Fair opportunity in education: A democratic equality perspective

Ethics

Volumn 117, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 595-622

  Anderson, Elizabeth ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 35348833120     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/518806     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (58)

1. For a history of this development, see Michael Rebell, "Educational Adequacy, Democracy, and die Courts," in Achieving High Educational Standards for All, ed. Timothy Ready, Christopher Edleyjr., and Catherine Snow, National Research Council Conference Proceeding (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2002), 218-68.
2. Adam Swift, How Not to Be a Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent (London: Routledge, 2003);
3. Rob Reich and William Koski, "The State's Obligation to Provide Education: Adequate Education or Equal Education?" (unpublished manuscript, Stanford University, 2006);
4. Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift, "Equality, Priority, and Positional Goods," Ethics 116 (2006): 471-97.
5. I am assuming that some hierarchy of offices is necessary for efficient production of goods and services and that a regime that rotated everyone through all official ranks would be infeasible in any advanced society.
6. Reich and Koski, "The State's Obligation to Provide Education"; Brighouse and Swift, "Equality, Priority, and Positional Goods," 475-77.
7. Kimberlé Crenshaw, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics," University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989: 139-67.
8. For further discussion of how race undermines access to privilege on the part of those who have seemingly "made it," see Ellis Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class (New York: HarperCollins, 1993);
9. and Joe Feagin and Melvin Sikes, Living with Racism: The Black Middle-Class Experience (Boston: Beacon, 1994).
10. Vicki Schultz, "Reconceptualizing Sexual Harassment," Yale Law Journal 107 (1998): 1683-1805.
11. On class segregation in the United States, see Paul Jargowsky, "Take the Money and Run: Economic Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas," American Sociological Review 61 (1996): 984-98;
12. on racial segregation, see Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartlieid (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
13. Maria Charles and David Grusky, Occupational Ghettos: The Worldwide Segregation of Women and Men (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
14. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 148-60.
15. Pierre Bourdieu, "The Forms of Capital," in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 241-58.
16. Barbara Reskin, The Realities of Affirmative Action in Employment (Washington, DC: American Sociological Association, 1998), 32-33.
17. Bourdieu, "The Forms of Capital."
18. Pierre Bourdieu, "Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction," in Knowledge, Education, and Cultural Change: Papers in the Sociology of Education, ed. Richard Brown (London: Tavistock, 1973), 80.
19. Here I use the terms "social capital" and "cultural capital" in a normative sense, to refer to what people need to perform competently in elite positions, according to democratic standards. This contrasts with die sociological or descriptive sense of these terms, used to refer to what people need to gain access to elite positions.
20. Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1998), documents a tragic case of cross-cultural miscommunication between American physicians and Hmong immigrants whose daughter suffered from epilepsy.
21. Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 198-220, documents how the mismatch of middle-class educators' cultural capital to working-class parents' cultural styles systematically disserves the working-class students.
22. Linda Krieger, "The Content of Our Categories: A Cognitive Bias Approach to Discrimination and Equal Employment Opportunity," Stanford Law Review 47 (1995): 1161-1248, briefly surveys the history of social psychology's theorization of stereotypes.
23. Susan Fiske, "Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Discrimination," in Handbook of Social Psychology, ed. Daniel T. Gilbert, Susan T. Fiske, and Gardner Lindzey (New York: McGrawHill, 1998), 357-411, reviews the numerous uses of stereotypes.
24. Fiske, "Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Discrimination." 362.
25. Barbara Reskin, "The Proximate Causes of Employment Discrimination." Contemporary Sociology 29 (2000): 319-29, succinctly reviews the literature on these themes;
26. for a more exhaustive survey; see Fiske. "Stereotyping", Prejudice, and Discrimination."
27. Reskin, "The Proximate Causes of Employment Discrimination"; Samuel Gaertner and John Dovidio, "The Aversive Form of Racism," in Prejudice, Discrimination, and Racism, ed. John Dovidio and Samuel Gaertner (New York: Academic Press, 1986), 61-89.
28. Reskin, The Realities of Affirmative Action in Employment, 35-36.
29. George Wilson, Ian Sakura-Lemessy, and Jonathan P. West, "Reaching the Top: Racial Differences in Mobility Paths to Upper-Tier Occupations," Work and Occupations 26 (1999): 165-86, show that, in white-dominated workplaces, whites have two paths of access to managerial and executive positions-demonstration of formal qualifications such as prior experience and demonstration of vague qualities such as loyalty through informal association with the boss-whereas blacks usually have only the formal path to promotion open to them.
30. Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), provides the definitive treatment of this idea.
31. Anthony G. Greenwald and Mahzarin R. Banaji, "Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes, Self-Esteem, and Stereotypes," Psychological Review 102 (1995): 4-27;
32. Fiske, "Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Discrimination," 364-75.
33. One might also gain such knowledge by imaginatively projecting oneself into the other's situation and thinking about what one would do if one were in their shoes. However, the ability of segregated elites to reliably gain knowledge in this way may be questioned. When one faces real gaps in knowledge of others' circumstances, it is all too easy to substitute stereotypes about them, or else generalizations from one's own experience, to facilitate inferences about others. For an insightful discussion of the potential and pitfalls of gaining knowledge about others through imaginative projection, see Maria Lugones, "Playfulness, 'World'-Traveling, and Loving Perception," Hypatia 2 (1987): 3-19.
34. Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.
35. Kristin Luker, Taking Chances (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).
36. John Jost, "Outgroup Favoritism and the Theory of System Justification," in Cognitive Social Psychology: The Princeton Symposium on the Legacy and Future of Social Cognition, ed. Gordon Moskowitz (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2001), 89-102, provides a survey and explanations of this phenomenon.
37. This is the famous "contact hypothesis" first advanced by Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1954),
38. Importantly, not all intergroup contact is equally good at reducing stereotypes and group antipathy, Formal, institutionally supported contact aimed at promoting shared goals works better than informal contact, See Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002),
39. It is also important that groups interact on terms of equality, as peers, rather than in contexts where the advantaged occupy elite positions and the disadvantaged occupy subordinate positions, Recent studies supporting Allport's hypothesis that integration on terms of cooperation and equality reduces group prejudice and stereotypes include Cynthia Estland, Working Together: How Workplace Bonds Strengthen a Diverse Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005);
40. and Samuel Gaertner and John Dovidio, Reducing Intergroup Bias: The Common Ingroup Identity Model (Philadelphia: Psychology Press, 2000),
41. For a review of the literature, see John Dovidio, Samuel Gaertner, and Kerry Kawakami, "Intergroup Contact: The Past, Present, and the Future," Group Processes and Intergroup Relations 6 (2001): 5-20.
42. Gaertner and Dovidio, "The Aversive Form of Racism."
43. For general discussion, see Reskin, "The Proximate Causes of Employment Discrimination." An important empirical study illustrating the importance to reducing prejudice of institutionally supported racial integration, valuation of intergroup competence among elites, and accountability of elites for their conduct toward disadvantaged racial groups is Charles Moskos and John Butler, All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way (New York: Basic, 1997).
44. Douglas Massey, The Source of the River: The Social Origins of Freshmen at America's Selective Colleges and Universities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 198-201, observes that this is particularly true for white students, who come from far more segregated and homogeneous family, neighborhood, and school backgrounds (as measured by race, class, parents' marital status, and so forth) than their more diverse black and Latino peers.
45. Elizabeth Anderson, "What Is the Point of Equality?" Ethics 109 (1999): 287-337.
46. Reich and Koski, "The State's Obligation to Provide Education."
47. Brighouse and Swift, "Equality, Priority, and Positional Goods," 488-89, suggest allocating desirable jobs by lottery or nepotism rather than by meritocratic criteria such as educational achievement.
48. Reich and Koski, "The State's Obligation to Provide Education."
49. William Bowen and Derek Bok, The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 234-36.
50. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, "Some Effects of Proportions on Group Life: Skewed Sex Ratios and Responses to Token Women," American Journal of Sociology 82 (1977): 965-90;
51. Reskin, "The Proximate Causes of Employment Discrimination," 325.
52. It does not follow from this that different communities within a state are entitled to draw on vastly unequal tax bases to fund their unequal tastes for education. John Coons, William Chine III, and Stephen Sugarman, Private Wealth and Public Education (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1970), propose an "equal tax rates, equal spendable dollars" criterion of equity in public school finance, according to which communities should be entitled to draw funds from a common tax base in proportion to their willingness to tax themselves, with equal tax rates yielding equal tax revenues. It isn't clear how much more people would be willing to tax themselves once they provided the revenues needed to secure for all the high level of sufficiency proposed by my criterion. To the extent that they would, I suggest that die Coons et al. standard offers a fair starting point for justly allocating surplus tax revenues.
53. See, e.g., Jeffrey Cohan, "Shrinking Tax Bases Crippling Suburbs," Pittsburgh PostGazette, March 7, 2004, http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04067/281673.stm, and "Local Taxes Display an Uneven Bite: County Residents Who Are Black or Poor, Pay More," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 8, 2004, http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/ 04068/282688.stm, documenting how poor and black communities pay far higher local tax rates (sometimes ten times as much), for far less revenue yield, than wealthy and white communities.
54. William Fischel, "An Economic History of Zoning and a Cure for Its Exclusionary Effects," Urban Studies 41 (2004): 19-26, traces extreme exclusionary zoning policies to the 1970s.
55. I thus wish to dispel the "positional arms race" metaphor that pervades the literature on educational opportunity. In my view, this metaphor supposes that the content of education remains fixed on traditional academic goals, ignoring practical education in intergroup cooperative competence and the other educational functions of integration. I have been arguing that more education for elites does not necessarily widen inequalities in functioning between elites and the rest If elites are properly educated to be responsive to others, more education for them will redound to the benefit of the less advantaged. This entails that elite education should be a humbling experience oriented to their obligations of service to others, rather than what it currently is, a celebration of their supposed "giftedness" that only sharpens their heightened sense of entitlement to all things good.
56. Elizabeth Anderson, "Rethinking Equality of Opportunity: Comment on Adam. Swift's How Not to Be a Hypocrite," Theory and Research in Education 2 (2004): 99-110.
57. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 87 ("The difference principle represents, in effect, an agreement to regard the distribution of natural talents as in some respects a common asset and to share in the greater social and economic benefits made possible by complimentarities in its distribution").
58. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 92.