http://crookedtimber.org/2004/11/02/kerry-317/

I think Kent is right to note the issue of scale, which partly explains why philosophers have mostly overlooked educational policy. “Ethics” usually involves decisions that individuals make in respect to other individuals (e.g., physicians’ treatment of their own patients, or teachers decisions in grading their students). This is the smallest possible scale. Meanwhile, political philosophers emphasize what Rawls called “the basic structure of society,” which is the biggest scale of all. But so many important issues involve the middle range. For example, how should hospitals be regulated in our partially unjust society? And, should schools be allowed to choose their students?

It’s my sense that medical ethicists used to focus on individual, ethical choices (for instance, abortion, suicide, euthanasia). But there is now a substantial body of writing on what you call “health policy ethics,” which concerns medium-scale issues in an imperfect world.

We need exactly the same kind of work in education, where the moral issues are not limited to individual decisions that arise within a classroom, nor to questions of universal rights. (Indeed, almost everyone endorses a right to education.) Instead, the interesting issues are the ones you concentrated on in your conference: systems of standards and testing; various forms of choice among schools; and the wisdom of replacing large, “shopping-mall” high schools with small institutions that have coherent themes.

I used to do ethics, and I think I can still put on that hat. Hopefully the following won’t be completely worthless.

I don’t think that philosophers’ alleged disinterest in being constrained by questions of feasibility can be the difference. Feasibility questions arise just as strongly in medical situations.

I think there may be other reasons why there is a professional field from which philosophers may aspire to make a living called “medical ethics,” but not one called “educational ethics.”

The cynical explanation would be financial. We simply value (and/or are willing to pay for) medical care more than we value education: we pay doctors the big bucks and teachers not so much. Hospitals have more dollars rattling around that can be paid to ethicists than do ever-strapped school boards.

To move somewhat away from the cynical, here’s another difference. Medical ethics debates specific issues that come up in medical practice. There are a whole bunch of issues, from living wills/DNR/etc. to distribution of economic resources, etc., etc. Many of the issues are patient-specific, and lead to complex conclusions: “do X in case Y, but do not-X in case Z, with the relevant differences between cases Y and Z being a, b, and c.”

In educational ethics, it seems like the big issues are more large-scale. “Should district X adopt policy Y?” Little, detailed prescriptions or proscriptions about how to handle specific cases … well, I suppose those could come up, but your essay doesn’t mention them. But I suppose one could imagine saying: we want to educate student Adam via method Y, but we should educate student Bill via method Z. (But would those be “ethical” decisions? Or would they not more likely be purely “educational” decisions: “Unlike Adam, Bill learns better this way than that way”?)

If the major educational moral decisions, unlike the major medical decisions, are really decisions about “how we want society as a whole to be,” then in a sense they do not fall under “educational ethics” so much as under political ethics or social ethics more generally. To take your Turkish example: “Facilitating greater equality of opportunity” versus “Promoting respect and tolerance for diverse ways of life” is a big question. I doubt that someone working for a school district would be likely to consider him/herself to have either the capacity or the social mandate to try to answer it.