education fair essay

Essay on Education for School Students and Children

500+ words essay on education.

Education is an important tool which is very useful in everybody’s life. Education is what differentiates us from other living beings on earth. It makes man the smartest creature on earth. It empowers humans and gets them ready to face challenges of life efficiently. With that being said, education still remains a luxury and not a necessity in our country. Educational awareness needs to be spread through the country to make education accessible. But, this remains incomplete without first analyzing the importance of education. Only when the people realize what significance it holds, can they consider it a necessity for a good life. In this essay on Education, we will see the importance of education and how it is a doorway to success.

Importance of Education

Education is the most significant tool in eliminating poverty and unemployment . Moreover, it enhances the commercial scenario and benefits the country overall. So, the higher the level of education in a country, the better the chances of development are.

In addition, this education also benefits an individual in various ways. It helps a person take a better and informed decision with the use of their knowledge. This increases the success rate of a person in life.

Subsequently, education is also responsible for providing with an enhanced lifestyle. It gives you career opportunities that can increase your quality of life.

Similarly, education also helps in making a person independent. When one is educated enough, they won’t have to depend on anyone else for their livelihood. They will be self-sufficient to earn for themselves and lead a good life.

Above all, education also enhances the self-confidence of a person and makes them certain of things in life. When we talk from the countries viewpoint, even then education plays a significant role. Educated people vote for the better candidate of the country. This ensures the development and growth of a nation.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Doorway to Success

To say that education is your doorway to success would be an understatement. It serves as the key which will unlock numerous doors that will lead to success. This will, in turn, help you build a better life for yourself.

An educated person has a lot of job opportunities waiting for them on the other side of the door. They can choose from a variety of options and not be obligated to do something they dislike. Most importantly, education impacts our perception positively. It helps us choose the right path and look at things from various viewpoints rather than just one.

With education, you can enhance your productivity and complete a task better in comparison to an uneducated person. However, one must always ensure that education solely does not ensure success.

It is a doorway to success which requires hard work, dedication and more after which can you open it successfully. All of these things together will make you successful in life.

In conclusion, education makes you a better person and teaches you various skills. It enhances your intellect and the ability to make rational decisions. It enhances the individual growth of a person.

Education also improves the economic growth of a country . Above all, it aids in building a better society for the citizens of a country. It helps to destroy the darkness of ignorance and bring light to the world.

FAQs on Education

Q.1 Why is Education Important?

A.1 Education is important because it is responsible for the overall development of a person. It helps you acquire skills which are necessary for becoming successful in life.

Q.2 How does Education serve as a Doorway to Success?

A.2 Education is a doorway to success because it offers you job opportunities. Furthermore, it changes our perception of life and makes it better.

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Which class are you in.

• Travelling Essay
• Picnic Essay
• Our Country Essay
• My Parents Essay
• Essay on Favourite Personality
• Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
• Essay on Knowledge is Power
• Essay on Gurpurab
• Essay on My Favourite Season
• Essay on Types of Sports

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Download the App

Your Right to Equality in Education

Getting an education isn’t just about books and grades – we’re also learning how to participate fully in the life of this nation. (We’re tomorrow’s leaders after all!)

But in order to really participate, we need to know our rights – otherwise we may lose them. The highest law in our land is the U.S. Constitution, which has some amendments, known as the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights guarantees that the government can never deprive people in the U.S. of certain fundamental rights including the right to freedom of religion and to free speech and the due process of law. Many federal and state laws give us additional rights, too.

The Bill of Rights applies to young people as well as adults. And what I’m going to do right here is tell you about EQUAL TREATMENT .

DO ALL KIDS HAVE THE RIGHT TO AN EQUAL EDUCATION?

Yes! All kids living in the United States have the right to a free public education. And the Constitution requires that all kids be given equal educational opportunity no matter what their race, ethnic background, religion, or sex, or whether they are rich or poor, citizen or non-citizen. Even if you are in this country illegally, you have the right to go to public school. The ACLU is fighting hard to make sure this right isn’t taken away.

In addition to this constitutional guarantee of an equal education, many federal, state and local laws also protect students against discrimination in education based on sexual orientation or disability, including pregnancy and HIV status.

In fact, even though some kids may complain about having to go to school, the right to an equal educational opportunity is one of the most valuable rights you have. The Supreme Court said this in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case when it struck down race segregation in the public schools.

If you believe you or someone you know is being discriminated against in school, speak up! Talk to a teacher, the principal, the head of a community organization or a lawyer so they can investigate the situation and help you take legal action if necessary.

ARE TRACKING SYSTEMS LEGAL?

Yes, as long as they really do separate students on the basis of learning ability and as long as they give students the same basic education.

Many studies show, however, that the standards and tests school officials use in deciding on track placements are often based on racial and class prejudices and stereotypes instead of on real ability and learning potential. That means it’s often the white, middle-class kids who end up in the college prep classes, while poor and non-white students, and kids whose first language isn’t English, end up on “slow” tracks and in vocational-training classes. And often, the lower the track you’re on, the less you’re expected to learn – and the less you’re taught.

Even if you have low grades or nobody in your family ever went to college, if you want to go to college, you should demand the type of education you need to realize your dreams. And your guidance counselor should help you get it! Your local ACLU can tell you the details of how to go about challenging your track placement.

CAN STUDENTS BE TREATED DIFFERENTLY IN PUBLIC SCHOOL BASED ON THEIR SEX?

Almost never. Public schools may not have academic courses that are just for boys – like shop – or just for girls – like home economics. Both the Constitution and federal law require that boys and girls also be provided with equal athletic opportunities. Many courts have held, however, that separate teams for boys and girls are allowed as long as the school provides students of both sexes the chance to participate in the particular sport. Some courts have also held that boys and girls may always be separated in contact sports. The law is different in different states; you can call your local ACLU affiliate for information.

CAN GIRLS BE KICKED OUT OF SCHOOL IF THEY GET PREGNANT?

No. Federal law prohibits schools from discriminating against pregnant students or students who are married or have children. So, if you are pregnant, school officials can’t keep you from attending classes, graduation ceremonies, extracurricular activities or any other school activity except maybe a strenuous sport. Some schools have special classes for pregnant girls, but they cannot make you attend these if you would prefer to be in your regular classes.

CAN SCHOOLS DISCRIMINATE AGAINST GAY STUDENTS?

School officials shouldn’t be able to violate your rights just because they don’t like your sexual orientation. However, even though a few states and cities have passed laws against sexual orientation discrimination, public high schools have been slow to establish their own anti-bias codes – and they’re slow to respond to incidents of harassment and discrimination. So while in theory, you can take a same-sex date to the prom, join or help form a gay group at school or write an article about lesbian/gay issues for the school paper, in practice gay students often have to fight hard to have their rights respected.

WHAT ABOUT STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES?

Although students with disabilities may not be capable of having exactly the same educational experiences as other students, federal law requires that they be provided with an education that is appropriate for them. What is an appropriate education must be worked out individually for each student. For example, a deaf student might be entitled to be provided with a sign language interpreter.

In addition to requiring that schools identify students with disabilities so that they can receive the special education they need in order to learn, federal law also provides procedures to make sure that students are not placed in special education classes when they are not disabled. If you believe you’re not receiving an appropriate education, either because you are not in special classes when you need to be, or because you are in special classes when you don’t need to be, call the ACLU!

And thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), students who are HIV positive have the same rights as every other student. People with HIV are protected against discrimination , not only in school but in many other public places such as stores, museums and hotels.

People with HIV aren’t a threat to anyone else’s health, because the AIDS virus can’t be spread through casual contact. That’s just a medical fact. Your local ACLU can provide information on how to fight discrimination against people with HIV.

CAN I GO TO PUBLIC SCHOOL IF I DON’T SPEAK ENGLISH?

Yes. It is the job of the public schools to teach you to speak English and to provide you with a good education in other subjects while you are learning. Students who do not speak English have the right to require the school district to provide them with bilingual education or English language instruction or both.

“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” –Title IX, Education Amendments of 1972

We spend a big part of our life in school, and our voices count. Join the student government! Attend school meetings! Petition your school administration! Talk about your rights with your friends! Let’s make a difference!

Produced by the ACLU Department of Public Education. 125 Broad Street, NY NY 10004. For more copies of this or any other Sybil Liberty paper, or to order the ACLU handbook The Rights of Students or other student-related publications, call 800-775-ACLU or visit us on the internet at https://www.aclu.org .

Related Issues

• Racial Justice
• Mass Incarceration
• Smart Justice
• Women's Rights

Stay Informed

Sign up to be the first to hear about how to take action.

By completing this form, I agree to receive occasional emails per the terms of the ACLU’s privacy statement.

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Equality of Educational Opportunity

It is widely accepted that educational opportunities for children ought to be equal. This thesis follows from two observations about education and children: first, that education significantly influences a person’s life chances in terms of labor market success, preparation for democratic citizenship, and general human flourishing; and second, that children’s life chances should not be fixed by certain morally arbitrary circumstances of their birth such as their social class, race, and gender. But the precise meaning of, and implications for, the ideal of equality of educational opportunity is the subject of substantial disagreement (see Jencks 1988). This entry provides a critical review of the nature and basis of those disagreements.

To frame the discussion we introduce three key factors that underscore the importance of treating equality of educational opportunity as an independent concern, apart from theories of equality of opportunity more generally. These factors are: the central place of education in modern societies and the myriad opportunities it affords; the scarcity of high-quality educational opportunities for many children; and the critical role of the state in providing educational opportunities. These factors differentiate education from many other social goods. We follow this with a brief history of how equality of educational opportunity has been interpreted in the United States since the 1950s and the evolving legal understandings of equality of opportunity. Our subsequent analysis has implications for issues that are at the center of current litigation in the United States. But our philosophical discussion is intended to have wider reach, attempting to clarify the most attractive competing conceptions of the concept.

1.1 The Value of Education

1.2 the scarcity of high-quality educational opportunity, 1.3 the state regulation of education, 2. a brief history of equality of educational opportunity in the united states, 3.1 what is educational opportunity, 3.2 formal equality of educational opportunity, 3.3 meritocratic equality of educational opportunity, 3.4 fair equality of educational opportunity, 3.5 debates about fair equality of educational opportunity, 3.6 equality of educational opportunity for flourishing, 3.7 equality of educational opportunity for the labor market, 3.8 equality of educational opportunity for citizenship, 3.9 equality and adequacy in the distribution of educational opportunities, 4.1 education and the family, 4.2 disability, 4.3 the target of equal educational opportunity: individuals or groups, 5. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. equality of educational opportunity as an independent concern.

Education has both instrumental and intrinsic value for individuals and for societies as a whole. As the U.S. Supreme Court stated in its unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), “In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education”. The instrumental goals of K–12 education for individuals include access to higher education and a constellation of private benefits that follow college education such as access to interesting jobs with more vacation time and better health care; greater personal and professional mobility, better decision-making skills (Institute for Higher Education Policy 1998) and more autonomy at work. Research further shows that education levels are correlated with health and wealth: the more education a person has, the healthier and wealthier she is likely to be. At the same time, education is also considered intrinsically valuable. Developing one’s skills and talents can be enjoyable or good in itself and a central component of a flourishing life, regardless of the consequences this has for wealth or health.

In addition to the instrumental and intrinsic value of education to an individual, education is also valuable for society. All societies benefit from productive and knowledgeable workers who can generate social surplus and respond to preferences. Furthermore, democratic societies need to create citizens who are capable of participating in the project of shared governance. The correlation between educational attainment and civic participation is strong and well-documented: educated citizens have more opportunities to obtain and exercise civic skills, are more interested in and informed about politics, and in turn, are more likely to vote (Verba, Schlozman, & Brady 1995: 432–437, 445; Dee 2004).

It is therefore relatively uncontroversial to say that education is a highly valuable good to both individuals and to society, especially to democratic societies. This makes questions about who has access to high-quality educational opportunities, and how educational opportunities should be distributed, particularly important.

Questions about the just distribution of educational opportunity are especially vexing given the scarcity of resources allocated to education. Although developed societies provide some education for free to their citizens, funding for education is always in competition with the need to provide citizens with other social goods. As Amy Gutmann writes: “The price of using education to maximize the life chances of children would be to forego these other social goods” (Gutmann 1999: 129). Other basic welfare needs (e.g., housing, healthcare, food), as well as cultural goods (e.g., museums, parks, concert halls), must be weighed against public funds allocated to education, thereby making high-quality education—even in highly productive societies—scarce to some degree.

This scarcity is evident on several fronts with respect to higher education in the United States, which attracts applicants from all over the world. There is fierce competition for admission to highly selective colleges and universities in the U.S. that admit fewer than 10% of applicants. In this arena, wealthier parents sometimes go to great lengths to bolster their children’s applications by paying for tutoring, extracurricular activities, and admissions coaching—activities that can put applicants without these resources at a significant disadvantage in the admissions process. The recent “varsity blues” scandal, in which wealthy families paid millions of dollars to a college coach who promised admission to elite U.S. universities, is an extreme case in point about the degree of competition attached to selective universities.

A more urgent demonstration of the scarcity of educational opportunity in the U.S. and many other societies is evident in how access to high-quality primary and secondary education is effectively limited to children whose families can afford housing in middle-class neighborhoods, or who have access to private schools via tuition or scholarships. Despite the Brown decision’s eradication of de jure , or state-sanctioned, segregation by race in schools, public schools in the U.S. remain sharply segregated by race and by class due to de facto residential segregation. This segregation has significant consequences for poor and minority students’ educational opportunity. Given the strong correlation between school segregation, racial achievement gaps, and overall school quality, poor and minority students are disproportionately educated in lower performing schools compared to their white and more advantaged peers (Reardon 2015 and Reardon, Weathers, Fahle, Jang, and Kalogrides 2022 in Other Internet Resources ). The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these systemic background inequalities, with prolonged school closures in the U.S. disproportionately impacting low-income children who rely on schools to provide an array of social welfare services, including meals (Levinson, Cevik, and Lipsitch 2020; Levinson, Geller, and Allen, 2021).

In view of the constellation of intrinsic and instrumental goods that flow from educational opportunity, and in the context of relative scarcity, questions about how educational resources should be distributed are especially pressing as a matter of social and economic justice.

A third consideration that underscores the importance of thinking about the distribution of educational opportunities is that in most developed societies, the vast majority of such opportunities are provided through and regulated by the state. All developed societies have a legal requirement that children attend school for a certain number of years. This means that, unlike other policy levers, education is typically under the control of state institutions and has the potential to reach the vast majority of the nation’s children across racial, religious, class, and gender-based divides. And given the myriad benefits that flow from education, it is arguably a state’s most powerful mechanism for influencing the lives of its members. This makes education perhaps the most important function of government.

Since education is an integral function of government, and because it is an opportunity that government largely provides, there are special constraints on its distribution. Justice, if it requires nothing else, requires that governments treat their citizens with equal concern and respect. The state, for example, cannot justly provide unequal benefits to children on the basis of factors such as their race or gender. Indeed, such discrimination, even when it arises from indirect state measures such as the funding of schools from property taxes, can be especially pernicious to and is not lost on children. When poor and minority children see, for example, that their more advantaged peers attend better resourced public schools—a conclusion that can be drawn in many cases simply by comparing how school facilities look—they may internalize the view that the state cares less about cultivating their interests and skills. Children in this position suffer the dignitary injury of feeling that they are not equal to their peers in the state’s eyes (Kozol 1991, 2005). This harm is especially damaging to one’s self-respect because it is the development of one’s talents that is at stake; whether or not one has opportunities to gain the skills and confidence to pursue their conception of the good is central to what Rawls calls “the social basis of self-respect” (Rawls 1999: sections 65 and 67; Satz 2007: 639).

Given the importance of education to individuals and to society, it is clear that education cannot be distributed by the market: it needs to be available to all children, even children whose parents would be too poor or too indifferent to pay for it. Furthermore, if education is to play a role in equipping young people to participate in the labor market, to participate in democratic governance, and more generally to lead flourishing lives, then its content cannot be arbitrary but rather must be tailored to meet these desired outcomes. We address considerations of education’s content in subsequent sections, turning first to how equality of opportunity has been interpreted in the U.S., where we can see some of the implications of a truncated understanding of equality of opportunity in stark form.

The United States Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, in finding racially segregated public schools unconstitutional, declared that the opportunity for an education, when provided for by the state, is a “right which must be available to all on equal terms”. But de facto racial segregation persists in the U.S. and is coupled today with ever-growing class-based segregation (Reardon & Bischoff 2011). Black students are far more likely to attend high-poverty schools than their white peers (see school poverty, in the National Equity Atlas, Other Internet Resources ). The resulting, compounded educational disadvantages that poor, minority children face in the U.S. are significant. As research continues to document, the racial/ethnic achievement gap is persistent and large in the U.S. and has lasting labor market effects, whereby the achievement gap has been found to explain a significant part of racial/ethnic income disparities (Reardon, Robinson-Cimpian, & Weathers 2015; Reardon 2021 in Other Internet Resources).

Efforts to combat de facto segregation have been limited by U.S. jurisprudence since the Brown decision. Although the Supreme Court previously allowed plans to integrate schools within a particular school district (see Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education , 1970), in Milliken v. Bradley (1974) the Court struck down an inter-district busing plan that moved students across district lines to desegregate the Detroit city and surrounding suburban schools. This limitation on legal remedies for de facto segregation has significantly hampered integration efforts given that most school districts in the U.S. are not racially diverse. More recently, the U.S. Supreme Court further curtailed integration efforts within the small number of districts that are racially diverse. In its Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District decision (2006), the Court prohibited districts from explicitly using individual students’ race as a factor in school assignment plans, thereby condoning only race-neutral integration plans in what many regarded as the Court’s final retreat from redressing de facto segregation (e.g., Rebell 2009; Ryan 2007).

The persistence of race and class-based segregation in the U.S. and the educational disadvantages that follow are rooted in the U.S. system of geographically defined school districts, whereby schools are largely funded by local property taxes that differ substantially between communities based on property values. This patchwork system compounds the educational disadvantages that follow from residential segregation. The 50 states in the United States differ dramatically in the level of per pupil educational funding that they provide; indeed some of these interstate disparities are greater than the intra-state inequalities that have received greater attention (Liu 2006). The system for funding schools and the residential segregation it exacerbates—itself the product of decades of laws and conscious policies to keep the races separate—has produced and continues to yield funding inequalities that disproportionately affect poor Americans of color. The segregation of resources, with greater resources flowing to children from families in the upper quintiles of society, makes it highly unlikely that children from the lower quintiles can have an equal chance of achieving success. This is evident in research documenting the growing achievement gap between high and low-income students, which is now 30–40% greater among children born in 2001 than those born twenty-five years before (Reardon 2011: 91; Reardon 2021 in Other Internet Resources).

Given the judicial retreat from remedying de facto segregation, many advocates have shifted their attention to the school finance system. A landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in this arena was an initial setback to efforts to advance educational equality via federal school finance litigation. In this case, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), the Court found that there is no federal right to education, and that funding inequalities among school districts due to variations in property tax revenue are not unconstitutional. This decision further entrenched the educational inequalities that follow from the geographic happenstance of a child’s home. In contrast to the U.S., many other countries do not finance their schools through local property taxes (e.g., Finland funds its schools at the national level based on the number of students they educate, and it provides more funding to schools that educate more students who are immigrants or whose parents are unemployed or uneducated; Sahlberg 2011). Many other societies distribute educational resources in a more centralized way than does the United States, which leaves educational funding, and even educational standards, to a large extent in local hands (for a recent volume on the idea of a federal right to education in the U.S., see Robinson 2019).

