouping or tracking practices that result in inferior services for lower-track groups.
However, unlike the formal model, the substantive model does not rely upon some sort of discrimination claim when it protests against comprehensive (multisubject) forms of ability grouping, at least at the primary school level. Because the substantive model conceives of education in the most expansive sense possible, considering family and neighborhood influences along with formal schooling opportunities, it militates against separating primary school students even when the process is procedurally fair. According to the substantive model, comprehensive forms of ability grouping are not defensible until children have been in school long enough for educators to have properly distinguished between actual native ability and mere cultural advantages and disadvantages that have accumulated over time. Perhaps this is possible by children's intermediate and middle-school years, but not before then.
As for the last three recommendations, recall that the presence of substantive equality of educational opportunity is assessed by the degree of parity across racial and socioeconomic groups in terms of educational success. Clearly, the emphasis is not on simple equality of access and provision, but actually equipping the "underdogs" to compete against their more fortunate peers. Smaller classes and schools will help all students, but they will especially help disadvantaged students. Compensatory education is, by definition, providing a helping hand to those who need it and has little to do with formal equality of access or provision. Finally, egalitarian reforms in the broader economic sector are essential if non-mainstream students are to fully take advantage of their schooling. Just as a procedurally fair footrace would mean little to a starving runner, formally equitable schooling means little to otherwise impoverished children.
Concluding Remarks
In presenting my vision of substantive equality of educational opportunity and corresponding policy recommendations above. I have hopefully answered the "what" questions: What is the fairest way to organize society's institutions, particularly in regard to educating our children? And what policy changes must we make to get there?
The "who" question has been left implicit here. Upon reading this issue of New Horizons For Learning, readers will understand well how non-mainstream status, whether it be racial, socioeconomic, or linguistic in origin, can negatively impact a child's K-12 schooling experience, but I invite you to read the second chapter of the book, in which I offer a comprehensive summary of research concerning the actual processes of schooling that contribute to higher rates of failure for non-mainstream students.
This leads me to a final type of question, the "why" question. Why should we care about authenticating our society's claim to equality of educational opportunity? I devote the third chapter of the book to answering this question historically, where I argue that creating substantively equal life chances for all children coheres with the truest elements of America's liberal tradition. And I do not employ the term "liberal" in the present vernacular sense here, but rather in the historic sense that arises from the root of the term itself, "liberal" meaning "free." Amy Gutmann put it nicely when she states that all children deserve the "material prerequisites of liberal autonomy."
In our "credential society," as Randall Collins famously described it (1979), education ranks first among the prerequisites for meaningful self-actualization in society. As argued above, education does not equal schooling, and so we have to consider the whole range of educative influences, or lack thereof, that children from various sectors of society encounter as they grow up. But we likewise need to reform the schooling experience itself. A comprehensive, multi-institutional approach would comprise both elements, and the children of our social and political community deserve nothing less when it comes to their education.
References
Aaron, Henry. (1978). Politics and the Professors: The Great Society in Perspective. Washington D.C.: The Brookings Institution.
American Federation of Teachers. (1997). Making Standards Matter. Report published online; retrieved 2/11/03 from http://www.aft.org/edissues/standards/MSM2001/Index.htm .
Averch, Harvey A. et al. (1972). How Effective is Schooling? Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation.
Barber, Benjamin R. & Battistoni, Richard M. (1993). Education For Democracy: A Sourcebook for Students and Teachers. Duboque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company.
Coleman, James, et al. (1966). Equality of Educational Opportunity. Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Collins, Randall. (1979). The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education. New York: Academic Press. Inc.
Council of Chief State School Officers. (1997). Mathematics and Science Content Standards and Curriculum Frameworks: States Progress on Development and Implementation. Washington DC: Council of Chief State School Officers.
Frankel, Charles. (1971). "Equality of Opportunity". Ethics. Vol. 81, No. 3.
Galston, William. (1986). "Equality of Opportunity and Liberal Theory". In Frank S. Lucash, ed. Justice and Equality Here and Now. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Green, Thomas F.(1974). "Equal Educational Opportunity: The Durable Injustice". In Tesconi & Hurwitz, eds. Education for Whom? New York: Dodd, Mead, & Company.
Guiton, Gretchen & Oakes, Jeannie. (1995)."Opportunity to Learn and Conceptions of Educational Equality". Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. Vol. 17, No. 3.
Howe, Kenneth. (1989). "In Defense of Outcomes-Based Conceptions of Equal Educational Opportunity". Educational Theory. Vol. 39, No. 4.
Jencks, Christopher, et al. (1972).Inequality. New York: Basic Books.
Kantor, Harvey & Lowe, Robert. (1995). "Class, Race, and the Emergence of Federal Education Policy." Educational Researcher. Vol. 24, No. 3.
Massell, Diane, Kirst, Michael, & Hoppe, Margaret. (1997). Persistence and Change: Standards-Based Systemic Reform in Nine States. Philadelphia, PA.: Consortium for Policy Research in Education.
Strike. Kenneth. (1988). "The Ethics of Resource Allocation in Education". In D.H. Monk & Julie Underwood, editors, Microlevel School Finance: Issues and Implications. Cambridge, MA: Ballanger Publishing Co.
U.S. Government Printing Office. (1994). Goals 2000: Educate America Act of 1994. Pub. L. No. 103-227. 103rd Congress, 2nd Session.
Fritzberg's argument in article form:
(2000). "Equal Educational Opportunity Versus 'Excellence': Keeping the Pressure on Goliath". Educational Foundations. Vol. 14, No. 2.
(2001). "Less Than Equal: A Former Schoolteacher Examines the Causes of Educational Disadvantagement". The Urban Review. Vol. 33, No. 2.
(2001). "From Rhetoric to Reality: Opportunity-to-Learn Standards and the Integrity of American Public School Reform". Teacher Education Quarterly. Vol. 28, No. 1.
(2001). "Opportunities of Substance: Reconceptualizing Equality of Educational Opportunity". Journal of Thought. Vol. 36, No. 1, (1st article in a two-part series).
(2002). "Freedom That Counts: The Historic Underpinnings of Positive Liberty and Equality of Educational Opportunity". Journal of Thought. Vol. 37, No. 2, (2nd article in a two-part series).
Gregory J. Fritzberg is an Associate Professor of Education at Seattle Pacific University. Dr. Fritzberg holds a Master of Arts degree in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, and currently serves as the editor of Curriculum in Context. He is the author of In the Shadow of "Excellence": Recovering a Vision of Educational Opportunity For All (Caddo Gap Press, 1999) as well as articles related to equality of educational opportunity in such journals and magazines as The Urban Review, Educational Foundations, Teacher Education Quarterly, Educational Leadership and Administration, Journal of Thought, Multicultural Education, and Sojourners.
© February 2003 New Horizons for Learning
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