From Here To Equality Grading Policies For Egalitarians

Educational Theory

Volumn 51, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 63-73

  Schrag, Francis ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84862504169     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2001.00063.x     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. Although philosophical critiques of education in the late 1960s and 1970s would see the connection as quite natural, recent theorizing has tended to avoid consideration of mundane, practical matters such as grading. It is hard to point, for example, to a contemporary parallel to philosopher Robert Paul Wolff's, The Ideal of the University (Boston: Beacon Press, which was addressed to a wide audience, and forwarded practical proposals on grading and college admissions, proposals which grew out of Wolff's more scholarly analysis of the nature of the university.1969.
2. For example Erik Oiin Wright (personal communication) sketches a "strategy to try to delink the criteria for allocating people to jobs or schools from the mechanisms which allocate monetary rewards to jobs and people. One could argue that we want as pure a meritocracy as possible for allocating people to jobs....But this need not imply that the most "merit" on performance grounds also commands the most income.".
3. John Rawls, The Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).
4. Elizabeth S. Anderson, "What is the Point of Equality?"Ethics 109 (1999): 287-337.
5. One excellent source for recent discussions of justice is Louis Pojman and Owen McLeod, What Do We Deservel A Reader on Justice and Desert (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
6. G.A. Cohen, "Where the Action Is: On the Site of Distributive Justice,"Philosophy and Public Affairs 26 (1997): 12.
7. G.A. Cohen, "On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice," Ethics 99 (July 1989): 931.
8. Natalie Angier, "Men, Women, Sex, And Darwin,"The New York Times Magazine, 21 February 1999, p. 50.
9. Angier notes that according to Vaiian the same degree decreases a woman's salary by $2,400.
10. Anderson, "What is the Point of Equality?" 288-89.
11. Adam Swift, "The Sociology of Complex Equality," In Pluralism, Justice, and Equality, ed. David Miller and Michael Walzer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 263.
12. Cohen, "Where the Action Is," 9.
13. Robert Max Jackson, Destined for Equality: The Inevitable Rise of Women's Status (Cambridge; Harvard University Press, 1998), 155.
14. Robert Dreeben, On What Is Learned in School (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1968).
15. Julian Lamont, "Problems for Effort-Based Distribution Principles", Journal of Applied Philosophy 12, no. 3 (1995): 215-29.
16. Erik O. Wright, Syllabus for Sociology 125, 3.
17. Wright, personal communication argues that though the reward structure is intended to fit his egalitarian beliefs he prefers to see it as broadening rather than subverting the idea of merit.1998.
18. Michael Apple, personal communication, 1998.
19. Whether this would stigmatize the students earning a grade with an asterisk next to it is not clear to me; I view it as an empirical question.