The U.S. Supreme Court did, however, leave an opening for state courts to act, and so legal advocates have adopted a state-by-state approach in the decades since Rodriguez . As this litigation has unfolded in almost every U.S. state, a policy debate with philosophical underpinnings has emerged around the question: Should educational resources be distributed on an equal basis (an equity model), or according to a sufficiency threshold (adequacy model)? State constitutions differ as to the basis they suggest for the state’s interest in funding education.

In the legal and political sphere, the adequacy approach has been more successful in school finance litigation at the state level. But the philosophical elaboration of equity and adequacy as competing ideals is somewhat distinct from how they are used in legal battles and political discourse. As we describe below, some theorists challenge the cogency of the sharp distinction often made between these two ways of justifying the distribution of educational resources.

3. The Meaning of and Debates about Equality of Educational Opportunity

Debates about the meaning and value of equality of educational opportunity—and about whether equal educational opportunity requires equality or adequacy—can be considered in the light of two questions.

The first question is that given the diverse goals of education—preparing individuals for the job market, for democratic citizenship, and to experience the intrinsic goods of education—is there only one justified rubric for distributing educational resources? For instance, distributional policies that support career preparation may be very different from those that support other goals like preparation for democratic citizenship. Since the labor market is a highly competitive sphere, education for labor market success appears to be a positional good, understood as a good whose value depends on one’s relative standing (i.e., the quality of my education for labor market success depends to a great extent on how good your education in this realm is since we will be vying for jobs). In a highly competitive job market with high stakes, distributing educational resources equally becomes especially important.

Conversely, education for human flourishing can be seen as a non-positional good because an individual’s attainment of the intrinsic goods of education (e.g., to enjoy literature, to be intellectually curious) is not compromised by others’ success in this realm; it is not a competitive field. In fact, one’s ability to enjoy the arts might be increased by others’ ability to do so too. An adequacy threshold for distributing educational opportunities directed at human flourishing may therefore be justified. As our educational goals vary, so too might the distributive principles for educational resources need to change.

The second question we must consider is about the best interpretation of the ideal of equality of educational opportunity. Is equality of opportunity achieved when everyone with similar talent gets the same results? When per pupil expenditures are equalized? When those with the same natural talent potential get the same opportunities?

Answers to these two fundamental questions enable philosophers to construct a conception of equality of educational opportunity. Of course, philosophical controversies remain even supposing the content of the conception can be settled. Some of these controversies concern clashes with other values, including that of the family and diversity: What limits do parental rights put on the pursuit of equality of educational opportunity? Is affirmative action required by or contrary to equality of educational opportunity? Other issues arise when we try to interpret what equality of educational opportunity means for those with disabilities, or when we attempt to define “merit” and “native talent potential”.

The following sections of this entry will describe the key maneuvers in different ways of answering these two questions: first, what the ideal can mean and what distributive principles realize it; and second, how to navigate tensions between this ideal and other values. The first section below introduces debates about the various definitions of equality of educational opportunity and its associated distributive principles. Some of the material covered in this section comes from the literature on equality of opportunity more generally, which we apply to educational aspects of these debates (for a recent article in this spirit written for the education policy and research community, see Levinson, Geron, and Brighouse, 2022). The subsequent section surveys debates about how to negotiate the challenges faced by those looking to realize the ideal of equality of educational opportunity, including whether equality of educational opportunity can be reconciled with respecting the private sphere of the family.

Before we can say what an equal educational opportunity is, we need to say what an opportunity is in general. Peter Westen (1985) provides a helpful definition of an opportunity that can be applied to the education sphere. For Westen, an opportunity is a relationship between an agent or a set of agents, and a desired goal, mediated by certain obstacles, none of which are insurmountable. For instance, Alice has an opportunity to become educated mediated by obstacles such as enrolling at a school, putting in hard work, and the quality of her teachers.

To employ this concept in the context of education, we need to answer questions about who the proper agents are, what the appropriate goal or goals are, and what, if any, obstacles are legitimate. For example, if we take admission at a highly selective college as our goal, and the citizens of some country as our agents, we might think that meeting a certain academic requirement, such as passing an entrance exam, is a relevant obstacle that should be permitted to stand in the way of the goal. In this context, we will also think that an applicant’s race, sex or religious affiliation should not be obstacles. When the appropriate group faces only the relevant obstacles with respect to the appropriate goal we can say that equality of opportunity obtains between the members of that group.

For instance, Alice and Belle have equal opportunity to attend a selective university if, all other things being equal, the only obstacle they face is passing an entry test, which is a relevant obstacle. They do not have equal opportunity if Alice also faces an irrelevant obstacle, such as race-based discrimination, that Belle does not face.

Educational opportunities are those opportunities that aim to enable individuals to acquire knowledge and certain skills, and to cultivate certain capacities. As noted above, we may value educational opportunity in some instances for the intrinsic value of acquiring knowledge, while in other cases we may care more about its instrumental effects on individual welfare (e.g., labor market success). Whatever our rationale for caring about educational opportunity, in order for an individual to be said to have this opportunity, she must have no insurmountable, irrelevant obstacles to the particular educational goal we have in mind.

Most commonly we associate the goals that constitute educational opportunities with access to educational institutions such as schools and universities, but apprenticeships and professional development and training also provide educational opportunities. In addition, there are many informal types of educational opportunity. These include public debates and lectures as well as time spent reading, practicing, or thinking outside of a school context.

Most contributors to debates about equality of educational opportunity focus on opportunities that are made available through public K–12 and higher education institutions. The reasons for this are similar to our reasons for being concerned with educational opportunity in the first place. Those institutional opportunities are more easily regulated and under the state’s control, they educate the vast majority of children in the developed world, and they have a profound effect on the quality of our lives. As a result, most of the literature primarily concerns K–12 educational institutions and colleges. Nevertheless, a crucial question concerns the extent to which the state should try to address inequalities in educational opportunities that are generated through the family. For example, we know that parents who read to their children give their children an educational advantage (Hutton et al. 2015). Should the state seek to correct for the disadvantages of those children whose parents could not (or would not) read to them? More generally, parents pass on not only genetic traits to their children, but also characteristics that differentially prepare children for success at school, and even at jobs. Again, how should the state respond to these and other factors that influence children’s likelihood of success at school? Are these appropriate obstacles for children to face or not?

The next sections survey different interpretations of equal educational opportunity in view of these questions.

Formal equality of opportunity is the view that formal rules that make reference to personal or ascriptive characteristics should not be obstacles to achieving certain goals. Such characteristics include race, socio-economic class, gender, religion, and sexuality. It is essentially a concept of equality before the law. It is often understood as an anti-discrimination principle (See the entry on equality of opportunity for more discussion).

As applied to educational opportunity, formal equality of opportunity requires the removal of formal obstacles, in the form of laws or entrance criteria for educational institutions, which refer to ascriptive characteristics. For instance, formal equality of opportunity is opposed to legally segregated schools whose admissions policy states that students be white, male or belong to a certain religion. This conception is likewise opposed to laws that endorse or require segregation in schools. The Brown decision is certainly consistent with at least formal equality of opportunity. At the same time, it is worth noting that formal equality of opportunity is at odds with the tolerant attitude many societies take toward schools and colleges that are segregated by sex and religion. One possible way in which these practices might be reconciled with formal equality of educational opportunity would be to argue that this principle applies only to public educational institutions and not private schools and colleges. Some people accept that formal equality of opportunity is a sufficient norm to guide the distribution of educational opportunities, but most political and moral philosophers accept it as necessary but not sufficient. A principle of non-discrimination leaves open whether and to what extent the state needs to provide the resources that are required for education, or how those resources should be distributed (see Gutmann 1999: 127ff). Since resources are necessary for education—whether in the form of books and materials, teachers, facilities, and so on—formal equality of opportunity is compatible with some children failing to actually receive an education. Formal equality of opportunity fails to provide effective equality of opportunity.

Additionally, formal equality of educational opportunity is not concerned with the informal rules, social norms, or private discrimination that people in a society face that can have a profound effect on a child’s opportunities for education. Consider that formal equality of opportunity is compatible with school segregation, if school attendance zones were determined by residence and residence were segregated by race and social class (as is typically the case in the U.S.). If integration is a moral imperative, formal equality of opportunity cannot achieve this goal (Anderson 2010). Many people believe that insofar as informal discrimination is an unfair obstacle to educational opportunity, it is a serious problem that requires policy attention.

Even if formal equality of opportunity could be defended as a just distributional principle outside of the educational context, perhaps because going beyond it violates certain rights (see Nozick 1997), it cannot be defended in the context of schooling. No democratic society can justify failing to educate the children of its poorest students. (Additionally, see Friedman & Friedman, 1990, for a libertarian argument for universal education based on its third party effects.)

Proponents of meritocratic equality of opportunity argue that no other obstacle besides merit should stand in the way of achievement of the desired goals. This view requires that educational goods be distributed solely in accordance with individual merit. In the context of education, merit is often measured by entrance requirements, aptitude tests, or grades on exams. Of course, merit could be defined in some other way—by how hard a student works, by how much a student improves, or by classroom participation, although all of these indicators pose measurement challenges.

Meritocratic equality of opportunity has well-known limitations, especially with respect to children. If educational opportunities should be given to those who have the most merit in terms of the best scores on entrance tests, we will overlook the fact that merit is endogenous to education, which is to say, educational opportunity itself creates merit (Satz 2007). The more educational opportunities an individual child has, the more “merit” that child may come to have. This might suggest that we should pay more attention to individuals’ underlying potential rather than to their assessed merit. Yet few people believe that we should give opportunities to those who have the most underlying but uncultivated ability at the expense of those who have less underlying ability or who are less qualified but have worked hard (Miller 1996).

To illustrate a second limitation with the meritocratic conception of equal educational opportunity, imagine that all highly selective university places have been awarded to members of the upper class through cronyism, and that a progressive new government is suddenly elected into power to enforce meritocratic admissions. After generations of consolidating superior education, jobs and wealth at the expense of the poor, the upper-classes are in a far better place, particularly if private schooling is available, to ensure that their children end up being the most meritorious, thereby preserving vast social inequalities between members of different classes. Although some opportunities are open to all equally, opportunities to develop “merit” are not distributed equally (Williams 1962). Intergenerational transmission of opportunities to cultivate merit would generate a deeply divided and unequal society, which is at odds with the ideal of equality of educational opportunity.

Two further limitations concerning meritocratic equality of opportunity in the context of education are worth noting, aside from the possible toxic consequences of engaging in meritocratic rhetoric (Young 1958; Sandel 2020). The first, as has already been mentioned, is that the definition of merit itself can be contentious. Is there an account of merit that is wholly independent of conceptions of justice (Sen 2000)? Is merit simply what maximizes productivity? Should merit be based solely on test scores or also take into account moral attributes like the ability to work cooperatively with others?

The second is that while conditioning educational opportunities on “merit” may look compelling when dealing with young adults, it is deeply problematic when applied to very young children. As Michael Walzer (1983: 203) notes, the job of the reading teacher is to teach children to read, not merely to offer the opportunity to learn to read. And this job presumably includes all children in a classroom—even those who are not especially “meritorious”. Perhaps this is also why the educational “tracking” of very young children on the basis of ability seems especially objectionable—there are certain capacities that need to be cultivated in all children (Satz 2007).

Because of the limits of formal equality of opportunity, John Rawls developed a conception he calls Fair Equality of Opportunity (FEO). FEO requires that social offices and positions be formally open to all, and that individuals who are similarly talented and motivated should have a roughly equal chance to attain these positions, independent of their social class background (Rawls 2001: 42–44). FEO holds that all citizens of a society count as the relevant agents, the desired goal is offices and positions, and the obstacles people should not face includes their social class background. The obstacles people may legitimately face include having fewer developed abilities or less willingness to use them.

When applied to education, this principle may support educational measures that close the achievement gap between the rich and the poor with the same high talent potentials, assuming that these children can be identified. This is because such students from poorer backgrounds should fare as well as their wealthier peers with the same potentials. The Rawlsian principle of FEO aims to eliminate the effects of social background and economic class on educational achievement. Fair equality of opportunity therefore offers a radical interpretation of equality of educational opportunity.

Debates about FEO have focused on the relative importance of the goods it regulates (i.e., access to offices and positions) and the fact that it regards inequalities in inborn potential as relevant obstacles generally, and in the education arena.

In A Theory of Justice , Rawls accords the fair equality of opportunity principle priority over access to other types of advantages such as income and wealth. Disputing this priority, some have argued that the opportunities that FEO regulates are not more important than these other goods and that we should prefer a principle (known, for example, in Rawls’ work as the difference principle) that ensures that the least advantaged are as well-off as possible in terms of income (or according to some critics, well-being) (Alexander 1985; Arneson 1999; Clayton 2001; Miklosi 2010). Richard Arneson presses this complaint forcefully in his paper “Against Rawlsian Equality of Opportunity”. Rawls’ argument for FEO over the difference principle comes from a commitment to individuals’ self-respect and the contribution that the ability to compete for offices and social positions on fair terms make to that self-respect. But Arneson argues that those among us with lesser capacities might reasonably reject according such weight to the self-respect of the talented. After all, the self-respect derived from the results of a “natural lottery” is unequally distributed. The untalented among us, Arneson argues, would prefer increases in well-being to a principle of self-respect that confers no benefit to them.

In terms of education, rather than ensuring that those with the same inborn talent potential and ambition have the same level of educational achievement, Arneson would emphasize that educational opportunities should aim at promoting the welfare of the least advantaged. This is more important, as he sees it, than ensuring that future competitions for jobs are fairly structured. But Rawls and his defenders have argued that wealth and welfare are different in kind from the goods that FEO regulates, and that FEO pertains to more important goods that are closely connected to autonomy, the social bases of self-respect, and what he calls the two moral powers. This explains their priority and irreducibility (Taylor 2004; Shields 2015; Shiffrin 2004). Further, if everyone had a decent minimum, then the additional contribution of wealth to well-being is less significant. In subsequent work however, Rawls does acknowledge that the priority of FEO over his difference principle may be less stringent than he thought.

Some philosophers criticize FEO as insufficiently egalitarian. This criticism has taken two forms. First, some claim that by making fair opportunities relative to motivation, FEO has insufficient bite in a non-ideal world in which inequality frequently produces diminished aspirations in the oppressed. If women have been socialized for centuries to think that certain positions in society are beyond their capacities, and accordingly they are not motivated to pursue such positions, does FEO have the resources to criticize this?

A second objection points out that inequalities in social luck (e.g., being born into a poor family, which FEO requires institutions to correct for) and inequalities in natural luck (e.g., being born with less talent potential, which FEO does not require institutions to correct for) should be treated the same. It is easy to think that both types of luck are equally arbitrary from a moral point of view, and that this arbitrariness is a source of injustice. Indeed, some of Rawls’ own remarks seem to suggest this. Why, we might ask, should educational institutions help close the gap between the talented rich and talented poor but do nothing to close the gap between talented and untalented students, when being untalented is, just like social class, totally unavoidable. Matthew Clayton and Richard Arneson press this complaint against Rawls. Clayton claims that Rawls’ own reasoning appears to privilege consistency about both types of luck. So Rawls should either accept a different principle applying to both natural and social luck, or else he must condone a type of natural aristocracy for both talent and wealth.

Part of a response to these objections would have to defend the resources that Rawlsian theory has for dealing with race and gender as obstacles to fair equality of opportunity as well as the importance of the specific goods that FEO protects. Rawls himself singled out certain goods as having a higher priority than the goods of income and wealth alone. In defense of Rawls on the first objection, Seana Shiffrin (2004) has argued that FEO is a “robust anti-discrimination principle”, which should not be read out of its context within Rawls’ two principles as a whole. Moreover, it

would be difficult to provide the sort of educational training necessary to fulfill the principle’s commands without thereby engaging in teaching that also combatted the stereotypes that produce significant differentiation of ambitions. (2004: 1650, fn31)

On her view, the social bases of self-respect require the robust anti-discrimination principle that FEO provides. In defense of Rawls on the second objection, Robert Taylor (2004) has attempted to show that self-realization has a crucial place in the hierarchy of goods on the Kantian interpretation of Rawls’ principles. He claims that FEO therefore has priority over the difference principle because it regulates goods that are more central to the exercise of our moral powers and our highest order interests. However, his defense of Rawls has been criticized for being overly perfectionist and therefore not politically liberal. If this criticism is sound, then it may seem to imply that while perfectionist Rawlsians can justify FEO, political liberal Rawlsians cannot. Liam Shields (2015) argues that there is a non-perfectionist account of self-realization and that this leads us to supplement the principle of FEO with a principle of sufficient self-realization. This may be one way to defend FEO against those who favor a strict focus on welfare.

However, these responses would not satisfy those who believe that we should adopt prioritarianism with respect to especially important goods, distributing them in a way that gives priority to those who have the least (Schouten 2012). Prioritarianism is a controversial view, and has some controversial implications for the distribution of K–12 education. For example, a prioritarian view might endorse providing no state supported educational resources at all for those who are extremely talented, unless it could be shown that doing so improves the lot of the least well off. But many people will reject this implication, believing that the state does have educational obligations to the talented in their own right. Prioritarianism is also inattentive to inequalities that obtain elsewhere in the distributional scheme, for example, between those at the median and those at the very top. Many egalitarians will be disturbed by disproportionate opportunities going to the top 1%, even if the very bottom of the distribution is improved. Rawls’ view is not a simple prioritarian one, but instead endorses a complex set of principles—some of which are egalitarian such as FEO, and some of which give special attention to the least well off, such as the difference principle.

A final issue with FEO concerns our understanding of, and ability to determine, natural levels of talent. It can be very hard to know who has the most potential even when children are well into their schooling. This suggests that it is not an appropriate or feasible benchmark for the regulation of social institutions since we could never know whether it was satisfied (Gomberg 1975). In addition, the focus on natural talents has led some to consider the interaction between epigenetic traits and social environmental factors, calling into question the integrity of this distinction. This expands our sense of the arbitrariness of natural inequalities and may provide important insights on how to redress these inequalities (Loi, Del Savio and Stupka 2013).

One goal of education is to enable young people to grow into adults who have flourishing lives. What would it mean to give children the equal opportunity for flourishing lives? Again, that depends on the view one should have about the appropriate obstacles. At the most extreme, some have argued all people should face only the obstacle of their own choices. The view makes sense of many of our intuitions. For example, we tend to think that victims of bad luck, those born with disabilities, or those who are severely harmed by natural disasters, are entitled to aid. Meanwhile, those who gamble and lose are not usually viewed as having any case for compensation.

The view so stated has very radical implications for educational institutions since it charges them with ensuring that all students have equal prospects for living well, regardless of differences in their natural potentials. Thus, educational institutions organized in accordance with equality of opportunity for flourishing would not only have to provide compensatory support and resources for those from disadvantaged family backgrounds, but also for those who have genetic disadvantages.

Many philosophers have taken issue with this general view. Some have argued that its unmitigated emphasis on choice and responsibility would lead to stigma (e.g., Anderson 1999; Wolff 1998). Imagine a letter to parents saying that the state is offering your child extra opportunities because your genes create significant disadvantages. Moreover, as has already been noted, any view emphasizing choice so heavily seems especially out of place when dealing with young children.

We also need an account of the flourishing that should be the aim of educational opportunities. Is it to be understood in terms of preference satisfaction? Or something else? Would it require autonomy? In choosing an account of flourishing, we have to respond to these questions and also be attentive to concerns about sectarianism. How can an undoubtedly controversial account of what makes a human life valuable (e.g., that a good life is an autonomous life) be a suitable basis for educational policy in a pluralistic society? Many liberals argue that families may justifiably reject, and request exemption from, an education that conflicts with their religious, cultural, or political views. They argue that an educational system driven by a principle of equality of opportunity for flourishing will not respect individuals’ entitlement to pursue their own account of how they wish to live, in accordance with their own reason (Rawls 2005). Of course, it might be pointed out in reply, that educational decisions made by parents affect not only their own views of how to live but also, and more importantly, their children’s.

A second key goal for education, which plays a prominent role in public discourse, is to prepare individuals for productive employment. Education for the labor market has significant benefits for the state (e.g., GDP growth) and for individuals (e.g., remunerative and rewarding employment and all its associated benefits, including more discretionary income, more leisure time, and in the U.S., better healthcare). This function of education is critically important as a matter of justice. Education aimed at preparing individuals for employment has become especially pressing in view of the income inequalities that leading economists have highlighted (Piketty 2014; Saez & Zucman 2014). And since education for employment is a highly positional good given a competitive labor market, it matters all the more how educational opportunity in this arena is distributed.

Although there is a clear correlation between educational attainment, income, and employment rates (see 2022 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Other Internet Resources ), the link between academic achievement as measured on tests and labor market outcomes has been found to be more attenuated (Bowles, Gintis, & Osborne 2001). Research has shown that “soft skills” (e.g., personality traits like tenacity; individual’s goals and preferences) may be more predictive of success than cognitive abilities measured by test scores (Heckman & Kautz 2012). Moreover, schooling that is most directly targeted at employment—vocational education—has a history in the U.S. of entrenching race and class-based inequalities (e.g., Oakes 1985). Although the relationship between traditional academic skills and labor market success may be less significant than previously thought, and despite the checkered history of vocational education, formal schooling still has a critical role to play toward equipping individuals for labor market success on several fronts.

First, students do acquire soft skills in formal school settings. One study found that student achievement on tests accounts for just 20% of the effects of educational attainment on earnings (Bowles, Gintis, & Osborne 2001), which indicates that schools are cultivating non-cognitive skills that tests do not measure, and that are consequential in the labor market (Levin 2012). Second, educational attainment has long been seen to have a signaling function in the labor market (Spence 1973), whereby employers rely upon job candidates’ educational credentials as a proxy for future productivity. Educational attainment itself, then, apart from applicants’ demonstration of particular skills, is central to screening and differentiating candidates. Finally, a college diploma has become especially consequential in recent years as the income gap between those with and without one has grown; individuals with a bachelors degree earn 84% more over their lifetime than those with just a high school diploma (see Carnevale, Rose & Cheah 2011). Lesley Jacobs’ notion of stakes fairness (2004) underscores the importance of equality of educational opportunity when it comes to preparation for the labor market. Ideally, the stakes attached to education for labor market success would not be nearly as high as they are now, whereby a winner-takes-all competition for a job can determine an individual’s access to social goods like healthcare, leisure time, and discretionary income. When the (non-ideal) stakes are this high, equality of educational opportunity matters all the more (Jacobs 2010).

Another important goal for providing educational opportunities is the development of students’ capacities associated with being a good citizen and maintaining democratic institutions over time (Callan 1997; Galston 2001; Gutmann 1999). It might be argued that just as equality of opportunity to become a flourishing individual is a matter of justice, so too is equality of opportunity to develop civic skills, and to participate effectively in political deliberations.

The structure and appropriate content of civic education is debated extensively. While some argue that citizenship education can be narrowly construed so as to not encroach upon individuals’ private commitments, others claim it is a far more demanding educational endeavor. A key part of this debate is the extent to which education requires the cultivation of autonomy, and if does, the nature of the autonomy that is required. Some claim that since some groups in pluralistic democracies reject the idea of an autonomous life, education for autonomy cannot be imposed upon them even for civic purposes, and so education should not entail the cultivation of individual autonomy (Galston 1989). Rawls’ own solution to the potential clash between civic education for autonomy and individuals’ private commitments is to advocate only a limited form of autonomy, political autonomy, which “leaves untouched all kinds of doctrines—religious, metaphysical, and moral” and yields a relatively thin civic education (Rawls 2005: 375). Others take issue with this view, arguing that civic education requires an encompassing form of autonomy that has unavoidable spillover effects into the private sphere of individuals’ lives, and that may clash with some religious convictions (Callan 1997; Gutmann 1995; see also Arneson & Shapiro 1996, for a discussion of Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), a U.S. Supreme Court case about religious exemptions from compulsory education).

Another dimension of ongoing debates about equality in the realm of civic education concerns the scope of the community for which we are educating students to become members. Is the right unit of analysis a particular nation state or the global community? If it is a particular nation state, how can we cultivate in students a sense of their national identity and the disposition to respect their state’s institutions and laws (and to advocate reform when needed), while also making them sensitive to what they owe non-citizens as a matter of justice? A key component of this debate is whether students should receive a patriotic civic education—that is, one that prioritizes shoring up their allegiance to their state over their capacity to reflect critically upon its potential shortcomings. Galston (1989) has notably argued that students need a civic education that is more rhetorical than rational, while a number of liberal theorists have criticized his view on grounds of democratic legitimacy, its status-quo bias, and the related possibility of ossifying existing inequalities (e.g., Brighouse 1998; Callan 1997; see also the related entry on civic education ). On the other hand, if we instead have a cosmopolitan view of civic education and aim to cultivate “citizens of the world” (e.g., Nussbaum & Cohen 1996), what are the relevant capacities that need to be made effective? There is no world state for students to participate in.

Whatever one believes about the appropriate scope and content of civic education, a pressing issue is students’ extremely uneven access to educational opportunities that prepare them for participatory citizenship. Meira Levinson’s work on the “civic achievement gap” highlights this corollary to the much-more discussed achievement gap and underscores vast inequalities across student groups in terms of what youth know about how government works, and their ability to participate effectively in civic life (Levinson 2012). These low rates of participation and engagement also have consequences for how the interests of the poor are treated. Indeed, even if one rejects equality of opportunity in this domain, there is ample evidence that many societies are not doing enough to enable their poorer and less educated citizens to effectively and competently participate in public life.

A longstanding debate in the literature juxtaposes the view that we should prioritize equality in the distribution of educational opportunities with the view that an “adequacy” approach is the right one (on this debate, see Reich 2013). Those who advocate the equality view may insist on equal outputs (i.e., educational outcomes, like the mastery of particular skills) or inputs (i.e., educational resources, like equal per pupil funding or qualified teachers). The adequacy view, by contrast, is seen as holding that what matters most is meeting a specified educational threshold.

In the context of school finance litigation in the U.S., advocates often invoke these two distributive ideals together rather than regarding them as being at odds (Rebell 2009: 21–22; Ryan 2008: 1232–1238). Although most school finance litigation in the U.S. today is pursued from an adequacy framework given its greater political viability, litigators often make comparative claims about students’ educational opportunities to bolster their case. Conversely in contexts where lawyers pursue equality claims, they frequently appeal to a conception of educational quality (e.g., achieving literacy, numeracy, and civic skills) to anchor their claims, and to avoid the leveling-down problem whereby equality is achieved by making everyone worse off, without regard for the realization of particular educational goals.

Some philosophical work has similarly undercut the sharp equality/adequacy distinction and shows how the two ideals are closely intertwined in the pursuit of educational justice. These approaches (e.g., Satz 2007; Anderson 2007) argue that adequacy in education has a relative and comparative component because the educational threshold depends on the knowledge and skills that others have, and so it is necessarily a moving target. For example, what it takes to serve on a jury, or to have an adequate opportunity for college, depends on the knowledge and skill levels of others. This “relational” approach to adequacy can respond to one of the strongest concerns proponents of equality raise: that because many of the benefits of education are positional, which is to say, their value depends upon one’s position relative to others, equality is the right distributive principle for educational opportunities. The meritocratic distribution of jobs, where the most qualified candidate is appointed (rather than the individual who is merely well-qualified), ensures that positionality is decisive in many cases. Conceptions of adequacy that are attentive to relevant comparative claims can address this issue and thereby deflate the tension between adequacy and equality approaches to distributing educational opportunities.

However one interprets equality of educational of opportunity, a number of important challenges face anyone who believes that the ideal is a crucial component of a fair and just society. Several of these challenges are philosophical in nature. For instance, one can ask whether certain values (e.g., respecting family autonomy) compete with the demands of equality of opportunity in education in ways that trump or are trumped by concerns about educational equality. One can also ask whether equal educational opportunity requires affirmative action, and what it may require for students with disabilities and special educational needs. One can accept equality of educational opportunity with respect to some goods and adequacy of educational opportunity with respect to others (Callan 2016). There are other challenges that are not philosophical but practical, such as how we can convince policymakers to allocate sufficient funds to meet students’ educational needs, and how we might increase public support for the ideal of equality of educational opportunity more generally.

4. Equality of Educational Opportunity’s Tensions with Other Values

Family background has long been recognized as a source of significant inequalities. Even before we consider that children have quite different personalities and needs, inequality in family wealth and differences in family priorities and wield influence over a child’s prospects in the labor market, in civic participation, and in overall well-being. Although the number of parents who choose to pay tuition to have their children educated in private schools may be relatively small, purchasing elite private schooling can result in compounding advantages for some students (and thus relative disadvantages for others). Only about 10% of primary and secondary students in the U.S. attend private schools (see NCES’s the Condition of Education 2016 in Other Internet Resources ), while students who attended private secondary schools have comprised nearly 30% or more of matriculating classes at some highly selective American universities in recent years (see, for example, online profiles of the 2016 freshman class at Harvard, Stanford, and Yale listed in Other Internet Resources ). Students at some public schools may also suffer more immediate disadvantages from the absence of the positive peer effects of being in a school with higher achieving students and more engaged parents. Smaller class sizes, more highly qualified teachers, and more extra-curricular opportunities may enable private school students to benefit from the compounding advantages of greater success in the college admissions process and subsequent labor market. And since employment opportunities and elite college places are scarce goods that are closely linked to other benefits in health, wealth, and overall well-being, these inequalities can be highly consequential.

While some of these inequalities might be remedied by social policies that address employment practices, gender and racial inequality, and wealth inequality, we have reasons to think that some inequality in opportunity will remain in a just society simply because parents should be able to treat their children differently from other people’s children in ways that are to their children’s advantage. For example, a parent may read bedtime stories to his children but if he does he does not also need to read them to other children, even if a failure to read to everyone exacerbates inequality. There are limits to what the state can do without intruding on the life of the family. At the same time, concern for mitigating inequality that is rooted in familial relations has to grapple with the fact that different parenting styles have value as well as downsides, and that the middle-class norm of trying to maximize children’s potential (“concerted cultivation”; Lareau 2011) is no exception in terms of having certain disadvantages for children.

There are several possible approaches to the conflict between equal educational opportunity and the family. One approach subordinates our concern for equality of educational opportunity to our concern with the family. To support this view we might try to argue that the goods of family life are especially weighty, or, that as a matter of value pluralism, the state cannot impose complete uniformity on childrearing practices. Conversely, we could subordinate our concern for the family to our concern with equality of educational opportunity. If this were to happen, however, we could end up abolishing the family as we know it, since the family and partiality run contrary to equal opportunity. One cannot, it seems, have the family and have perfect equality of opportunity. Plato famously advocated raising children in common within communities in The Republic (though not out of concern for equality). But most philosophers, including Rawls, believe that abolishing the family is far too high a price to pay for equality (this is discussed in Munoz-Dardé 1999; Brighouse & Swift 2009; Schoeman 1980; Schrag 1976; see also Miller 2009 on different conceptions of equality of opportunity and how the family fits within them).

Alternatively, we might think that some careful weighing of the values at stake is required. For instance, we might think that only some of the demands of familial partiality, those related to intimacy such as reading bedtime stories, are sufficient to outweigh concern for equality of educational opportunity. Other aspects of familial partiality that appear to be unconnected to intimacy, such as paying tuition for private schools, would not be justified. This view would enjoin us to equalize children’s educational opportunities whenever we can, without sacrificing the goods central to the family (Brighouse & Swift 2014). Yet it can be very difficult in practice to determine whether an advantage parents provide their child is constitutive of the family or not.

Individuals with cognitive and physical disabilities have been marginalized, denied resources, and even denied an education. Can a conception of equality of educational opportunity accommodate those with cognitive and physical disabilities? Some critics claim that theories of justice focus unduly on meeting the demands of reciprocity and cooperation as a pre-condition to equal opportunity and other demands of justice, and in doing so, exclude some individuals with disabilities from those entitlements. Some argue that we need new theories (Kittay 1999; Barnes 2016) while others argue that existing theories and approaches can be applied to or extended to include individuals with disabilities (Stark 2013; Robeyns 2006; Brighouse 2001). In education, treating individuals with disabilities the same as those without does not always suffice to treat all equally, for disabilities sometimes give rise to special needs and requirements and this raises challenges for ‘inclusion’ (Warnock 2005). In order to avoid these challenges it seems that we might need to endorse differential treatment, which can lead to stigma and division and has been associated with educational segregation. This gives rise to what has been called the “dilemma of difference” and pertains to decisions about whether students with disabilities should be educated in the same class as students without disabilities. Placing disabled children in mainstream schools or classes may lead to bullying, as Mary Warnock (2005) has noted, but placing disabled children in separate settings may further entrench the wide-spread social stigma associated with disability, even when there is much that can be done to ensure disability is not an obstacle to learning. Further debates focus on the extent to which (at least some of) the disadvantages of disability may be detached from the disability itself and the extent to which they are attached only in virtue of social organization or social attitudes, which we could and should alter. For instance, if the dominant modes of communication in our society were sign-based rather than spoken, perhaps deafness would not be considered a disability. Likewise, where braille translations are readily available, the blind do not face a disability with respect to reading (Sparrow 2005). In the case of education, the design of the school or the curriculum can determine whether a disability is an obstacle to learning. For some discussion of this debate see Terzi 2005.

Disability may be thought to pose problems for various conceptions of equality of educational opportunity and can strengthen well-known objections. For example, it poses problems for those who endorse a meritocratic allocation of advantageous positions, such as FEO. If one of the primary goals of an education system is to ensure fair competition for jobs, many people with disabilities will likely face greater and even insurmountable obstacles to becoming the most meritorious candidate. Recall that FEO requires equal prospects for the equally naturally talented and ambitious. Some of those with disabilities do not have similar or equal natural talent with others vying for opportunities, even if these differences could be compensated for through education. Meritocratic equality of opportunity also appears to neglect some people with disabilities, by interpreting merit in terms of inborn potentials. FEO and meritocratic equality of opportunity are consistent with providing very low or even no educational opportunities to some cognitively disabled persons, but that hardly seems like an acceptable outcome. Adequacy accounts may also struggle to explain what to do when disabilities are so severe that individuals cannot achieve adequate educational levels, or do so only at enormous cost. If an adequate education involved at least acquiring a high school diploma, it is not possible for some cognitively impaired persons to reach this level. Since the focus of adequacy is on achieving that level, and these people cannot do so, it appears that when educational adequacy is set at these levels no entitlement to education for the cognitively disabled can be derived from it. This sort of example puts a lot of pressure on accounts of adequacy to explain at what cost adequacy is worth pursuing, and also challenge those who deny that native ability is relevant to equality of opportunity.

One way to avoid such outcome would be to supplement these views of equality or adequacy of educational opportunity with other principles. For example, it might be held that we owe some educational resources even to the severely cognitively disabled not on grounds of equality of opportunity but on grounds of humanity.

Opportunities belong to agents. However, when we are concerned with equality of opportunity we may be concerned that each individual has the same opportunities or that certain groups (classified by race, gender, socio-economic class, sexuality or religion) have the same opportunities. In other words, our concern may be that people’s opportunities are not affected by their membership of some disadvantaged group rather than being concerned that each individual has equal opportunity within groups. Imagine two societies. In society A , all those who gain entrance to selective colleges on the basis of test scores are white. In society B , all those who gain entrance on the basis of test scores are white or non-white in proportionate to their percentages in the overall population. Should we care about whether we are in society A or B ? If our concern is with individuals alone, then so long as our conception of equality of opportunity is met, then there is no difference between society A and B . Of course, we may suspect that society A violates our conception of equality of opportunity. But suppose that it does not.

Do we have any reason to favor a college admissions policy that moves us from A to B ? Those who advocate for affirmative action in admissions argue that we have reason to depart from a color-blind standard. Some of those arguments appeal to the illegitimacy of the standards used (e.g., tests scores), which critics say are biased. Others argue that we should expect to see equality of outcomes with respect to relevant social groups. For example, John Roemer (1998) defends a conception of equality of opportunity according to which members of groups that have been subordinated (women, racial minorities) should have the same probabilities of achieving success as the members of the dominant group. This is because he thinks the obstacles these groups face should be the same and if we assume that they have equal distributions of talent within them, then different outcomes means there are different obstacles. Roemer uses the example of smoking to illustrate this. Smoking rates vary by social class: the poorer you are, the more likely it is that you will smoke. On Roemer’s view, this means that it is harder for a poor person to stop smoking than a wealthy person. So we should not penalize a poor person who smokes to the same extent that we penalize a wealthy person. Of course, which social groups should be included in this exercise is controversial. Conservatives and liberals differ as to whether individuals face different obstacles simply by virtue of their group membership.

A different argument for moving to society B is given by Glenn Loury (1987) who argues that the dynamic effects of a society like A would prevent poor but talented minorities from achieving equality of educational opportunity because they would lack access to the social networks upon which jobs and other opportunities depend. In society A , disadvantages would cluster. Because equality of opportunity does not, as we have seen, easily extend to the private sphere of family and intimate associations, it is compatible with the continued practice of racial discrimination in such practices, even when there is legal, formal equality.

Loury thus sees a role for preferential policies in higher education that would move us from a society like A to a society like B . One of the more controversial reforms associated with higher education and equality of opportunity is affirmative action, which reserves preferential treatment for historically disadvantaged groups. Affirmative action has been criticized by those who think that merit, and not race or class, should be the only criterion for selecting college applicants. Others argue that it can lead to the unintended stigmatization of members of disadvantaged groups who attend college as not deserving of their place. However, this is to forget that opportunities to develop merit are themselves unfairly distributed between groups historically. Notwithstanding this response, affirmative action remains a controversial response to a very difficult social problem (Guinier 2016).

This entry has provided analysis of key positions in debates about equality of educational opportunity. We began by describing the reasons for being concerned about equality in this arena and then surveyed debates about the value and distribution of such opportunities. As the above discussion highlights, the realization of the ideal of equality of educational opportunity may be frustrated by competing conceptions of what equality itself entails, and also by other important values that are in tension with equalizing education opportunities (e.g., respecting family autonomy). Social scientific advances in recent years have clarified our understanding of the mechanisms behind children’s unequal access to educational opportunities, and the consequences of those inequalities for social mobility (e.g., Chetty et al. 2014; Duncan & Murnane 2011). This knowledge enables policymakers to target interventions to areas that will be most impactful (e.g., growing recognition of the importance of early childhood education). But value tensions of the sort highlighted in this entry will persist, and they warrant ongoing attention by philosophers as our understanding of the causes and consequences of educational inequalities sharpens.

• Alexander, Larry A., 1985, “Fair Equality of Opportunity: John Rawls’ (Best) Forgotten Principle”, Philosophy Research Archives , 11: 197–208. doi:10.5840/pra19851111
• Anderson, Elizabeth S., 1999, “What Is the Point of Equality?”, Ethics , 109(2): 287–337. doi:10.1086/233897
• –––, 2007, “Fair Opportunity in Education: A Democratic Equality Perspective”, Ethics , 117(4): 595–622. doi:10.1086/518806
• –––, 2010, The Imperative of Integration , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Arneson, Richard J., 1999, “Against Rawlsian Equality of Opportunity”, Philosophical Studies , 93(1): 77–112. doi:10.1023/A:1004270811433
• Arneson, Richard and Ian Shapiro, 1996, “Democratic Autonomy and Religious Liberty: A Critique of Wisconsin v. Yoder”, in Political Order (Nomos 38), Ian Shapiro and Russell Hardin (eds.), New York: New York University Press, pp. 365–411.
• Barnes, Elizabeth, 2016, The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Bowles, Samuel, Herbert Gintis, and Melissa Osborne, 2001, “The Determinants of Earnings: A Behavioral Approach”, Journal of Economic Literature , 39(4): 137–1176. doi:10.1257/jel.39.4.1137
• Brighouse, Harry, 1998, “Civic Education and Liberal Legitimacy”, Ethics , 108(4): 719–745. doi:10.1086/233849
• –––, 2001, “Can Justice as Fairness Accommodate the Disabled?”, Social Theory and Practice , 27(4): 537–560. doi:10.5840/soctheorpract200127433
• Brighouse, Harry and Adam Swift, 2009, “Educational Equality Versus Educational Adequacy: A Critique of Anderson and Satz”, Journal of Applied Philosophy , 26(2): 117–128. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5930.2009.00438.x
• –––, 2014, Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Callan, Eamonn, 1997, Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0198292589.001.0001
• –––, 2016, “Democracy, Equal Citizenship, and Education”, Theory and Research in Education , 14(1): 77–90. doi:10.1177/1477878515619789
• Carnevale, Anthony P., Stephen J. Rose, and Ban Cheah, 2011, The College Payoff: Education, Occupations, Lifetime Earnings , Washington, DC: Center on Education and the Workforce. [ Carnevale, Rose, & Cheah 2011 available online ]
• Chetty, Raj, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, & Emmanuel Saez, 2014, “Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States”, The Quarterly Journal of Economics , 129(4): 1553–1623. doi:10.3386/w19843
• Clayton, Matthew, 2001, “Rawls And Natural Aristocracy”, Croatian Journal Of Philosophy , 1(3): 239–259.
• Dee, Thomas S., 2004, “Are There Civic Returns to Education?”, Journal of Public Economics , 88(9–10): 1697–1720.
• Duncan, Greg J. and Richard J. Murnane (eds.), 2011, Whither Opportunity?: Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances . New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
• Friedman, Milton and Rose Friedman, 1990, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement , New York: Harcourt.
• Galston, William, 1989, “Civic Education in the Liberal State”, in Nancy Rosenblum (ed.), Liberalism and the Moral Life , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 89–102.
• –––, 2001, “Political Knowledge, Political Engagement, and Civic Education”, Annual Review of Political Science , 4(1): 217–234. doi:10.1146/annurev.polisci.4.1.217
• Gomberg, Paul, 1975, “IQ and Race: A Discussion of Some Confusions”, Ethics , 85(3): 258–266. doi:10.1086/291965
• Guinier, Lani, 2016, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America , Boston: Beacon Press.
• Gutmann, Amy, 1995, “Civic Education and Social Diversity”, Ethics , 105(3): 557–579. doi:10.1086/293727
• –––, 1999, Democratic Education . Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Heckman, James J. and Tim D. Kautz, 2012, “Hard Evidence on Soft Skills”, Labour Economics , 19(4): 451–464. doi:10.3386/w18121 doi:10.1016/j.labeco.2012.05.014
• Hutton, John S., Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus, Alan L. Mendelsohn, Tom DeWitt, Scott K. Holland, & C-MIND Authorship Consortium, 2015, “Home Reading Environment and Brain Activation in Preschool Children Listening to Stories”, Pediatrics , 136(3): 466–478. doi:10.1542/peds.2015-0359
• Institute for Higher Education, 1998, Reaping the Benefits: Defining the Public and Private Value of Going to College , Washington, DC: Institute for Higher Education.
• Jacobs, Lesley A., 2004, Pursuing Equal Opportunities: the Theory and Practice of Egalitarian Justice , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2010, “Equality, Adequacy, And Stakes Fairness: Retrieving The Equal Opportunities In Education Approach”, Theory And Research In Education , 8(3): 249–268. doi:10.1177/1477878510381627
• Jencks, Christopher, 1988, “Whom Must We Treat Equally for Educational Opportunity to be Equal?” Ethics , 98(3): 518–533. doi:10.1086/292969
• Kittay, Eva, 1999, Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency , New York: Routledge
• Kozol, Jonathan, 1991, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools , New York: Broadway Books.
• –––, 2005, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America , New York: Broadway Books.
• Lareau, Annette, 2011, Unequal childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life , Oakland: University of California Press.
• Levin, Henry M., 2012, “More Than Just Test Scores”, Prospects , 42(3): 269–284. doi:10.1007/s11125-012-9240-z
• Levinson, Meira, 2012, No Citizen Left Behind , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Levinson, Meira, Tatiana Geron, and Harry Brighouse, 2022, “Conceptions of Educational Equity”, AERA Open , 8. doi:10.1177/23328584221121344
• Levinson, Meira, Alan C. Geller, and Joseph G. Allen, 2021, “Health Equity, School Hesitancy, and the Social Determinants of Learning”, The Lancet Regional Health – Americas , 2: 100032. doi:10.1016/j.lana.2021.100032
• Levinson, Meira, Muge Cevik, and Marc Lipsitch, 2020, “Reopening Primary Schools During the Pandemic”, New England Journal of Medicine , 383: 981–985. doi:10.1056/NEJMms2024920
• Liu, Goodwin, 2006, “Interstate Inequality in Educational Opportunity”, New York University Law Review , 81(6): 2044–2128.
• Loi, Michele, Lorenzo Del Savio, and Elia Stupka, 2013, “Social Epigentics and Equality of Opportunity”, Public Health Ethics , 6(2): 142–153. doi:10.1093/phe/pht019
• Loury, Glenn C., 1987, “Why Should We Care About Group Inequality”, Social Philosophy and Policy 5(1): 249–271. doi:10.1017/S0265052500001345
• Miklosi, Zoltan, 2010, “How Does the Difference Principle Make a Difference?”, Res Publica , 16(3): 263–280. doi:10.1007/s11158-010-9123-1
• Miller, David, 1996, “Two Cheers for Meritocracy”, Journal of Political Philosophy , 4(4): 277–301. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9760.1996.tb00053.x
• –––, 2009, “Equality Of Opportunity And The Family”, in Debra Satz and Rob Reich (eds.), Toward A Humanist Justice: The Political Philosophy Of Susan Moller Okin , New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 93–112. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195337396.003.0006
• Munoz-Dardé, Véronique, 1999, “Is the Family to be Abolished Then?”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 99: 37–56. doi:10.1111/1467-9264.00044
• Nozick, Robert, 1997, “ Life is Not a Race ”, in Louis P. Pojman and Robert Westmoreland (eds.), Equality: Selected Readings , New York: Oxford University Press, 167–169.
• Nussbaum, Martha C., 2007, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership , Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. and Joshua Cohen, 1996, For Love of Country? , Boston: Beacon Press.
• Oakes, Jeannie, 1985, Keeping Track . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Phillips, Anne, 2004, “Defending Equality of Outcome”, Journal of Political Philosophy , 12(1): 1–19. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9760.2004.00188.x
• Piketty, Thomas, 2014, Capital in the Twenty-first Century , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Rawls, John, 1999, A Theory of Justice, Revised Edition , Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
• –––, 2001, Justice as Fairness: a Restatement , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2005, Political Liberalism , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Reardon, Sean F., 2011, “The Widening Academic Achievement Gap Between the Rich and the Poor: New Evidence and Possible Explanations”, in Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane (eds.), Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances , New York, NY: Russel Sage Foundation, pp. 91–116.
• Reardon, Sean F. and Kendra Bischoff, 2011, “Income Inequality and Income Segregation”, American Journal of Sociology , 116(4): 1092–1153. doi:10.1086/657114
• Reardon, Sean F., Joseph P. Robinson-Cimpian, and Ericka S. Weathers, 2015, “Patterns and Trends in Racial/Ethnic and Socioeconomic Academic Achievement Gaps”, in Helen F. Ladd and M.E. Goertz (eds.), Handbook of Research in Education Finance and Policy (2nd Ed.) , New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 497–516.
• Rebell, Michael A., 2009, Courts and Kids: Pursuing Educational Equity through the State Courts , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• Reich, Rob, 2013, “ Equality, Adequacy, and K12 Education ”, in Danielle Allen and Rob Reich (eds.), Education, Justice, and Democracy , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 623–648.
• Robeyns, Ingrid, 2006, “Three Models of Education: Rights, Capabilities and Human Capital”, Theory and Research in Education , 4(1): 69–84. doi:10.1177/1477878506060683
• Robinson, Kimberly Jenkins (ed.), 2019, A Federal Right to Education: Fundamental Questions for Our Democracy , New York: New York University Press.
• Roemer, John E., 1998, Equality of Opportunity , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Ryan, James E., 2007, “The Supreme Court and Voluntary Integration”, Harvard Law Review , 121(1): 131–157.
• –––, 2008, “Standards, Testing, and School Finance Litigation”, Texas Law Review , 86: 1223–1262.
• Saez, Emmanuel and Gabriel Zucman, 2014, Wealth Inequality in the United States Since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data (NBER Working Paper no. 20625), Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. doi:10.3386/w20625
• Sahlberg, Pasi, 2011, Finnish lessons , New York: Teachers College Press.
• Sandel, Michael, 2020, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Satz, Debra, 2007, “Equality, Adequacy, and Education for Citizenship”, Ethics , 117(4): 623–648. doi:10.1086/518805
• Schoeman, Ferdinand, 1980, “Rights of Children, Rights of Parents, and the Moral Basis of the Family”, Ethics , 91(1): 6–19. doi:10.1086/292199
• Schouten, Gina, 2012, “Fair Educational Opportunity and the Distribution of Natural Ability: Toward a Prioritarian Principle of Educational Justice”, Journal of Philosophy of Education , 46(3): 472–491. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9752.2012.00863.x
• Schrag, Francis, 1976, “Justice and the Family”, Inquiry , 19(1–4): 193–208. doi:10.1080/00201747608601791
• Sen, Amartya, 2000, “ Merit and Justice ”, in Kenneth Arrow, Samuel Bowles, and Steven Durlauf (eds.), Meritocracy and Economic Inequality , Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 5–16.
• Shields, Liam, 2015, “From Rawlsian Autonomy to Sufficient Opportunity in Education”, Politics, Philosophy & Economics , 14(1): 53–66. doi:10.1177/1470594X13505413
• Shiffrin, Seana Valentine, 2004, “Race, Labor, And The Fair Equality Of Opportunity Principle”, Fordham Law Review , 72(5): 1643–1676.
• Sparrow, Robert, 2005, “Defending Deaf Culture: the Case of Cochlear Implants”, Journal of Political Philosophy , 13(2): 135–152. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9760.2005.00217.x
• Spence, Michael, 1973, “Job Market Signaling”, The Quarterly Journal of Economics , 87(3): 355–374.
• Stark, Cynthia A., 2013, “Luck, Opportunity and Disability”, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy , 16(3): 383–402. doi:10.1080/13698230.2013.795701
• Taylor, Robert S., 2004, “Self-realization and the Priority of Fair Equality of Opportunity”, Journal of Moral Philosophy , 1(3): 333–347. doi:10.1177/174046810400100307
• Terzi, Lorella, 2005, “Beyond the Dilemma of Difference: The Capability Approach to Disability and Special Educational Needs”, Journal of Philosophy of Education , 39(3): 443–459. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9752.2005.00447.x
• –––, 2010, Justice and Equality in Education: A Capability Perspective on Disability and Special Educational Needs , New York: Continuum.
• Verba, Sidney, Kay Lehman Schlozman and Henry E. Brady, 1995, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Walzer, Michael, 1983, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality , New York: Basic.
• Warnock, Mary, 2005, “Special Educational Needs: A New Look”, Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain.
• Westen, Peter, 1985, “The Concept of Equal Opportunity”, Ethics , 95(4): 837–850. doi:10.1086/292687
• Williams, Bernard, 1962, “ The Idea of Equality ”, in Peter Laslett and W.G. Runciman (eds.), Philosophy, Politics and Society, Second Series , Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 112–17.
• Wolff, Jonathan, 1998, “Fairness, Respect, and the Egalitarian Ethos”, Philosophy & Public Affairs , 27(2): 97–122. doi:10.1111/j.1088-4963.1998.tb00063.x
• Young, Michael, 1958,  The Rise of the Meritocracy, New Brunswick, NJ: Thames and Hudson.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

Cited Court Cases

• Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
• Milliken v. Bradley (1974).
• Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District (2006).
• San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973).
• Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1970).
• Yoder v. Wisconsin (1972).

Other Resources

• “The Condition of Education” , National Center for Education Statistics
• Reardon, Sean F., 2015, “School Segregation and Racial Academic Achievement Gaps” , (CEPA Working Paper No.15–12). Retrieved from Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis.
• Reardon, Sean F., 2021, “ The Economic Achievement Gap in the US, 1960-2020: Reconciling Recent Empirical Findings ”, (CEPA Working Paper No. 21.09). Retrieved from Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis.
• Reardon, Sean F., Erica Weather, Erin Fahle, Heewon Jang, and Demetra Kalogrides, 2022, “ Is Separate Still Unequal? New Evidence on School Segregation and Racial Academic Achievement Gaps ”, (CEPA Working Paper No.19-06). Retrieved from Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis.
• National Equity Atlas , PolicyLink and the USC Equity Research Institute. In particular the entry on School Poverty
• 2022 US Bureau of Labor Statistics

affirmative action | childhood, the philosophy of | citizenship | civic education | disability: and justice | discrimination | economics [normative] and economic justice | egalitarianism | equality | equality: of opportunity | justice: distributive | luck: justice and bad luck | rights: of children

Copyright © 2023 by Liam Shields < liam . shields @ manchester . ac . uk > Anne Newman < arnewman @ stanford . edu > Debra Satz < dsatz @ stanford . edu >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2024 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Featured Topics

Featured series.

A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.

Explore the Gazette

Read the latest.

One way to help big groups of students? Volunteer tutors.

Footnote leads to exploration of start of for-profit prisons in N.Y.

Should NATO step up role in Russia-Ukraine war?

The costs of inequality: education’s the one key that rules them all.

When there’s inequity in learning, it’s usually baked into life, Harvard analysts say

Corydon Ireland

Harvard Correspondent

Third in a series on what Harvard scholars are doing to identify and understand inequality, in seeking solutions to one of America’s most vexing problems.

Before Deval Patrick ’78, J.D. ’82, was the popular and successful two-term governor of Massachusetts, before he was managing director of high-flying Bain Capital, and long before he was Harvard’s most recent Commencement speaker , he was a poor black schoolchild in the battered housing projects of Chicago’s South Side.

The odds of his escaping a poverty-ridden lifestyle, despite innate intelligence and drive, were long. So how did he help mold his own narrative and triumph over baked-in societal inequality ? Through education.

“Education has been the path to better opportunity for generations of American strivers, no less for me,” Patrick said in an email when asked how getting a solid education, in his case at Milton Academy and at Harvard, changed his life.

“What great teachers gave me was not just the skills to take advantage of new opportunities, but the ability to imagine what those opportunities could be. For a kid from the South Side of Chicago, that’s huge.”

If inequality starts anywhere, many scholars agree, it’s with faulty education. Conversely, a strong education can act as the bejeweled key that opens gates through every other aspect of inequality , whether political, economic , racial, judicial, gender- or health-based.

Simply put, a top-flight education usually changes lives for the better. And yet, in the world’s most prosperous major nation, it remains an elusive goal for millions of children and teenagers.

Plateau on educational gains

The revolutionary concept of free, nonsectarian public schools spread across America in the 19th century. By 1970, America had the world’s leading educational system, and until 1990 the gap between minority and white students, while clear, was narrowing.

But educational gains in this country have plateaued since then, and the gap between white and minority students has proven stubbornly difficult to close, says Ronald Ferguson, adjunct lecturer in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and faculty director of Harvard’s Achievement Gap Initiative. That gap extends along class lines as well.

“What great teachers gave me was not just the skills to take advantage of new opportunities, but the ability to imagine what those opportunities could be. For a kid from the South Side of Chicago, that’s huge.” — Deval Patrick

In recent years, scholars such as Ferguson, who is an economist, have puzzled over the ongoing achievement gap and what to do about it, even as other nations’ school systems at first matched and then surpassed their U.S. peers. Among the 34 market-based, democracy-leaning countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States ranks around 20th annually, earning average or below-average grades in reading, science, and mathematics.

By eighth grade, Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. noted last year, only 44 percent of American students are proficient in reading and math. The proficiency of African-American students, many of them in underperforming schools, is even lower.

“The position of U.S. black students is truly alarming,” wrote Fryer, the Henry Lee Professor of Economics, who used the OECD rankings as a metaphor for minority standing educationally. “If they were to be considered a country, they would rank just below Mexico in last place.”

Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) Dean James E. Ryan, a former public interest lawyer, says geography has immense power in determining educational opportunity in America. As a scholar, he has studied how policies and the law affect learning, and how conditions are often vastly unequal.

His book “Five Miles Away, A World Apart” (2010) is a case study of the disparity of opportunity in two Richmond, Va., schools, one grimly urban and the other richly suburban. Geography, he says, mirrors achievement levels.

A ZIP code as predictor of success

“Right now, there exists an almost ironclad link between a child’s ZIP code and her chances of success,” said Ryan. “Our education system, traditionally thought of as the chief mechanism to address the opportunity gap, instead too often reflects and entrenches existing societal inequities.”

Urban schools demonstrate the problem. In New York City, for example, only 8 percent of black males graduating from high school in 2014 were prepared for college-level work, according to the CUNY Institute for Education Policy, with Latinos close behind at 11 percent. The preparedness rates for Asians and whites — 48 and 40 percent, respectively — were unimpressive too, but nonetheless were firmly on the other side of the achievement gap.

In some impoverished urban pockets, the racial gap is even larger. In Washington, D.C., 8 percent of black eighth-graders are proficient in math, while 80 percent of their white counterparts are.

Fryer said that in kindergarten black children are already 8 months behind their white peers in learning. By third grade, the gap is bigger, and by eighth grade is larger still.

According to a recent report by the Education Commission of the States, black and Hispanic students in kindergarten through 12th grade perform on a par with the white students who languish in the lowest quartile of achievement.

There was once great faith and hope in America’s school systems. The rise of quality public education a century ago “was probably the best public policy decision Americans have ever made because it simultaneously raised the whole growth rate of the country for most of the 20th century, and it leveled the playing field,” said Robert Putnam, the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at HKS, who has written several best-selling books touching on inequality, including “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of the American Community” and “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis.”

Historically, upward mobility in America was characterized by each generation becoming better educated than the previous one, said Harvard economist Lawrence Katz. But that trend, a central tenet of the nation’s success mythology, has slackened, particularly for minorities.

“Thirty years ago, the typical American had two more years of schooling than their parents. Today, we have the most educated group of Americans, but they only have about .4 more years of schooling, so that’s one part of mobility not keeping up in the way we’ve invested in education in the past,” Katz said.

As globalization has transformed and sometimes undercut the American economy, “education is not keeping up,” he said. “There’s continuing growth of demand for more abstract, higher-end skills” that schools aren’t delivering, “and then that feeds into a weakening of institutions like unions and minimum-wage protections.”

“The position of U.S. black students is truly alarming.” — Roland G. Fryer Jr.

Fryer is among a diffuse cohort of Harvard faculty and researchers using academic tools to understand the achievement gap and the many reasons behind problematic schools. His venue is the Education Innovation Laboratory , where he is faculty director.

“We use big data and causal methods,” he said of his approach to the issue.

Fryer, who is African-American, grew up poor in a segregated Florida neighborhood. He argues that outright discrimination has lost its power as a primary driver behind inequality, and uses economics as “a rational forum” for discussing social issues.

Better schools to close the gap

Fryer set out in 2004 to use an economist’s data and statistical tools to answer why black students often do poorly in school compared with whites. His years of research have convinced him that good schools would close the education gap faster and better than addressing any other social factor, including curtailing poverty and violence, and he believes that the quality of kindergarten through grade 12 matters above all.

Supporting his belief is research that says the number of schools achieving excellent student outcomes is a large enough sample to prove that much better performance is possible. Despite the poor performance by many U.S. states, some have shown that strong results are possible on a broad scale. For instance, if Massachusetts were a nation, it would rate among the best-performing countries.

At HGSE, where Ferguson is faculty co-chair as well as director of the Achievement Gap Initiative, many factors are probed. In the past 10 years, Ferguson, who is African-American, has studied every identifiable element contributing to unequal educational outcomes. But lately he is looking hardest at improving children’s earliest years, from infancy to age 3.

In addition to an organization he founded called the Tripod Project , which measures student feedback on learning, he launched the Boston Basics project in August, with support from the Black Philanthropy Fund, Boston’s mayor, and others. The first phase of the outreach campaign, a booklet, videos, and spot ads, starts with advice to parents of children age 3 or younger.

“Maximize love, manage stress” is its mantra and its foundational imperative, followed by concepts such as “talk, sing, and point.” (“Talking,” said Ferguson, “is teaching.”) In early childhood, “The difference in life experiences begins at home.”

At age 1, children score similarly

Fryer and Ferguson agree that the achievement gap starts early. At age 1, white, Asian, black, and Hispanic children score virtually the same in what Ferguson called “skill patterns” that measure cognitive ability among toddlers, including examining objects, exploring purposefully, and “expressive jabbering.” But by age 2, gaps are apparent, with black and Hispanic children scoring lower in expressive vocabulary, listening comprehension, and other indicators of acuity. That suggests educational achievement involves more than just schooling, which typically starts at age 5.

Key factors in the gap, researchers say, include poverty rates (which are three times higher for blacks than for whites), diminished teacher and school quality, unsettled neighborhoods, ineffective parenting, personal trauma, and peer group influence, which only strengthens as children grow older.

“Peer beliefs and values,” said Ferguson, get “trapped in culture” and are compounded by the outsized influence of peers and the “pluralistic ignorance” they spawn. Fryer’s research, for instance, says that the reported stigma of “acting white” among many black students is true. The better they do in school, the fewer friends they have — while for whites who are perceived as smarter, there’s an opposite social effect.

The researchers say that family upbringing matters, in all its crisscrossing influences and complexities, and that often undercuts minority children, who can come from poor or troubled homes. “Unequal outcomes,” he said, “are from, to a large degree, inequality in life experiences.”

Trauma also subverts achievement, whether through family turbulence, street violence, bullying, sexual abuse, or intermittent homelessness. Such factors can lead to behaviors in school that reflect a pervasive form of childhood post-traumatic stress disorder.

[gz_sidebar align=”left”]

Possible solutions to educational inequality:

• Access to early learning
• Improved K-12 schools
• More family mealtimes
• Reinforced learning at home
• Data-driven instruction
• Longer school days, years
• Respect for school rules
• Small-group tutoring
• High expectations of students
• Safer neighborhoods

[/gz_sidebar]

At Harvard Law School, both the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative and the Education Law Clinic marshal legal aid resources for parents and children struggling with trauma-induced school expulsions and discipline issues.

At Harvard Business School, Karim R. Lakhani, an associate professor who is a crowdfunding expert and a champion of open-source software, has studied how unequal racial and economic access to technology has worked to widen the achievement gap.

At Harvard’s Project Zero, a nonprofit called the Family Dinner Project is scraping away at the achievement gap from the ground level by pushing for families to gather around the meal table, which traditionally was a lively and comforting artifact of nuclear families, stable wages, close-knit extended families, and culturally shared values.

Lynn Barendsen, the project’s executive director, believes that shared mealtimes improve reading skills, spur better grades and larger vocabularies, and fuel complex conversations. Interactive mealtimes provide a learning experience of their own, she said, along with structure, emotional support, a sense of safety, and family bonding. Even a modest jump in shared mealtimes could boost a child’s academic performance, she said.

“We’re not saying families have to be perfect,” she said, acknowledging dinnertime impediments like full schedules, rudimentary cooking skills, the lure of technology, and the demands of single parenting. “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

Whether poring over Fryer’s big data or Barendsen’s family dinner project, there is one commonality for Harvard researchers dealing with inequality in education: the issue’s vast complexity. The achievement gap is a creature of interlocking factors that are hard to unpack constructively.

Going wide, starting early

With help from faculty co-chair and Jesse Climenko Professor of Law Charles J. Ogletree, the Achievement Gap Initiative is analyzing the factors that make educational inequality such a complex puzzle: home and family life, school environments, teacher quality, neighborhood conditions, peer interaction, and the fate of “all those wholesome things,” said Ferguson. The latter include working hard in school, showing respect, having nice friends, and following the rules, traits that can be “elements of a 21st-century movement for equality.”

In the end, best practices to create strong schools will matter most, said Fryer.

He called high-quality education “the new civil rights battleground” in a landmark 2010 working paper for the Handbook of Labor Economics called “Racial Inequality in the 21st Century: The Declining Significance of Discrimination.”

Fryer tapped 10 large data sets on children 8 months to 17 years old. He studied charter schools, scouring for standards that worked. He champions longer school days and school years, data-driven instruction, small-group tutoring, high expectations, and a school culture that prizes human capital — all just “a few simple investments,” he wrote in the working paper. “The challenge for the future is to take these examples to scale” across the country.

How long would closing the gap take with a national commitment to do so? A best-practices experiment that Fryer conducted at low-achieving high schools in Houston closed the gap in math skills within three years, and narrowed the reading achievement gap by a third.

“You don’t need Superman for this,” he said, referring to a film about Geoffrey Canada and his Harlem Children’s Zone, just high-quality schools for everyone, to restore 19th-century educator Horace Mann’s vision of public education as society’s “balance-wheel.”

Last spring, Fryer, still only 38, won the John Bates Clark medal, the most prestigious award in economics after the Nobel Prize. He was a MacArthur Fellow in 2011, became a tenured Harvard professor in 2007, was named to the prestigious Society of Fellows at age 25. He had a classically haphazard childhood, but used school to learn, grow, and prosper. Gradually, he developed a passion for social science that could help him answer what was going wrong in black lives because of educational inequality.

With his background and talent, Fryer has a dramatically unique perspective on inequality and achievement, and he has something else: a seemingly counterintuitive sense that these conditions will improve, once bad schools learn to get better. Discussing the likelihood of closing the achievement gap if Americans have the political and organizational will to do so, Fryer said, “I see nothing but optimism.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story inaccurately portrayed details of Dr. Fryer’s background.

Illustration by Kathleen M.G. Howlett. Harvard staff writer Christina Pazzanese contributed to this report.

Next Tuesday: Inequality in health care

Share this article

You might like.

Research finds low-cost, online program yields significant results

Historian traces 19th-century murder case that brought together historical figures, helped shape American thinking on race, violence, incarceration

National security analysts outline stakes ahead of July summit

When should Harvard speak out?

Institutional Voice Working Group provides a roadmap in new report

Day to remember

One journey behind them, grads pause to reflect before starting the next

Had a bad experience meditating? You're not alone.

Altered states of consciousness through yoga, mindfulness more common than thought and mostly beneficial, study finds — though clinicians ill-equipped to help those who struggle

• High contrast
• Press Centre

Search UNICEF

• Inclusive education

Every child has the right to quality education and learning.

There are an estimated 240 million children with disabilities worldwide. Like all children, children with disabilities have ambitions and dreams for their futures. Like all children, they need quality education to develop their skills and realize their full potential.

Yet, children with disabilities are often overlooked in policymaking, limiting their access to education and their ability to participate in social, economic and political life. Worldwide, these children are among the most likely to be out of school. They face persistent barriers to education stemming from discrimination, stigma and the routine failure of decision makers to incorporate disability in school services.

Disability is one of the most serious barriers to education across the globe.

Robbed of their right to learn, children with disabilities are often denied the chance to take part in their communities, the workforce and the decisions that most affect them.

Getting all children in school and learning

Inclusive education is the most effective way to give all children a fair chance to go to school, learn and develop the skills they need to thrive.

Inclusive education means all children in the same classrooms, in the same schools. It means real learning opportunities for groups who have traditionally been excluded – not only children with disabilities, but speakers of minority languages too.

Inclusive systems value the unique contributions students of all backgrounds bring to the classroom and allow diverse groups to grow side by side, to the benefit of all.

Inclusive education allows students of all backgrounds to learn and grow side by side, to the benefit of all.

But progress comes slowly. Inclusive systems require changes at all levels of society.

At the school level, teachers must be trained, buildings must be refurbished and students must receive accessible learning materials. At the community level, stigma and discrimination must be tackled and individuals need to be educated on the benefit of inclusive education. At the national level, Governments must align laws and policies with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities , and regularly collect and analyse data to ensure children are reached with effective services.

UNICEF’s work to promote inclusive education

To close the education gap for children with disabilities, UNICEF supports government efforts to foster and monitor inclusive education systems. Our work focuses on four key areas:

• Advocacy : UNICEF promotes inclusive education in discussions, high-level events and other forms of outreach geared towards policymakers and the general public.
• Awareness-raising : UNICEF shines a spotlight on the needs of children with disabilities by conducting research and hosting roundtables, workshops and other events for government partners.
• Capacity-building : UNICEF builds the capacity of education systems in partner countries by training teachers, administrators and communities, and providing technical assistance to Governments.
• Implementation support : UNICEF assists with monitoring and evaluation in partner countries to close the implementation gap between policy and practice.

More from UNICEF

The boy who changed his community in Serbia

How one boy overcame stigma and demonstrated the power of inclusive education.

I want to change how society sees people with disabilities

"When I came to school, I was determined to show everybody I could make it."

Children call for access to quality climate education

On Earth Day, UNICEF urges governments to empower every child with learning opportunities to be a champion for the planet

An entire generation of children in Sudan faces a catastrophe as the war enters its second year

Fixing the Broken Promise of Education for All

This report draws on national studies to examine why millions of children continue to be denied the fundamental right to primary education.

Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities adopts a broad categorization of persons with disabilities and reaffirms that all persons with all types of disabilities must enjoy all human rights and fundamental freedoms.

Inclusive Education: Including Children with Disabilities in Quality Learning

This document provides guidance on what Governments can do to create inclusive education systems.

Towards Inclusive Education: The Impact of Disability on School Attendance in Developing Countries

Using cross-nationally comparable and nationally representative data from 18 surveys in 15 countries, this paper investigates how disability affects school attendance.

Equity vs Equality in Education: Building Inclusivity

• May 2, 2020

The quality of education that students receive directly correlates to their quality of life years down the road.[1] Early education in particular has the power to shape a child’s future and the more resources available to them, the better. For this reason, it’s crucial for educators to address any barriers young students face to succeeding in school. The key is equity. Equity means offering individualized support to students that addresses possible barriers, like poverty or limited transportation. 97% of teachers agree that equity is important, but many don’t know how to best work towards it in their classrooms.[2] But once educators have the right strategies to promote equity in schools through understanding the difference between equity vs equality in education, they can make sure each student is prepared to reach their potential.

Want to create inclusive and equitable classrooms at your school? Discover the difference between equity and equality, then learn five strategies for resolving common barriers to equity in education.

Main Differences Between Equity and Equality

Equality is more commonly associated with social issues, perhaps because more people know what it means. In a nutshell, its definition is as it sounds–the state of being equal. When a group focuses on equality, everyone has the same rights, opportunities, and resources.[4] Equality is beneficial, but it often doesn’t address specific needs. Giving each student a take-home laptop, for example, would not address students who don’t have Internet in their houses. Even if a school is equal, some students may still struggle.

Equity, on the other hand, provides people with resources that fit their circumstances. The World Health Organization (WHO) definition of social equity is “the absence of avoidable or remediable differences among groups of people.” [5] Schools that prioritize equity versus equality are more in tune to their students’ needs and provide resources to overcome their specific challenges.

Equity and Equality Descriptors

In short, equality is:

• Group-focused

And equity is:

• Individual-focused

“The route to achieving equity will not be accomplished through treating everyone equally,” says the Race Matters Institute. “It will be achieved by treating everyone equitably, or justly according to their circumstances.” [6] Equity is more thoughtful and, while it’s harder work, it is better at resolving disadvantages. While equality is an admirable goal, try shifting your school’s focus to equity for a more effective outcome.

Challenges Involving Equity and Equality in Schools

Barriers to an inclusive education can affect groups based on race, gender, and many other factors. The issues are not only who is being targeted but also how we try to resolve them. In terms of equity vs equality in the classroom, most schools focus on horizontal equity. The definition of horizontal equity in education is treating people who are already assumed equal in the same way.[7]

Horizontal equity is only useful in homogenous schools, where each person really is given the same opportunities in life. But in most schools, students will come from a variety of backgrounds–some more privileged than others. For this reason, educators should focus on vertical equity, which assumes that students have different needs and provides individual resources based on said needs.[8]

How does poverty impact students?

Another challenge facing equity vs equality in education is poverty. 60% of the most disadvantaged students come from under-resourced homes or communities.[9] Because their families or schools might have very limited budgets, it can be difficult to provide these students with equitable resources. Additionally, these under-resourced communities often have trouble keeping educators who can make a difference: 62% of high-poverty schools report that it is challenging to retain high-quality teachers.[10]

According to the Scholastic Teachers and Principals Report, these are a few additional barriers to equity in American schools:[11]

• Family crises
• Mental health issues
• Lack of healthcare
• Coming to school hungry
• Homelessness or living in a temporary shelter
• Still learning the English language

Recognizing the challenges preventing equity in your classroom is the first step to resolving them. Try to analyze any issues that are keeping your students from succeeding in school. Perhaps you teach in an under-resourced community, or one of your students is an English language learner (ELL) . By evaluating the needs of individual students, you’re much closer to providing them with the support necessary for academic achievement.

Benefits of Focusing on Equity in Education

Equity in schools is the answer to supporting every student, not just those from disadvantaged backgrounds. When schools provide their students with resources that fit individual circumstances, the entire classroom environment improves.[12] Not only that, but the importance of equity extends to our society as a whole. In equitable communities, everyone has the opportunity to succeed regardless of their original circumstances.

Student Development and Community Equity

Equity can also strengthen a student’s health and social-emotional development . In a study involving over 4,300 students in Southern California, the children who felt safer, less lonely, and reported less bullying also had higher diversity levels in their classes.[14] Being equipped to promote diversity and provide for students from all backgrounds makes for an environment where students feel comfortable and have better emotional regulation. Additionally, equitable communities are linked to better health and longer average lifespans.[15]

Surrounding communities benefit from equity in schools as well. Equity is linked to stronger social cohesion, meaning that individuals connect with each other better and are more compassionate.[16] It also leads to long-term economic growth.[17] This means that promoting equity in schools can be one of the best and most effective social investments .

To summarize, these are some of the benefits of focusing on equity in education:

• Higher test scores
• Better health
• Stronger social atmosphere
• Longer life
• Economic growth

5 Tips for Using Equity to Create an Inclusive Classroom

Knowing the difference between equity and equality is the first step to creating a classroom where every child can succeed. From there, educators can take steps to better address the challenges faced by struggling students.

Keep these five tips in mind for promoting equity in your classroom and helping every student succeed:

• Remember that every child is different and has unique needs. Evaluate any challenges that students face and, if needed, offer support or resources [18]
• Cultivate an environment in your classroom where every student feels heard. Encourage them to speak out against unfairness and let you know if they’re facing any hardships at home or in class
• Parent engagement is a particularly helpful way to resolve challenges involving equity. Keep open communication with parents and encourage them to volunteer or attend school events to involve them with their child’s education [19]
• Provide equity training in schools for faculty members so teachers know how to resolve common barriers [20]
• Add diversity and inclusion activities as well as lessons against prejudice to your school curriculum so every student feels like they belong [21]

OECD Observer Staff. Ten Steps to Equity in Education . Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, January 2008, pp. 1-8.[1]

Scholastic Team . Barriers to Equity in Education | Teachers and Principals School Report . Retrieved from scholastic.com: http://www.scholastic.com/teacherprincipalreport/barriers-to-equity.htm.[2]

Winston-Salem State University. Strategic Planning at Winston-Salem State University: Working Toward Equity . Retrieved from wssu.edu: https://www.wssu.edu/strategic-plan/documents/a-summary-of-equity-vs-equality.pdf.[3]

Just Health Action. Part 1: Introduction to Environmental Justice, Equity, and Health . Retrieved from justhealthaction.org: http://justhealthaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/JHA-Lesson-Plan-3-How-are-equity-and-equality-different-final.pdf.[4]

World Health Organization. WHO | Equity . Retrieved from who.int: https://www.who.int/healthsystems/topics/equity/en/.[5]

Race Matters Institute. Racial Equality or Racial Equity? The Difference it Makes . Retrieved from viablefuturescenture.org: https://viablefuturescenter.org/racemattersinstitute/2014/04/02/racial-equality-or-racial-equity-the-difference-it-makes/.[6]

Catapano, J. The Challenges of Equity in Public Education . Retrieved from teachhub.com: https://www.teachhub.com/challenges-equity-public-education.[7,8]

OECD Observer Staff. Ten Steps to Equity in Education . Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, January 2008, pp. 1-8.[9,10]

Scholastic Team. Barriers to Equity in Education | Teachers and Principals School Report . Retrieved from scholastic.com: http://www.scholastic.com/teacherprincipalreport/barriers-to-equity.htm.[11]

OECD Observer Staff. Ten Steps to Equity in Education . Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, January 2008, pp. 1-8.[12]

Gorard, S., and Smith, E . An international comparison of equity in education systems . School Comparative Education, 2004, 40(1), pp. 15-28.[13]

Atchison, B., Diffey, L., Rafa, A., and Sarubbi, M. Equity in Education: Key Questions to Consider . Education Commission of the States, June, 2017, pp. 1-6.[14]

OECD Observer Staff. Ten Steps to Equity in Education . Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, January 2008, pp. 1-8.[15, 16, 17]

Scholastic Team. Barriers to Equity in Education | Teachers and Principals School Report . Retrieved from scholastic.com: http://www.scholastic.com/teacherprincipalreport/barriers-to-equity.htm.[18]

OECD Observer Staff. Ten Steps to Equity in Education . Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, January 2008, pp. 1-8.[19]

Atchison, B., Diffey, L., Rafa, A., and Sarubbi, M. Equity in Education: Key Questions to Consider . Education Commission of the States, June, 2017, pp. 1-6.[20]

OECD Observer Staff. Ten Steps to Equity in Education . Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, January 2008, pp. 1-8.[21]

More education articles

10 of the Best Elementary Activities for the Last Days of School

The end of the school year can evoke a bittersweet feeling. It marks a moment for celebration as educators contemplate the growth and achievements of

Preparing Your Child for Kindergarten: 6 Important Skills to Foster

As someone who has had the privilege of being a kindergarten teacher, I vividly recall the excitement and anticipation of children stepping foot into my

National Poetry Month: Elementary Classroom Activities & Picture Books

Every April, the literary world comes alive with rhythm and rhyme as we celebrate National Poetry Month. For elementary school teachers, this month is an

Mental Health Awareness Month 2024: 7 Ways to Nurture Your Child’s Mental Health

MacKenzie Scott’s Yield Giving Awards Waterford.org a $10 Million Grant

Fairness in Education

Fair and equitable education is the key to unlocking lifelong opportunities for children living in poverty. It provides them with the opportunity to learn, graduate, and pursue a good life with jobs to sustain themselves and grow.

As advocates for families and children living in poverty, we and our clients give voice to the challenges they face in obtaining an education – in hearings, in school board meetings, at the state department of education, and in the Ohio General Assembly. ABLE works for changes for individual students, in school policies and practices, and community driven projects for child educational success, so that all children have the opportunity to learn, without regard to race, disability, immigrant background, or poverty.

Areas of Legal Practice and Advocacy: Combatting unfair or discriminatory practices | Suspension & Expulsion Defense | Racial Justice | English Learner education | Disability Rights | Special Education | Educational stability for children who are homeless or in foster care | Community Lawyering projects for educational success | Parent Education and Empowerment | Education funding equity | Mental Health Consumer Rights

Retired Justice Lanzinger, "Justice is a mandate that everyone have an opportunity for education.”

“The Ohio Access to Justice Foundation was previously known as the Ohio Legal Assistance Foundation.”

News and Resources

Empowering Non-English speaking parents with meaningful access to their children’s education

Nadia: Fighting for the least restrictive classroom

Justice Department Reaches Settlement with Toledo Public Schools

Katie's fight

Katie’s mother struggled to get her daughter the education she needs from their rural, public school district. As a young child, Katie struggled with severe behavioral outbursts and would run away from school – even from a school that specialized in working with children with disabilities. Katie has a genetic disorder, autism, attention deficit and behavioral disorders.

Read more about Katie

Clarissa: Failure to Transfer School Records Affects Children Across the State

All children deserve stable education. But when Clarissa, an ABLE client with a special education plan, had to move one summer, her education at her next school fell apart. Instead of a small classroom with the help Clarissa needed for her diagnosed mental health needs, Clarissa’s new school put her in a regular class. She did not get her much-needed instruction on adapting and coping skills, which could have helped her transition.

Learn more about Clarissa

How Basma triumphed in her struggle for education

When Basma* came to the U.S., the public school in her district denied her admission by claiming that her middle school diploma which she received in Syria was a terminal school degree. The school claimed this meant Basma could not attend any additional school grades.

ABLE explained to the principal of the school that Basma was entitled to a free, public education regardless of her school degree from her country of origin. As a result, the principal enrolled Basma. ABLE also advocated for services to help Basma learn English as a second language. The school arranged for that assistance, and now Basma is on the path to high school graduation.

* This client’s name was changed to protect her privacy.

Funding Partners

DO YOU NEED LEGAL HELP?

Click to apply for legal help/​solicitar ayuda legal.

Cookie Notice

This website uses cookies to enhance your browsing experience.

Accept Cookies

Classroom Q&A

With larry ferlazzo.

In this EdWeek blog, an experiment in knowledge-gathering, Ferlazzo will address readers’ questions on classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing teachers. Send your questions to [email protected]. Read more from this blog.

Equity? Equality? How Educators Can Tell the Difference

• Share article

Today’s post is the latest in a series on the difference between equity and equality .

‘Every Student Doesn’t Need the Same Thing’

Karen Baptiste, Ed.D., a senior consultant at McREL International, is a former special education teacher, instructional coach, and director who now works with K–12 schools across the United States to support improved teaching and learning. She is a co-author of The New Classroom Instruction That Works :

It’s common for educators to believe and teach that everyone should be treated fairly and equally. Having been a special education teacher, and being a person of color, I understand the impact on a child’s life when we treat everyone equally.

Equality, in general terms, is the belief that everyone should get the same treatment, the same resources, and the same starting point. That would be OK if our society did not rank race, gender, (dis)ability, religion, etc. Unfortunately, people of color have dealt with racism and oppression for hundreds of years, and they have not had equal treatment, fairness, nor the same starting point. When teachers say they want equality, what they are saying is that they want all of their students to be treated the same and, therefore, do not see or acknowledge the differences among their students.

When an educator says they believe in equality over equity, they overlook their students’ unique characteristics, abilities, and traits that make them who they are and alleviate themselves from the responsibility of having to address their students’ needs. Most people want to avoid discomfort, especially when the topic of race is surfaced. There is fear of getting it wrong or being accused of being a racist, so it’s easier to say “I treat all of my students the same.”

Equity acknowledges and addresses the unique needs of each student, and it is what we need to work toward. Because of my dark skin, and because of my gender, and because of the texture of my hair, and because of the language I speak, I am born into a world where I am too often dismissed and seen as inferior, not just in school but at work, when buying a home, shopping at the grocery store, traveling, and engaging in any part of living life. There is no part of our lives that has gone untouched by racism and/or discrimination. People of color are still fighting today to be seen and heard as an equal, valued member in the world. Until that happens, we can’t talk about equality.

Equity says I see you.

Equity says I want to understand you.

Equity says I accept your Black and brown skin.

Equity says there is nothing wrong with you or your existence in the world.

Equity says I recognize your learning needs and I am willing to learn the best ways to teach you and provide you with the resources that you need to be successful so that you can feel equal in this space.

Every student doesn’t need the same thing. Equality pushes for everyone to get the same thing, while equity is about giving every student what they need to be successful. Let’s set aside the topic of race momentarily and think about the grave outcomes if we treat students with special needs equal to their peers without special needs. What if the expectation during physical education class is to run two laps in a specified time? Students who use a wheelchair cannot realistically meet that expectation. This is why the federal law requires children designated for special education services to have an individualized education program, because their needs are not equal; they do not need equal treatment, they need equitable treatment and resources in order to access a quality education. Now, think about your student in class who needs to use manipulatives during a math lesson while other students can do mental math.

All students learn differently and can meet mastery when equity becomes part of your practice. Some might consider this pedantic when discussing equality and equity, but it’s not. Providing students with the resources they need to be successful provides them with the psychological safety that is sometimes missing in classrooms but gravely needed.

‘Equity Is Not an Initiative’

PJ Caposey is the Illinois Superintendent of the Year and is a best-selling author, having written nine books for various publishers. PJ is a sought after presenter and consultant who has a widely read weekly newsletter available at www.pjcaposey.com :

Sometimes, I think the concept of equity compared to equality is very difficult and complex. Other times, I think it is straightforward and people out of an act of willful ignorance choose not to understand. I work hard to keep a positive mindset, so my intent in this is to provide six practical examples to demonstrate the difference and how it plays out in schools.

• A student’s grandmother is in the hospital, and their attendance suffers, so you modify some assignments to ensure you are measuring their progress toward standards but limiting the volume to best meet the student’s needs. EQUITY
• A student’s grandmother is in the hospital, and their attendance suffers, and you keep them responsible for the exact work everyone else must complete. EQUALITY
• A student struggles to read and has a documented disability, so their tests are read to them. EQUITY
• A student struggles to read and has a documented disability, but you provide zero assistance to them because it would not be fair to the other students. EQUALITY
• A district analyzes their data and creates plans to close achievement gaps by paying special attention to those groups not performing well. EQUITY
• A district analyzes their data and creates improvement plans that are equally applied to all students. EQUALITY
• Based on benchmark assessment results, some students are placed in intervention groupings to support their learning needs. EQUITY
• Despite assessment results, all students receive the exact same instruction throughout the course of the day. EQUALITY
• All students who wish to participate in Advanced Placement courses are allowed to do so despite previous performance if they attend an in-person meeting articulating the demands of the course. EQUITY
• Only students who have a 3.2 grade point average and have had less than five missing assignments per year on average are allowed to participate in Advanced Placement courses without any exceptions. EQUALITY
• Some staff members have advanced degrees in reading so their professional development requirements around the new reading curriculum are altered to acknowledge their expertise. EQUITY
• All staff members are required to attend the same professional development regardless of prior knowledge or expertise. EQUALITY

My point in sharing these very realistic examples of equity versus equality is twofold. I have come to the realization that we “DO” equity far more than some people would elect to realize. Second, even those who are reluctant to embrace the fact that schools should have an equity focus typically want schools to make equitable decisions when it comes to them or their children. From that statement, feel free to extrapolate what you will.

I will leave with one last thought on the topic. Equity is not a goal. Equity is not an initiative. Equity is a mindset and a lens through which we make innumerable decisions every single day. Whenever we consider how we can best serve an individual student or lead an individual staff member by meeting them where they are at and helping them to get where they need to be, we are operating with an equity mindset.

‘Equity Empowers’

A retired teacher and speaker, Denise Fawcett Facey now writes on education issues. Among her books, Can I Be in Your Class focuses on ways to enliven classroom learning:

The words “That’s not fair” have become a virtual children’s anthem. Heard from homes to playgrounds to classrooms, those three words—spoken almost in the cadence of a song—are the outcry of kids everywhere, conveying their frustration over what they perceive as unequal treatment when things don’t go as they expected. Although we tend to ignore that all-too-common outburst, the early sense of justice that underlies it just as often informs adult concepts of equality as well, fostering an expectation that everyone will be treated the same. However, there is a striking difference between appearing to treat everyone equally and ensuring that everyone has the equity offered by an equal opportunity.

In an educational setting, affording everyone an equal chance at success means equity supersedes equality. From differentiation in teaching methods to the hiring of teachers, among other factors, here are four differences between equality and equity:

• Differentiation. Just as we don’t expect all students to wear eyeglasses in the name of equality, we shouldn’t expect all students to learn in the same way, either. Differentiation settles that. Providing what each student needs for optimal learning, it might be as simple as eyeglasses, preferential seating, or extended time for assignments. However, the chance to present mastery in multiple ways or to use books and other resources that are culturally relevant are also means of differentiation. Although the content area is the same for all students, as are the myriad tools available (there’s your equality), each uses the tool that enables that student to achieve success. That’s not only differentiation. It’s equity.
• Admission to gifted classes. While white, able-bodied students of a certain intellectual ability and socioeconomic level generally have an equal opportunity to be admitted to classes for gifted students, admission tends to exclude students of color as well as students with physical disabilities and those of lower socioeconomic levels, all of whom have eligible students among them. Equality makes certain that all schools have classes for gifted students. Equity goes beyond that, seeking to identify gifted students among those underrepresented groups within each school and assuring that they also gain admittance to gifted classes once identified.
• Hiring diverse teachers. It’s easy to point with pride to teachers of color in a district or to teachers who use wheelchairs, believing them to be reflections of equality and diversity. However, how many are there? And where are these teachers placed? Equality merely says there are some of each. Equity provides an equal opportunity for ALL teachers to teach at any school, not simply affording them an interview at the “better” schools with no hope of being hired nor relegating these teachers to schools designated “inner city” or “low achieving.” Equity also ensures that the number of teachers outside the dominant group is at least representative of their numbers in that community.
• A seat at the table. Much like hiring practices, opening a committee or group to people not normally invited is ostensibly equality. After all, this type of equality frequently involves having “one of each kind,” so to speak, with representation from various racial and ethnic groups and possibly from different ability groups as well. However, it’s certainly not equity as the newly invited are expected to be grateful for the invitation, not to be bold enough to participate as equals. Without affording these participants a genuine voice, it’s educational tokenism that solely allows one to be present. Equity, on the other hand, balances power, legitimizing each person’s voice.

Returning to that childhood question of fairness, equity is the true answer for both students and educators. Offering an equal playing field for success, equity empowers, placing everyone on equal footing.

Thanks to Karen, PJ, and Denise for contributing their thoughts!

Today’s post answered this question:

It’s not unusual for districts, schools, and educators to confuse “equality” with “equity.” What are examples, and ways, you would help them understand the difference?

Part One in this series featured responses from Jehan Hakim, Mary Rice-Boothe, Jennifer Cárdenas, and Shaun Nelms.

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at [email protected] . When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo .

Just a reminder; you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email . And if you missed any of the highlights from the first 12 years of this blog, you can see a categorized list here .

The opinions expressed in Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

Sign Up for The Savvy Principal

Edweek top school jobs.

Sign Up & Sign In

Gender equality and education

Gender equality is a global priority at UNESCO. Globally, 122 million girls and 128 million boys are out of school. Women still account for almost two-thirds of all adults unable to read.

UNESCO calls for attention to gender equality throughout the education system in relation to access, content, teaching and learning context and practices, learning outcomes, and life and work opportunities. The  UNESCO Strategy for gender equality in and through education (2019-2025)  focuses on a system-wide transformation to benefit all learners equally in three key areas: better data to inform action, better legal and policy frameworks to advance rights and better teaching and learning practices to empower. 

What you need to know about education and gender equality

"her education, our future" documentary film.

Released on 7 March for 2024 International Women’s Day, “Her Education, Our Future” is a documentary film following the lives of Anee, Fabiana, Mkasi and Tainá – four young women across three continents who struggle to fulfill their right to education. 

This documentary film offers a spectacular dive into the transformative power of education and showcases how empowering girls and women through education improves not only their lives, but also those of their families, communities and indeed all of society. 

Key figures

of which 122 million are girls and 128 million are boys

of which 56% are women

for every 100 young women

Empowering communities: UNESCO in action

Keeping girls in the picture

Everyone can play a role in supporting girls’ education

UNESCO’s new drive to accelerate action for girls’ and women’s education

2022 GEM Report Gender Report: Deepening the debate on those still left behind

Capacity building tools

• From access to empowerment: operational tools to advance gender equality in and through education
• Communication strategy: UNESCO guidance on communicating on gender equality in and through education
• Communication tools
• Keeping girls in the picture: youth advocacy toolkit
• Keeping girls in the picture: community radio toolkit

Monitoring SDG 4: equity and inclusion in education

Resources from UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report.

Related items

• Gender equality
• Policy Advice
• Girls education
• See more add

What You Need to Know About the Long Fight for Educational Equity

Key takeaways from the 2024 phyllis l. kossoff lecture on education and policy, presented by dr. crystal r. sanders.

Just over 70 years after Brown v Board of Education, educational equity is still elusive, even more so after a rise in book bans and the end of race-based affirmative action in college admissions. Offering inspiration for the future by looking to the past, this year’s Phyllis L. Kossoff Lecture on Education and Policy, given by Dr. Crystal R. Sanders, draws connections between the historical struggle for high quality education and the current fight for fair and equitable schooling.

Established in 2007 by distinguished alum Phyllis L. Kossoff , the lecture series has provided a platform to further critical conversations on education, policy and research. For the 10th lecture, the first since Kossoff’s passing in 2022, Sanders, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Emory University College of Arts and Sciences, gave an illuminating lecture on an educational migration that occurred during the Jim Crow era. 

Her talk, “A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners and Graduate Education During the Era of Legal Segregation,” outlined the myriad difficulties Black Southerners faced as they sought out graduate education in often hostile environments. She focused specifically on “segregation scholarships,” a term originated by Sanders that describes state funding given to Black students to support their studies at Northern colleges and universities in order to maintain segregation in the South. 

Find takeaways from her lecture — a preview of her upcoming book, A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs — below.

(Photo courtesy of Sanders)

Many Black scholars, especially recipients of segregation scholarships, came to TC for their studies

It’s unknown precisely how many Black students came to TC on a segregation scholarship however, according to Sanders, the College’s summer continuing studies program was one of the most popular during that time period. Being a top graduate school of education with a history of accepting Black students certainly played a role, but Sanders cites proximity to Harlem and Mabel Carney’s, head of TC’s Rural Education Department from 1918 to 1941 , course on Negro Education as a major draw for scholars. 

Existing relationships with Southern educators combined with a willingness to accept Black students, Sanders noted, made TC a top choice for Black educators at the time. The work of professors like Arthur Linden, who ran summer courses for degree credit in Asheville, N.C., further expanded TC’s reach in the South and made higher education more accessible to Southern scholars.

Post-graduate students conducting a lab experiment, 1942. From left to right: J.S. Newcomer, A.E. Bell, Hiss Trondailer Jones and Samuel Massie. (Photo: FAS/OWI Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

Segregation Scholarships offered great opportunities, at a high cost

As explained by Sanders, during legal segregation, virtually all Southern schools with graduate programs refused to accept Black students, while Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were often unable to offer graduate programs due to lack of funding from state legislatures. This forced Black students to journey North for their education which was often out of reach financially. To offset the costs, students leveraged the “separate but equal” doctrine, pushing Southern states to pay for Black students forced to study out of state. Sixteen Southern states started segregation scholarship programs between 1921 and 1948, despite these programs being deemed unconstitutional in 1938 .

Even though scholarships offered needed opportunity, “​​most of [the recipients] felt that there was a disadvantage professionally, [and] a disadvantage personally,” said Sanders. Professional degrees received out of state were met with undue scrutiny and created more hurdles, such as law students who had to study legal codes for two states at one time. Students also encountered racism in the North, struggled to find housing and dealt with extreme pressure to “behave properly” at their new school. The isolation students felt was compounded by their inability to visit home during their studies, as scholarships often didn’t cover basic living expenses, let alone travel expenses for a trip home.

Howard University students on campus, 1942 (Photo: Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

Pushing Black scholars to study at Northern institutions created an enormous debt at Southern HBCUs

While they have a rich legacy, many HBCUs have crumbling buildings and small endowments . Consistent underfunding plays a major role in this decay — over the course of 33 years, 18 state-run land-grant HBCUs were underfunded by $12.3 billion , adjusted for inflation — as does the legacy of segregation scholarships. Rather than being paid by the state, scholarships were instead taken from the operating budget of Black colleges and universities. 

While individual scholarships weren’t substantial enough to cover each student’s needs, it still cost schools an incredible sum. By Sanders’s calculations, just one year of segregation scholarships cost Mississippi HBCUs $5.3 million dollars in today’s money and they ran scholarships for 20 years. Sanders argued that those funds could have been used to update infrastructure, attract faculty, and support new research. Instead, HBCUs had to foot the bill of segregationist policies. 

To address this lack, Sanders proposes that state governments give HBCUs “equity funding” by making an endowment contribution that matches the amount of money spent by each school on segregation scholarships, adjusted for inflation. “Nothing less is acceptable,” she said.

Despite the financial difficulties, isolation and racism scholars faced, they fought for their education out of a desire for a better life, Sanders explains. When they returned home with their hard-earned degrees, graduates set about “using their credentials and their training to create the type of world they want in these Southern communities,” said Sanders.

Sander’s forthcoming book, A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs , will be published in October of this year. 

— Sherri Gardner

Tags: Higher Education History of Education

Published Wednesday, May 22, 2024

Teachers College Newsroom

Address: Institutional Advancement 193-197 Grace Dodge Hall

Box: 306 Phone: (212) 678-3231 Email: views@tc.columbia.edu

• Current Issue
• Past Issues
• Get New Issue Alerts
• American Academy of Arts 
and Sciences

The Socialist Model of Higher Education: The Dream Faces Reality

This essay explores the socialist model of higher education that originates from early socialist and Marxist thinkers. We contrast this model with Western and Chinese models by focusing on the socialist model’s ideals of education as a public good, as free and equal access to instruction, and as a class-based approach to education. Our study of this model employs historical reconstruction and path-dependence analysis to understand the implementation and transformation of these ideals.   We discuss early Soviet experiments, the global influence of the model, and its evolution following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The model’s emphasis on state control, specialized training, and production of a skilled workforce is also highlighted. The essay concludes by acknowledging the model’s flaws, reflecting on the implications for contemporary higher education, and recognizing its contributions to ideas of social mobility, fair access, and the role of universities in societal development.

Isak Frumin   is the Head of the Observatory of Innovations in Higher Education at Constructor University, Professor in the Department of Higher Education Research at the University for Continuing Education Krems, and the Founder and former Director of the Institute of Education at HSE University (National Research University Higher School of Economics) in Moscow. He is the author of more than two hundred publications and recently edited Building Research Capacity at Universities: Insights from Post-Soviet Countries (with Maia Chankseliani and Igor Fedyukin, 2022).

Daria Platonova is a Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Education at HSE University (National Research University Higher School of Economics) in Moscow, where she also serves as the Executive Editor of its academic journal, Educational Studies (Moscow) . She is the editor of Assessing the Contributions of Higher Education: Knowledge for a Disordered World (with Simon Margison, Brendan Cantwell, and Anna Smolentseva, 2023) and has published in journals such as Tertiary Education and Management , Higher Education Policy , and International Transactions in Operational Research .

In discussions of higher education, two main historical and cultural models are typically considered: the Continental European model, which is more specialized in practical and theoretical subjects, and the British-American model, which follows a liberal arts approach to all subjects. Occasionally, the Chinese model is included due to its association with Confucianism, a system of thought originating in ancient China that promotes family and social harmony. However, there is another set of principles for arranging the higher-education system that has existed and continues to exist: the socialist model, which millions of students still study within.

To understand how this model has survived and its relevance to contemporary challenges, we need to reconstruct the initial ideas that produced it, because the socialist model has been unlucky in its objective and neutral coverage in the academic literature. Few books and articles have attempted to understand the socialist experiment without either blaspheming or praising it. And often, the instruments built to implement the fundamental ideas behind this model are viewed as the essence of this education system, when, in reality, they are technologies designed to implement its ideas in specific historic, cultural, and economic conditions.

The story of the socialist model is unusual. Unlike the Continental European and British-American models, it was not built gradually through trial and error, but rather as a dream or utopian project that was transformed into the system we see and criticize today. The history of the realization of the socialist model is largely a drama wherein a beautifully spiritual dream of a small group of thinkers and revolutionaries collides with the reality of technological, economic, and human possibilities. To identify the critical elements of the socialist model that have survived and set a deep institutional path for postsocialist models, we rely on two approaches. The first approach is historical reconstruction , in which we examine how the basic socialist ideas were transformed in their encounter with technological, economic, and cultural realities, and how some of these ideas contradict each other in practice. The second approach is path-dependence analysis , in which we identify the elements of the model that have not completely disappeared after the collapse of socialist regimes.

To begin, we discuss the fundamental ideas behind the model and attempts to implement these ideas. We then examine how these individual elements survived the new conditions of postsocialist development, and conclude by connecting these elements of the socialist model to debates about prospects for higher education that are taking place today. Please note that throughout this essay, we have used the term “communism” to refer to the ideological construct that was the aim of social development in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, and “socialism” to refer to the social order that was officially implemented in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ( USSR ) and socialist states.

The conceptual foundations of the socialist model of higher education can be traced back to the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Antonio Gramsci, and even earlier utopian socialist thinkers like Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen, who Lenin considered an important source of Marxism. Although these theorists mostly wrote about education in a general sense and not universities per se, their ideas still provide insights into the foundations of the socialist model.

The first foundation of this model is the idea of education as a public good rather than a private good.   Education, skills development, and personality development were seen as serving the needs of society, rather than individual private interests. The authors of the socialist model recognized that real socialist education should not cater to individual human interests but instead develop human abilities to fulfill public ideals. Fourier made this idea operational by presenting the concept of mechanical harmony, which was partially built on the idea of people as parts of a harmonious and effective social machine. According to Fourier, everyone’s skills should be inserted into the right place. At the same time, he recognized the importance of specific human abilities and how skills development should reflect them. Saint-Simon argued that free and accessible education should be a source of inspiration for the nation and should contribute to its progress. 1 Engels extended this idea politically by strengthening the role of the state in “The Principles of Communism,” which influenced his work with Marx in The Communist Manifesto : “The education of all children,” they say, “from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions at state expense.” 2

The second foundation of the socialist model is the idea that education should be free and equally accessible. This idea first appeared in the writings of the early utopian socialist thinkers previously mentioned and grew from the criticism expressed by Marx and Engels, who denounced existing universities for being instruments of elite reproduction. In his brief tract, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Marx quotes the French Constitution: “Education is free. Freedom of education shall be enjoyed under the conditions fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state,” but the founders of Marxism did not provide any insights on the practical implementation of this humanist idea. 3

The third foundation of the socialist model is the idea of a class-based approach to education. Marx and Engels expressed this idea clearly in The German Ideology , a set of manuscripts that critiqued the modern German philosophy of their time: 

The class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. 4

The logical consequence of this idea is that the dictatorship of the proletariat should bring another set of dominant ideas into the intellectual sphere. In their perspective, the important difference between the dominant ideas of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat was that proletarian ideas were not ideas of dominance or exploitation. They were, instead, ideas of liberation and building a new world. Following this view, the socialist education system could become a mechanism for developing and disseminating these working-class ideas.

These three ideological foundations, which have influenced and continue to influence intellectuals and education practitioners around the world, faced their first grand challenge of practical implementation when the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917. Lenin and his team faced two practical questions at the time: First, what should they do with traditional Russian universities that had been growing since the eighteenth century based on a combination of French and German education models? Second, what should be expected from the new model of higher education that considers the big ideas of accessibility, class, and public good while bringing the most value into the development of the first socialist state?

The first question had two possible answers: make existing universities serve the objectives of socialist development or destroy them completely to build something new. The decision to choose the former answer took some time. Initially, the traditional universities were preserved to keep science alive. Yet the Bolsheviks, a radical political faction led by Lenin, did not trust traditional professors from the bourgeoisie to educate the new working-class generation. They also wanted to influence all intellectual fields with Marxist philosophy, a preference that made them critical of the hierarchical structure of traditional universities, and the power relations between professors and students. They considered rigid sequential curricula and exams as barriers for working-class youth, so they initiated experiments to implement the idea of accessible, liberating knowledge. One such experiment was people’s universities, which these youth had unlimited access to, and where they studied without strict curricula and exams. Other experiments included peer-to-peer learning groups (mainly for Marxism studies) in factories and public organizations, open lectures by famous scientists for workers and soldiers, and a communist academy.

The traditional universities were also affected by experiments with the formats and organization of higher learning, and with attempts to eliminate traditional power relations in academia. The Bolsheviks insisted that professors and students should be equal. Thus, in some universities, exams were eliminated as an exercise in power. In addition to such reforms, students could choose courses freely. New leaders also experimented with collective learning and peer-to-peer learning within the traditional university setting and introduced mandatory social service practices for professors and students.

Another experiment that partially survived was what we today call “part-time education.” In other words, part-time study by working students. This experiment came from attempts to find effective combinations of study and work. Later, it enabled the development of the largest system of part-time education in the world and education approaches that were connected to specific enterprises. Some of these experiments lasted until the early 1930s. Prominent scholar and education reformer John Dewey wrote admiring words about these experiments in his 1929 book, Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World , in which he stated, “The Russian educational situation is enough to convert one to the idea that only in a society based upon the cooperative principle can the ideals of educational reformers be adequately carried into operation.” 5 However, most of these experiments failed. The institutional arrangements were not stable, and they faced troubles with scaling in both the socioeconomic conditions and the new political regime that developed during Joseph Stalin’s period of leading the Soviet Union (192 4– 1953).

Later, Lenin (and subsequently Stalin) realized that they could and should use the traditional machinery of higher education for their own purposes. Therefore, the idea of keeping elements of traditional university organization–such as rigid curricula, exams, and distance between professors and students–was not a part of the socialist model. This organizational model won partly because of its inertia despite the dramatic changes happening outside of it. Lenin made it very clear in a speech delivered at the Third All-Russia Congress of The Russian Young Communist League in 1920: “It is said that the old school was a school of purely book knowledge, of ceaseless drilling and grinding. That is true, but we must distinguish between what was bad in the old schools and what is useful to us, and we must be able to select from it what is necessary for communism.” 6 How have the higher-education institutions evolved in this dialectical process between socialist ideas of higher education, the hierarchical education models inherited from Europe, and the Soviet government’s use of these stratified models to build their own hierarchical version of socialist society?

In 1990, over twelve million students attended universities in socialist countries that had similar higher-education systems based on the fundamental ideas discussed above, with minimal variation. This could be explained by the centralized system of national control behind the Soviet Union’s state organization, and the consistent model of higher education that emerged from early Soviet trial and error with education reform. At the time, many “first world” countries allied with the Western Bloc (led by the United States)–and “third world” countries neutral to both the Western and Eastern Bloc (led by the Soviet Union)–implemented some elements of this revised model, sometimes without reference. The main practical characteristics of this later system in relation to the founding principles of the socialist model follow education as a public good, free and equal access to instruction, and class-based education approaches.

The idea of higher education as an exclusively public good transformed into the idea of higher education as a state good, since, in the socialist society, everything public was controlled and owned by the socialist state. For example, the owner of the university was not the people-nation-public but the state. This is one of the striking paradoxes of the disconnect between discussion and implementation. In discussion, Lenin proposed theoretical ideas about the elimination of the state, and the transfer of power to the masses that would destroy the separation between governors and the governed. However, in implementation, Lenin’s ideas and Marxist interpretations of them considered the Soviet Union as the state and as an all-embracing institution. 7

This initial idea of higher education as a public good was entrenched in the United States and Europe in the nineteenth century via U.S. land-grant universities and the Humboldtian model of higher education, whose core idea is a holistic combination of research and studies. American state universities were supposed to be accessible to everyone. The state owned these universities and funded them, resulting in low tuition costs for students. Therefore, the important condition for implementing these ideas was the principle that higher education should be provided by the state, leaving no space for private education. This had powerful consequences such as making the higher-education system a part of the state bureaucracy. By contrast, in the Soviet Union, this idea was implemented in two additional directions. 

In the first direction, higher education became a machine that produced manpower for the socialist economy. Lenin’s government quickly realized the importance of specialized skills and knowledge for successful industrial development. Since he viewed socialism as one unified factory, he also saw skills development as the sector in the factory responsible for manpower production. In letters and resolutions, he stressed education as a source of productivity increase. 8 Thus universities, following this approach, had to become part of the socialist production machine and develop useful skills and knowledge within their students. The Bolsheviks predicted the idea of human capital, strongly believing that it should be nationalized. The state, for instance, could plan how many people it should prepare for different economic sectors because the socialist plan was not just about the number of cars to be assembled, but also about the number of engineers to prepare for such specific jobs. This vocational approach was inspired by the idea of labor division as a universal perspective in all spheres of life.

In the greater mechanism of the state economy, each student was seen as a cog with highly specialized skills, which was achieved through specialized training for specific jobs, and rapid response to technological innovations. The Soviet government easily created new universities to respond to changing needs. For example, during the Cold War arms race, universities were established for the nuclear and space industries. This system not only created a supply of skilled workers but also matched them with employer demand through state economic planning and mandatory job placement, providing guaranteed employment and relatively high training efficiency. Specialized training also required a curriculum that was meticulous and focused, but this narrowly specialized character of higher education was not a feature by itself–it was a logical consequence of the idea to prepare people for very specific jobs.

At the same time, narrowly specialized training could not be called “vocational,” as stated by many sources in the literature. The graduates had extensive training in Marxist humanities, as well as mandatory foreign language and physical education classes during their first three years of study. In the 1930s, the growth of this narrow system was fortified by the creation of specialized institutes, as well as the separation of such institutes from large multidisciplinary universities. Even agricultural universities could be divided into specific higher-education institutions of livestock, milk technologies, grain production, and so on. In the postsocialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, specialized institutions have largely become multidisciplinary universities and have been placed under the control of these countries’ education ministries. 9

Some features of specialized higher education were typical for countries going through an industrial revolution. Just as land-grant universities did in the late nineteenth century in the United States, Soviet polytechnic universities, agricultural, engineering, and pedagogical institutions, provided infrastructure for rapid human capital development to meet the needs of growing industries. We must not forget about the territorial and geographical features of this education approach either, seeing as the task of developing the territory for academic institutions was no less acute. Universities acted as part of the standard infrastructure of new cities, along with hospitals, kindergartens, and libraries. The peculiarity of the Soviet project was that these investments were purely state owned, in contrast to initiatives that were implemented in the Russian Empire and other countries with opportunities for large private investments and public-private partnerships. For example, The National Research Tomsk State University (known as Tomsk University during the Soviet era) was established by Russian Emperor Alexander II  in 1878, with the support of private investments and other major funds from entre preneurs, industrialists, businessmen, and local city councils. 10 A similar ap proach was used in other socialist countries where universities served as important drivers of territorial economic development.

In the second direction for implementing the idea of higher education as a public good, higher education became an engine driving the construction of a communist society. Lenin believed that the next generation would be free from capitalist memories and could therefore become the real driving force for the construction of communism, the new social order. He insisted that socialist universities should bridge the gap between life and practice:

One of the greatest evils and misfortunes left to us by the old, capitalist society is the complete rift between books and practical life . . . .  That is why it would be most mistaken merely to assimilate book knowledge about communism. Without work and without struggle, book knowledge of communism obtained from communist pamphlets and works is absolutely worthless, for it would continue the old separation of theory and practice, the old rift, which was the most pernicious feature of the old, bourgeois society. 11

The implementation of this task created probably the most important feature of the early socialist model: social activism, the “fourth mission” of universities. 12 It was not just about the practical implementation of learned skills. It was about active transformation of the social and cultural environment. Students and professors became active preachers of the communist ideology; they participated in the creation of new proletarian culture, including political movements like early Soviet Vanguardism; and they helped workers and peasants in their practical tasks.

It is important to note that there were two distinct periods in the development of socialist higher education. The socialist model of the first developmental period emerged in the early days of the Soviet Union. Gramsci discussed the model and stressed that universities could become a major source of social transformation and cultural revolution, even in their traditional organizational structure. 13 This model assumed that the mission of the higher-education system is not the reproduction of an existing social order but the production of a new one. It had an emphasis on community outreach, creativity, and dynamism. In all socialist countries, higher education gradually entered its second developmental period when it became part of both the state and the party bureaucracy, fixed with the main task of reproducing existing socialist society. It made social activism formal, transforming political action into political obedience and conformity to reproduce the new party hierarchy.

After higher education as a public good, the second founding principle of the socialist model–free and equal access to education–had two directions for implementation. First, the Bolsheviks aimed to make  higher education universally accessible and free but were unable to make it fully universal because access was primarily based on meritocratic selection with some exceptions. Despite this selectivity, it is notable that the Soviet Union and other socialist countries had higher university enrollment rates than many wealthy countries. In 1913, the Russian Empire had just sixty-three state and fifty-four private institutions of higher education. These were elite institutions with high tuition costs and around one hundred thousand students. In 1923, there were over two hundred eighty institutions with more than two hundred ten thousand students, and by 1940, there were eight hundred twenty institutions with eight hundred thousand students.

Second, the idea of fair access differed from that of equal access . Socialists believed that justice was fundamentally class-based and should account for initial inequalities, either through affirmative actions or additional support for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. The Bolsheviks pioneered large-scale positive discrimination by implementing the idea of fair and wide access, which went hand in hand with negative discrimination against students from educated and wealthy classes. This access was broadly related to social engineering, deliberately supporting what would now be called first-generation college students. This system of affirmative action helped build a new social structure, as expressed by lyrics from “The Internationale,” an international anthem adopted by the Communist Party: “He who was nothing will become everything!” 14 Positive discrimination provided opportunities for social mobility, gender equality, and the development of small ethnic groups.

Soviet leadership introduced not only many categories of quotas but also other instruments of educational support for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. These included grants for young people from working-class families who completed military service and went to university, as well as part-time and evening education for working students that became a popular form of instruction. Combined with a regulated labor market, these measures had a strong and lasting impact. By 1930, around 34 percent of students in institutions of higher education came from working and peasant families. By 1950, the figure increased to 66 percent, with women accounting for about 42 percent of students in higher education.

It is important to note that the process of social engineering not only em ployed positive discrimination but also involved dramatic negative discrimi nation against students who belonged to overeducated groups, such as children from bourgeois families in the 1920s and 1930s or Jewish students from the 1950s through the 1970s. All socialist countries used different forms of affirmative action to achieve better representation for underrepresented groups–for instance, students from rural areas in China, the Romani populations in Eastern Europe, or the Afro-Cuban population in Cuba. Many universities had special officers (now known as diversity officers) who controlled admission and educational support measures for such students.

A class-based education approach, the third founding principle of the socialist model, meant that higher education should not only train qualified specialists but also produce leaders, elites, and people with coherent ideological values. In other words, the “new Soviet person.” This led to two radical and practical innovations in defining higher-education objectives. The first innovation was that all graduates should be equipped with deep knowledge of Marxism. The second was that all graduates should become highly moral people focused on the collective good. These two innovative objectives were interconnected but different, with the former being about knowledge and the latter being about attitudes and values. They were also critical parts of the Soviet nation-building process in territories with extremely diverse populations in terms of culture, language, and history. Highereducation institutions played an important role in promoting a universal curriculum and common approaches to the educational process.

To return to the first objective, becoming expert Marxists required a deep dive into Marxism . Universities never agreed to call this process indoctrination, as Marxists considered Marxism a science rather than a doctrine to memorize or believe. As such, Marxism-Leninism courses were integrated into the mandatory curriculum for all fields of study, taking up 10 to 20 percent of learning time. These courses were given high academic status and combined in a logical sequence, with a typical set including topics such as “History of the Communist Party” and “Scientific Atheism” in the first year, “Dialectical and Historical Materialism” in the second year, “Marxist Political Economy” in the third year, and “Scientific Communism” in the fourth year. The syllabi for these courses were developed centrally in Moscow Communist Party institutes and became dogma, with professors required to follow them precisely. The teaching of Marxism in courses lacked any element of questioning and doubt, focusing instead on memorizing ideological texts, rewriting them, and reproducing correct interpretations and accepted quotations. This learning method made Marxism more like a religious cult than a philosophical doctrine. No studies have been conducted on the efficacy of such mandatory scientific training in Marxism, but one can assume that it was low. For instance, millions of those who studied scientific atheism eventually joined traditional religions after the collapse of socialism.

Concerning the formation of a new Soviet person, the second objective of Soviet higher education, universities became responsible for actively engaging students through extracurricular activities–namely, amateur theater, arts, and sport activities, as well as community service (known today as service-learning). The primary mission of these activities was to develop the importance of collective action. Ninety-nine percent of students were members of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, also known as the Komsomol , a political youth  organization sometimes described as the youth division of the Communist Party, despite its independent status. In addition, each university had a committee that wielded a strong voice and independent resources toward students’ collective, political action. These committees supported student initiatives, as long as they did not contradict the dominant ideology and norms. They also conducted annual evaluations of students’ moral stance and social engagement.

It is worth noting that the hidden curriculum embedded in the Soviet education model influenced the formation of this new Soviet personality, creating someone who gained the right to work, who accepted the universality of individual educational and professional trajectories, and who succumbed to the illusion that those trajectories were being planned and optimized at the national level. Though the learning plans for each field of study were standardized, their large class workloads and limited independent work provided no room for students to make valuable educational and life choices. And while these plans also maintained the illusion of providing an optimal personal track toward postgraduate success, they denied individual responsibility and agency. In exchange for students’ transferring the rights to their personal educational choices, the state guaranteed them societal success through their chosen trajectory, which was centered on the ability and right to work. Therefore, during the second period of implementing the socialist model, an era that emphasized societal reproduction and the objective of forming a new Soviet person, the idea of creating a socially active, collectivist person turned into training young students for hypocrisy and obedience.

These new socialist elements in educational objectives and the educational process led to specific organizational features of universities. Western researchers studying socialist higher education often emphasized severe limitations on academic freedom within this model, and this is correct. However, it is important to stress that this was a logical consequence of the entire model. These limitations did not affect freedom of research in the natural sciences, medicine, or engineering after Stalin’s governance. They limited political freedoms but did not stop scientific discussions if they avoided Marxist dogmas. Moreover, universities had more intellectual freedom than other organizations. For example, professors and students had access to modern art and books authorized only for science libraries. Even in Marxist disciplines, the principles of scientific rigor and academic honesty exercised by natural science and engineering communities positively influenced the culture of higher education.

The role of the Communist Party and the Komsomol in socialist higher education was quite complex. These two organizations existed not just for ideological control but also provided some degree of pluralism and debate within the executive hierarchy. Socialist universities had a dual-governance model in which the senior executive (rector or president) had significant power and was subordinate to the government’s minister of higher education. At the same time, the Communist Party secretary was independent and coregulated many aspects of university life, including personnel policies. He had a completely different line of command in the territorial party committee, compared to the rector who was a member of the university party committee. These executives had complex relationships that often led to conflicts, as well as some discussions that replaced the classical form of shared governance.

When the USSR collapsed in the early 1990s, the former Soviet republics and countries of the socialist bloc in Europe faced not only newfound freedom, but also the resulting consequences of poverty, loosely coupled governance, and painful breaks in social order and social perception of justice. Though many layers of Soviet-era institutional structures and organizations fell off from higher education during this time, many also remained. 15 Two examples among the layers that did not survive are coherent ideological education and formative moral education. Case studies such as Turkmenistan showed how Marxist courses were easily replaced by new ideologies formulated in postsocialist works like Ruhnama , a two-volume work written by one of the country’s former presidents, Saparmurat Niyazov, that served as a tool of state propaganda and cultural history. 16 Through cases such as this, the idea of higher education as a driving force for constructing new societies became clear. In other former constituent countries, new universities were established to support the new aims of socioeconomic development, namely training new national bureaucracies, diplomatic corps, academics, and other professionals. By the mid-2000s, universities had received more attention from the state and large private establishments. In the decades since, universities have become part of national state-building strategies that treat higher-education institutions as drivers of their global enterprise and large-scale initiatives for competitive excellence.

Throughout these postsocialist developments, the perception of higher education as a public or state good has remained crucial. Current Russian higher education presents an interesting case in the duality of practical approaches, as seen in the binary of tuition-based admissions (a private marketized good), compared with tuition-free admissions (a relative public good). The opening of private education institutions made it possible, almost universally, to increase participation in higher-education systems. Affirmative action measures have also survived in a drastically decreased form. While societies experienced increasing inequality in the distribution of economic capital, merit-based access to higher education became a dominant source of equality, reflecting the idea of new fairness by rarely considering the socioeconomic background of applicants’ families. 

Although the labor market changed dramatically and the plan system of standardized study was abandoned, the idea of strong links between universities and the labor market persisted, even after the collapse of the socialist system. However, even in nonsocialist countries, the connections between labor markets and universities to graduates’ employability persist as key policy issues, to ensure universities provide markets with a steady supply of graduates who are equipped with the specific skills demanded by today’s employers. Toward this aim, some former Soviet countries have introduced mandatory job placement for students trained at the expense of state funding. Even more formerly constituent countries are trying to improve graduates’ employment through organized contacts (usually in the form of contracts) with industries, while bachelor’s and master’s programs, as well as education in private universities, have supported students’ flexibility within their educational and professional trajectories. The neighboring Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania recently succeeded in national reforms to higher education and curricula. 17 However, the specialized curriculum is still strong, preparing graduates for specific skills-based jobs with limited variability and choice.

We believe that the main lesson from our study of the socialist education model is the risk of totalitarianism demonstrated by the history this essay reconstructed, a history in which humanistic dreams about perfect universities in a perfect society transformed over time. As soon as high social objectives became mandatory for everyone, the energy and initiative to realize such objectives were focused on social control, pressure, and reproduction, rather than on the production of a new social order. The expansion of mandatory values in Soviet-era universities (and any university system by extension) also created power struggles instead of meaningful discussions and free individual choice. At the same time, some ideas and elements of the socialist model were actively used in nonsocialist countries, both prior to and following the collapse of the USSR . Many of them are still good sources for the invention of effective social and educational instruments that improve higher-education systems.

The reconstructed history and path-dependence analysis that guided this essay also highlight the development of universities as drivers of economic growth. This view became quite popular in many countries that aligned the supply of skilled students from universities with the demands of employers in the labor market. We noted the growing discourse of employability as an important outcome of higher education, along with mechanisms piloted in socialist countries, like industrial practice and early employment contracts, which could be used in different economic settings. The idea of having specialized universities for fast-growing sectors of the economy in developing countries proved to be effective then and can be used more widely now, as universities worldwide continue to work as drivers of social and cultural transformation .  We see many elements today of social mobilization, for example, in universities that include the green agenda and social sustainability in their missions. 18

The socialist model has played its role in higher education and was attractive due to its promotion of founding principles like free and equal access .  In current times, many countries have outperformed early socialist experiments with the expansion of their higher-education systems. Nordic countries are a good example of higher-education systems with high rates of participation. They are also closer than other countries to the ideal society theorized by early utopian socialists. 19 At the same time, many countries elsewhere struggle with expanding public provision of higher education, but we think some ideas and approaches from the socialist model could help. Take the rapid scale-up of online higher education, for instance. Perhaps the early stages of the comparably rapid growth of higher-education systems in socialist countries could be used as a blueprint for expanding online education. At present, that expansion is mostly driven by fee-based programs. However, with fair scaling, it could become a great force for democratizing access to higher education.

Large-scale affirmative actions   in Western nations, states, and countries were an obvious response to the socialist model’s principle of fair access. Today, these actions exist in many countries around the world where they continue to support social mobility. Still, the practical experience of having socialist systems reinforce social mobility (through targeted access to higher education) suggests that we must take a deeper look at not just the entrance to university, but at success after enrollment. Different instruments of enriching nontraditional students’ higher-education capital could be used to increase the effectiveness of the fair-access   system. 20

The Marxist idea to teach liberating knowledge at universities became quite popular in the second half of the twentieth century, especially in postcolonial countries, but we think the lesson this idea imparted is more negative. A class-based approach to teaching, the last founding principle of the socialist model, easily became an instrument for indoctrination and limiting free thought. But there was an upside in the idea that universities should engage in formative educa tion aimed at students’ personal development, which also supports discovery of their  sense of purpose within a collectivist framework. In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, this idea is becoming more popular again, with some researchers recommending deeper study of topics like the creation of Chinese collectivist values, since most Chinese scholars in the field of higher education have found interesting connections between Marxist and Confucian ideas. We think, overall, that the socialist experiments discussed in this essay show how risky and complex the field of value education is. However, we can always learn more about the socialists’ attempts to connect higher education and the real world in ways that inspired reformists like John Dewey a century ago.  

authors’ note

The authors of this essay had firsthand encounters with the socialist model of higher education. One of them is a direct product of its implementation during the Soviet era; the other studied at a post-Soviet university that was both on the Soviet path and trying to overcome it. The authors’ dialogue within this essay supported an attempt to separate personal impressions from the objective picture. In doing so, it became clear that socialist ideas concerning education, and practical attempts to implement them, deserve to play a role in the discussion of the evolution of higher education in the world.

• 1 Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, Nouveau Christianisme–Dialogues entre un Conservateur et un Novateur [New Christianity–Dialogues between a Conservative and an Innovator] (Paris: Bossange Père, Auguste Sautelet et Cie, 1825).
• 2 Friedrich Engels, “Principles of Communism,” in Marx/Engels Collected Works,  Volume 6 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), 299.
• 3 Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” trans. Daniel De Leon (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1913), 27.
• 4 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology , ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, [1846] 1947), 64.
• 5 John Dewey, Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World (New York: New Republic, 1929), 86.
• 6 Vladimir Lenin, “ Speech Delivered at the Third All-Russia Congress of The Russian Young Communist League ,” in The Tasks of the Youth Leagues (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1951).
• 7 Martin Carnoy, The State and Political Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 153–163.
• 8 Vladimir Lenin, O Vospitanii i Obrazovanii [About Upbringing and Education] (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1973).
• 9 Jeroen Huisman, Anna Smolentseva, and Isak Froumin, 25 Years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries: Reform and Continuity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2018).
• 10 Elena Feoktistova, “ Historical Moment: Opening of the University ,” [in Russian] Redvix Media LLC , August 3, 2014 (accessed March 6, 2024).
• 11 Lenin, “Speech Delivered at the Third All-Russia Congress of The Russian Young Communist League.”
• 12 The three widely accepted missions of higher education are training, research, and service.
• 13 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci , ed. and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
• 14 Eugène Pottier, “L’Internationale” [The Internationale], Boldoduc (Lille), [1871] 1888, sheet music. Literal English translation provided by the authors.
• 15 Huisman, Smolentseva, and Froumin, 25 Years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries .
• 16 Saparmurat Niyazov, Ruhnama: The Book of the Soul , annotated by Andrew S. Edwards (Seattle, Wash.: Kindle Direct Publishing, 2015).
• 17 European Commission, “ National Reforms in Higher Education ,” November 27, 2023.
• 18 Brendan Cantwell, Simon Marginson, and Anna Smolentseva, High Participation Systems of Higher Education  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
• 20 Stanton Wortham, Renata Love-Jones, William Peters, et al., “ Educating for Comprehensive Well-Being ,” ECNU Review of Education 3 (3) (2020): 406–436.

Korea Glocal Education Fair opens for 5-day run in Yeosu to explore future of education

education fair-opening

YEOSU, South Korea, May 29 (Yonhap) -- An international education fair kicked off Wednesday in the southwestern city of Yeosu for a five-day run to seek and discuss the direction of future education in the era of digital transformation.

The opening ceremony for the Korea Glocal Education Fair 2024 at Expo Ocean Park in Yeosu, some 320 kilometers south of Seoul, brought together about 900 officials from the central and regional government bodies, including Education Minister Lee Ju-ho.

Also in attendance were South Jeolla Gov. Kim Yung-rok, South Jeolla education superintendent Kim Dae-jung, North Gyeongsang education superintendent Lim Jong-sik and Lee Bae-yong, chair of the National Education Commission.

In his speech at the event, Education Minister Lee said, "This event is very meaningful in opening the stage for sharing a regional-based education reform model with the world."

Gov. Kim expressed hopes that the event would "feature various forms of future education, focusing on the region's characteristics, including a large number of students from multicultural families and small-scale schools in farming and fishing villages."

Michael Sandel, a professor at Harvard Law School and author of the famous book "Justice," delivered a keynote speech, followed by an opening concert featuring K-pop music.

The fair will run through Sunday under the theme of "Education for Coexistence and Sustainable Future," jointly hosted by the South Jeolla Office of Education, the Ministry of Education, the South Jeolla provincial government and the North Gyeongsang Office of Education.

It will feature special lectures by world-renowned education leaders, conferences on future education, glocal future classrooms, future education exhibitions and festivals, and cultural and arts exchanges, according to the organizers.

The Glocal Future Classroom, which is considered the core content of the fair, will showcase a classroom that students will attend in 2030. Students use digital devices instead of pencils and notebooks to search and obtain the information they need while in class, and robots move around the classroom to help enhance their overall learning experience.

There will be special lectures on future education and the lecturers include Sandel; Tan Oon Seong, former president of the Singapore National Institute of Education; Thomas Frey, executive director of the DaVinci Institute; Paul Kim, the associate dean of the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University; and Korean American robotics engineer Dennis Hong.

[email protected]

More From Forbes

5 strategies to unlock your winning college essay.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Linkedin

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS - JUNE 29: People walk through the gate on Harvard Yard at the Harvard ... [+] University campus on June 29, 2023 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that race-conscious admission policies used by Harvard and the University of North Carolina violate the Constitution, bringing an end to affirmative action in higher education. (Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images)

The college application season is upon us, and high school students everywhere are staring down at one of the most daunting tasks: the college essay. As someone who has guided countless applicants through the admissions process and reviewed admissions essays on an undergraduate admissions committee, I've pinpointed the essential ingredient to a differentiated candidacy—the core of your college admissions X-factor .

The essential ingredient to your college admissions X-factor is your intellectual vitality. Intellectual vitality is your passion for learning and curiosity. By demonstrating and conveying this passion, you can transform an average essay into a compelling narrative that boosts your chances of getting accepted to your top schools. Here are five dynamic strategies to achieve that goal.

Unleash Your Authentic Voice

Admissions officers sift through thousands of essays every year. What stops them in their tracks? An authentic voice that leaps off the page. Forget trying to guess what the admissions committee wants to hear. Focus on being true to yourself. Share your unique perspective, your passions, and your values. Authenticity resonates deeply with application reviewers, making your essay memorable and impactful. You need not have experienced trauma or tragedy to create a strong narrative. You can write about what you know—intellectually or personally—to convey your enthusiasm, creativity, and leadership. Intellectual vitality shines through when you write with personalized reflection about what lights you up.

Weave A Captivating Story

Everyone loves a good story, and your essay is the perfect place to tell yours. The Common Application personal statement has seven choices of prompts to ground the structure for your narrative. The most compelling stories are often about the smallest moments in life, whether it’s shopping at Costco or about why you wear socks that have holes. Think of the Common Application personal statement as a window into your soul rather than a dry list of your achievements or your overly broad event-based life story. Use vivid anecdotes to bring your experiences to life. A well-told story can showcase your growth, highlight your character, and illustrate how you've overcome challenges. Intellectual vitality often emerges in these narratives, revealing how your curiosity and proactive approach to learning have driven you to explore and innovate.

Reflect And Reveal Insights

It's not just about what you've done—it's about what you've learned along the way. When you are writing about a specific event, you can use the STAR framework—situation, task, action, and result (your learning). Focus most of your writing space on the “R” part of this framework to dive deeply into your experiences and reflect on how they've shaped your aspirations and identity.

NSA Warns iPhone And Android Users To Turn It Off And On Again

A 3-point cheat sheet for creating romantic chemistry—by a psychologist, goldman sachs issues astonishing bitcoin and ethereum etf prediction after price turning point.

The most insightful college-specific supplement essays demonstrate depth of thought, and the ability to connect past experiences with your future life in college and beyond. Reflecting on your intellectual journey signals maturity and a readiness to embrace the college experience. It shows admissions officers that you engage deeply with your studies and are eager to contribute to the academic community.

Highlight Your Contributions—But Don’t Brag

Whether it's a special talent, an unusual hobby, or a unique perspective, showcasing what you can bring to the college environment can make a significant impact. Recognize that the hard work behind the accomplishment is what colleges are interested in learning more about—not retelling about the accomplishment itself. (Honors and activities can be conveyed in another section of the application.) Walk us through the journey to your summit; don’t just take us to the peak and expect us know how you earned it.

Intellectual vitality can be demonstrated through your proactive approach to solving problems, starting new projects, or leading initiatives that reflect your passion for learning and growth. These experiences often have a place in the college-specific supplement essays. They ground the reasons why you want to study in your major and at the particular college.

Perfect Your Prose

Great writing is essential. Anyone can use AI or a thesaurus to assist with an essay, but AI cannot write your story in the way that you tell it. Admissions officers don’t give out extra credit for choosing the longest words with the most amount of syllables.

The best essays have clear, coherent language and are free of errors. The story is clearly and specifically told. After drafting, take the time to revise and polish your writing. Seek feedback from teachers, mentors, or trusted friends, but ensure the final piece is unmistakably yours. A well-crafted essay showcases your diligence and attention to detail—qualities that admissions officers highly value. Intellectual vitality is also reflected in your writing process, showing your commitment to excellence and your enthusiasm for presenting your best self.

Crafting a standout college essay is about presenting your true self in an engaging, reflective, and polished manner while showcasing your intellectual vitality. Happy writing.

• Editorial Standards
• Reprints & Permissions

• International
• Schools directory
• Resources Jobs Schools directory News Search

GCSE English - Grade 9 Model Essay Answers

Last updated

31 May 2024

• Share through email
• Share through twitter
• Share through linkedin
• Share through facebook
• Share through pinterest

Resources included (4)

GCSE English - Macbeth Model Essay

English - An Inspector Calls Model Essay

GCSE English - Jekyll & Hyde Model Essay

This bundle includes grade 9 model responses to multiple GCSE 30 mark questions on Macbeth, Jekyll & Hyde, and An Inspector Calls.

Tes paid licence How can I reuse this?

Your rating is required to reflect your happiness.

It's good to leave some feedback.

Something went wrong, please try again later.

This resource hasn't been reviewed yet

To ensure quality for our reviews, only customers who have purchased this resource can review it

Report this resource to let us know if it violates our terms and conditions. Our customer service team will review your report and will be in touch.

Not quite what you were looking for? Search by keyword to find the right resource:

• Ground Reports
• 50-Word Edit
• National Interest
• Campus Voice
• Security Code
• Off The Cuff
• Democracy Wall
• Around Town
• PastForward
• In Pictures
• Last Laughs
• ThePrint Essential

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Senior Russian security official Dmitry Medvedev said on Friday that Russia was not bluffing when it spoke of the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine and that its conflict with the West could escalate into an all-out war.

In a post on his official Telegram channel, Medvedev said Moscow’s conflict with the West was developing according to the worst case scenario and that “no one can rule out it escalating to the last stage”.

Medvedev was commenting after four U.S. officials told Reuters on Thursday that U.S. President Joe Biden had quietly authorised Kyiv to launch U.S.-supplied weapons at military targets inside Russia that are supporting an offensive against the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.

(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Andrew Osborn)

Disclaimer: This report is auto generated from the Reuters news service. ThePrint holds no responsibilty for its content.

Subscribe to our channels on YouTube , Telegram & WhatsApp

Support Our Journalism

India needs fair, non-hyphenated and questioning journalism, packed with on-ground reporting. ThePrint – with exceptional reporters, columnists and editors – is doing just that.

Sustaining this needs support from wonderful readers like you.

Whether you live in India or overseas, you can take a paid subscription by clicking here .

LEAVE A REPLY Cancel

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Most Popular

3 in 4 israelis support retaliation against hamas or believe it hasn’t gone far enough, finds pew, george mallory’s everest climb was no macho heroism—it was rooted in racism, war, tragedy, how govt’s budget transparency push is making this rail psu switch tracks from its core business.

Required fields are marked *

Copyright © 2024 Printline Media Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved.

• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy