Educational Equality and Educational Adequacy

by Harry on February 12, 2008

Adam Swift and I have just posted a short critical working paper at the Center for the Study of Social Justice website. It’s a response to papers in Ethics (July 2007) by Elizabeth Anderson and Debra Satz (both, I’m afraid, behind a paywall, though I notice that the free sample issue is the one with Adam’s and my paper on parents rights, so I can’t resist encouraging people to read that), both arguing for a principle of educational adequacy as the correct principle of educational justice. Before reading their papers I had thought of adequacy as a straightforward strategic retreat by educational progressives, a retreat that makes strategic sense in the US because many States have constitutional provisions that are plausibly interpreted as demanding adequacy for all (and litigation, not politics, is the most promising way forward). But both Satz and Anderson argue for adequacy on principled grounds; they think that educational equality is a misguided goal, and also that adequacy is a good goal. There’s a great deal of good stuff in both their papers, so I strongly recommend them (if you can get at them). Satz is especially good on what adequacy, understood the right way, demands for low-achieving children, whereas Anderson is especially good on what it demands for children bound for elites; basically, her argument is that an adequate education for them requires that they have a lot of interaction with children from other social backgrounds so that they are well prepared for their roles in the elites they will join (which are justified, in Rawlsian terms, by their tendency to benefit the less advantaged). Our paper doesn’t dispute the importance of adequacy as part of the picture, and an urgent one at that, but responds to their anti-equality arguments, showing that they depend on (wrongly) interpreting equality as the sole principle of educational justice (in fact it is one among several principles, and not necessarily the most important); but also arguing that adequacy does not offer the right guidance in some circumstances. Comments welcome.

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Siksha Foundation Blog » Educational Adequacy
02.14.08 at 6:09 am

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1

Tracy W 02.12.08 at 3:48 pm

The disadvantaged children in the more integrated school will do better, other things being equal, because they have fewer competitors for the limited resources.

May I ask what is your evidence for this statement?

The US experience with NCLB, which requires breakdown of all students by various categories, including parental income, is finding that poor children in rich schools do not do better than poor children in poor schools. See for example
http://d-edreckoning.blogspot.com/2007/09/take-look-at-what-48-million-buys-you.html

What seems to be going on here is that schools who mostly have advantaged kids do not get good at educating kids from disadvantaged backgrounds.

I speak of course in terms of averages. There are plenty of individual kids from advantaged backgrounds who do badly at schools full of advantaged kids, and individual kids from disadvantaged backgrounds who do well at schools from advantaged kids. But I don’t know of any evidence that putting disadvantaged kids in schools full of advantaged kids improves those kids’ results on average.

When a school is socio-economically mixed it can deploy the talents of those teachers attracted by the advantaged children to the benefit of the less advantaged children, and it can do so even if it practices some form of tracking.

Only if those teachers attracted by the advantaged children are also good at teaching the less advantaged children. And, also, only if the school is set up to support those teachers in teaching less-advantaged children.

2

Rich B. 02.12.08 at 4:22 pm

As always, studies of educational adequacy/ equality will fail to take into account the Great State of New Jersey.

In your third Objection/Response, you both take as a given that greater funding levels will lead to different outcomes — with a question of whether “levelling down” is a bad thing because it doesn’t “promote the development of human talents.” The response is that using money for the development of human talents is good, but not as good as using it to create a “flourishing life” for the lower level performers.

In New Jersey, we provide at least equal funding for all school district. The poorest districts like Newark and Camden (so-called “Abbott districts”) actually receive more funding that the richest. In my semi-ritzy town, I received a small refund check because it was determined by the state that my district paid “too much” for education last year. So, far from “levelling down,” we fund our poor at a greater level than we fund the rich.

The results are that you can’t tell education outcomes in New Jersey from those in the most unequal states. The wealthy continue to “develop their human talents”, despite the soft-ceiling of their abilities to fund their schools, and the poor continue to fail to find a “flourishing life”, despite their state-funded educations.

To the extent the debate is about the funneling of resources, the case of New Jersey says Please Look Elsewhere.

3

Steve LaBonne 02.12.08 at 6:43 pm

and litigation, not politics, is the most promising way forward

Well, maybe. But I live in Ohio, whose Supreme Court several years ago handed down a decision requiring that the existing funding system be replaced with one that would provide adequate resources for all districts. The Legislature has simply ignored this decision, with complete impunity. So we’re in such bad shape that not even the “strategic retreat” has worked. Even adequacy remains a pipe dream.

4

SamChevre 02.12.08 at 6:52 pm

I will largely second tracy’s critique, with some additional detail.

Point #4, on page 6, makes a set of (in my experience) very unjustified assumptions.

The resources less advantaged and more advantaged students need are often (often enough that I’d say normally) different and competitive. My 2 particular points of observation would be:

1) Math (which my wife and I have both taught in public schools): I am good at teaching advanced students, and poor at teaching struggling students; my wife is the opposite. In many cases, the struggling students need explanation of points which the advanced students already got, and practice of skills which the advanced students already have mastered. Their needs compete with one another.

2) Amish/Mennonite schools, which give an interesting natural experiment since schooling is always in English, but in some communities English is a first language and in others it’s a second language. Teachers who are good in one setting are almost never good in the other; teachers tend to be either good at helping students negotiate that language barrier, or not so good at it.

5

Greg Anrig 02.12.08 at 7:25 pm

Tracy W.’s claim is mistaken. There is an enormous body of research, dating back to the Coleman report of the 1960s, demonstrating that low-income children in predominantly middle-class schools score significantly better than low-income children in predominantly low-income schools. NAEP data reaffirm those findings.

There’s a useful graph in here:
http://www.law.unc.edu/documents/civilrights/conferences/kahlenberg.pdf

The report referenced in the post seems to contrast results in one wealthy school with those of an “average” school. But “average” isn’t poor.

6

SamChevre 02.12.08 at 7:31 pm

My comment is missing it’s intended last sentence.

Teachers who are good in one setting are almost never good in the other; teachers tend to be either good at helping students negotiate that language barrier, or not so good at it. However, teachers who are not so good at helping students negotiate that language barrier are quite often very good in settings where English is a first language.

7

KDeRosa 02.12.08 at 9:36 pm

There is an enormous body of research, dating back to the Coleman report of the 1960s, demonstrating that low-income children in predominantly middle-class schools score significantly better than low-income children in predominantly low-income schools.

This is not accurate. In these studies “poverty” is not adequately controlled. Using eligibility for free lunches and the like, greatly expands the definition of poverty to include many children who fall in the middle classa and far outside the poverty thresholds. An inner city school will not only have more poor students, those students will be far more likely to be below teh poverty threshold. In contrast, the middle class schools will not only have less poor students, those poor studenst will be far more likely to fall above the poverty thresholds, i.e., are not poor. It should not be too surprising to discover that the black middle class outperforms the black lower class in academics, which is all these studies are actually showing once you look past the numbers. Also, bear in mind that the performance differntial is slight in any event.

8

Greg Anrig 02.12.08 at 10:12 pm

From the most recent Programme for International Student Assessment: “Regardless of their own socio-economic background, students attending schools in which the average socio-economic background is high tend to perform better than when they are enrolled in a school with below socio-economic intake. In the majority of OECD countries, the effect of the average economic, social and cultural status of students in a school … far outweighs the effects of the individual student’s socio-economic background.”

9

KDeRosa 02.13.08 at 3:28 am

You do understamd that PISA is playing the same games with the data that I described above.

“In the interpretation of Figure 4.11, it needs to be borne in mind that differences
in the averages of schools’ socio-economic backgrounds are naturally smaller
than comparable differences between individual students, given that every
school’s intake is mixed in terms of socio-economic variables.”

Plus, their analysis confuses causation with correlation.

You also might recall that when we tried bussing low SES kids to high SES schools the real world gains from the correlations were not forthcoming.

10

chris armstrong 02.13.08 at 9:51 am

Harry, you probably know this already, but my colleague Andrew Mason’s recent book on equality of opportunity (Levelling the Playing Field, OUP) defends an adequacy view of educational provision on principled grounds too. He usually gets the response that mitigating, as opposed to neutralizing, the influence of circumstances cannot be a coherent position at the level of egalitarian ideal theory (as opposed to a concession to the non-ideal world), but he certainly believes that it is a coherent position at that level. It’s an interesting book.

11

Tracy W 02.13.08 at 11:19 am

I will also add this post on the Marginal Revolution blog summarising the statistical relationship between parental income and child’s income for biological children and adopted children (the adopted children were assigned randomly to any parent who qualified to adopt).

What the graph says is that if parental income was US$200,000 a year, biological children had a mean income of a bit less than $80,000 a year. If parental income was $10,000 a year, biological children had a mean income of less than $40,000 a year. However, for the $200,000 parental income, mean income of adoptive children was a bit below $40,000 a year, for $10,000 parental income, mean income of adoptive children was a bit above $40,000 per year.

Whatever advantages rich parents pass on to their kids by bringing extra resources to their education, it doesn’t seem to show up in the kids’ incomes.

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/11/nature_nurture_.html

12

chris armstrong 02.13.08 at 12:28 pm

Of course, for that to be a fair comparison you’d have to assume that adopted children were otherwise identically positioned to ‘biological’ children. You’d have to assume that they were no more likely to feel the effects of poor early-years upbringing or education, the (only possible, not inevitable!) damage to self-esteem / identity-security of (only possibly!) knowing they were adopted, (only possibly!) not being treated identically by their adoptive parents, or a whole host of other issues.

This is just speculation on my part: I have no facts to hand, but my hunch is that adopted and biological children are often de facto divided by more than mere genetics. And therefore the differential outcomes don’t prove beyond doubt that the benefits of extra resources are not being felt.

13

Brett Bellmore 02.13.08 at 12:51 pm

“In New Jersey, we provide at least equal funding for all school district[s].”

The mathematician in me scratches his head at the notion of “at least equal”. It’s got to be right up there with “most unique” and “one of the only”.

14

Tracy W 02.13.08 at 1:26 pm

Of course, for that to be a fair comparison you’d have to assume that adopted children were otherwise identically positioned to ‘biological’ children. You’d have to assume that they were no more likely to feel the effects of poor early-years upbringing or education, the (only possible, not inevitable!) damage to self-esteem / identity-security of (only possibly!) knowing they were adopted, (only possibly!) not being treated identically by their adoptive parents, or a whole host of other issues.

No. The point is the comparison between children adopted by rich parents and children adopted by poor parents. Children adopted by rich parents did not on average have higher incomes than children adopted by poor parents. The reason for mentioning the biological children is that they biological children showed the normal positive correlation between parental income and child income, so we can dismiss the hypothesis that parents who adopt children differ in that respect from parents who don’t adopt children.

For your comments about poor early-years upbringing, education, damage to self-esteem/identity-security, or whole host of other issues to explain the lack of correlation between parental income and adopted children’s income you would have to assume that the children adopted by rich parents were worse on these grounds than the children adopted by poor parents. Since the children were randomly assigned to any parent who entered the programme, effects due to poor early-years upbringing or education are not there. And what plausible reason is there to think that children adopted by richer parents would have more damage to self-esteem, or be more likely to be treated differently by their adoptive parents?

Or to put it in other words, you have to come up with some reason why any confounding factor would be worse for the adopted children of rich parents than for the adopted children of poor parents.

What this study says is not that adopted children were otherwise identically positioned to biological children, but that additional parental income has not had any impact on the incomes of the adopted children.

And therefore the differential outcomes don’t prove beyond doubt that the benefits of extra resources are not being felt.

The only area of science I know of where there is proof beyond doubt is in mathematics. The relevant point is that we have a lot of evidence to doubt Harry B and Adam Swift’s contention that rich parents improve their children’s educational outcomes because they can supply additional resources.

15

chris armstrong 02.13.08 at 2:02 pm

Ah! I’m happy to accept that I misunderstood your argument, then. The relevant comparison is, as you say, between children adopted by poorer and wealthier parents, rather than between adopted and non-adopted children of wealthy parents. And the similar outcomes do suggest, as you say, that differential resources are not playing a role in this case (although the apparent small, but negative effect of income is curious, right?).

16

richard 02.13.08 at 2:25 pm

an adequate education for them requires that they have a lot of interaction with children from other social backgrounds so that they are well prepared for their roles in the elites they will join

On the one hand, I realise you’re probably saying “no rich ghettoes,” on the other, this is the creepiest sentence I’ve seen all week, bringing to mind especially-bred politico-children (with enhanced White TeethTM), destined to continue legacies in Congress, who have to be able to press flesh with the stinking horde without grimacing.

17

Tracy W 02.13.08 at 2:47 pm

Good summary, Chris.
The apparent small negative effect of income on adoptive children strikes me as likely being statistical noise as the line waggles up and down a bit.

It’s startling what a difference controlling for genetic relationships makes to studies on parents’ effects on children’s behaviour. I keep reading newspaper articles and mutter to myself “Well, maybe the causation is the other way round – teenagers who are willing to let their parents monitor them are less likely to do drugs anyway, rather than that parents who closely monitor their kids cause their kids less likely to be doing drugs”.

And I had better specifically note that I do find it very plausible that appalling parents, ones who beat their children, or lock them in the cellar for years, or who never touch them but live in such a state of domestic violence that the child’s brain is soaked in stress chemicals for years, do damage their children directly. All the studies I know of that control for the relationship between genes and child outcomes only look at decent parents, for obvious ethical reasons.

18

harry b 02.13.08 at 2:54 pm

Thanks for the study tracy. I’d hesitate to draw too strong a conclusion from one study, but its interesting and useful

Richard — read the paper (not ours, hers). There’s an interesting question about what to hold constant when thinking about these issues. Anderson holds constant the assumption that there will be elites and that there will be very limited social mobility — assuming that (what you find creepy), I am a bit sceptical about the feasibility of implementing inclusionary zoning and inclusionary schooling, as Anderson calls for, at least in any meaningful way. But I also concede that on that assumption her recommednations are extremely urgent.

sam — that’s interesting about teachers. I agree that some people will just be good at one kind of teaching, and others at another. But most, early in the careers, have a range of abilities, and it is impossible (and would be inefficient) to develop them all. The system provides incentives for them to develop some rather than others, and what actually happens in the public school system in the US is that teachers with a wide range of talents are encouraged to develo the talent to teach the higher achievers, and to gravitate to the schools where those students are. Lower achivers (usually from lower SES groups) are in schools with a lot of teacher turnover, in which teachers have less exeprience and have not developed their talents well yet, and often with less capable principals.

We don’t talk about setting/streaming/tracking in the paper (which is relevant to your comment) because it takes us too close to the practical world, and because we don’t have full command of the issue. That said, it seems to me very odd to have comprehensive classrooms past a certain age, in subjects like math, the sciences, and writing intensive subjects like English. Many high schools track without tracking, but offering electives that enable middle class parents to put their children into Shakespeare classes; ie they track by social class rather than by potential for achievement; not a fan of that, either, myself. But this is strictly off-topic.

19

Tracy W 02.13.08 at 3:19 pm

Thanks for the study tracy. I’d hesitate to draw too strong a conclusion from one study, but its interesting and useful

I am entirely in favour of hesitating to draw strong conclusions from one study. What I was questioning in your paper was which studies you do draw from when you say “The disadvantaged children in the more integrated school will do better, other things being equal, because they have fewer competitors for the limited resources.”

In your paper you do not mention even one study supporting this view. And, I note it is a strong view. Not “there is some evidence to suggest…” but just a bold statement that children “will do better, other things being equal”. Surely someone who hesitates to draw conclusions from one study must have a variety of studies behind such a strong claim. What are these studies that are behind your claim? And, out of curiousity, why don’t you mention them in your report?

20

harry b 02.13.08 at 4:02 pm

I’ll provide you with a list, tracy, later (I’m taking a moment off work to read comments). Why not provide massive references? Because it is a working paper, narrowly targetted at a couple of other papers which share the empirical assumption, and nthe central argument of which does not turn on the assumption (obviously, since it is shared between the papers).

Your first question, in #1, is based on a misunderstanding. We are talking about integrated schools (which Satz and Anderson both argue for), not schools with large numbers of advantaged and small numbers of disadvantaged children, and assuming (implausibly, perhaps, and that is one reason that non-integrative strategies may be superior in some circumstances, as I argue elsewhere) that the problem of intra-school competition over resources is solved (as is unlikely in the NCLB results). Still, we could be clearer about that, certainly.

21

KDeRosa 02.13.08 at 4:39 pm

I’d be very surprised if there are any scientifically rigorous studies that properly measure poverty and the SES of the schools and compare the results to a proper control group. Bear in mind that you’d have to have at least 15 experimental schools, not students, to achieve statistically reliable results.

What we are likely to see are poorly designed “studies” that try to correlate SES and achievement, broadly defined, with no control groups. The studies will also imply a causation even though the studies couldn’t possibly show causation.

This is how it’s done in education and this is why none of the proposed solutions ever work. It also helps to have a short memory and conveniently forget that after teh Coleman Report we tried bussing low SES kids to high SES schools and failed to achieve any gains, suggesting that the expected causation was incorrect.

22

Greg Anrig 02.13.08 at 5:20 pm

My guess is that kderosa would find comparable fault with studies supporting the theory of evolution, global warming, and other phenomena for which countervailing evidence is negligible. No serious scholars of education policy question Coleman’s findings, because so much subsequent research has supported his conclusions.

As for court-ordered busing, the problem was that the lion’s share of children involved, both white and black, were from low-income families living in cities. Mixing low-income kids of different races doesn’t overcome the socio-economic concentration problem. Cross-distict voluntary programs like those in St. Louis and Boston, which enable low-income minorities to attend predominantly middle class and white schools, have produced consistently positive results.

23

KDeRosa 02.13.08 at 6:38 pm

Two of these “other phenomena” for which there was scientific consensus were that the the earth was flat and that the sun revolved around the earth and look how well they turned out.

But let’s get back to the topic at hand.

The various Coleman Reports noted many correlations:

* academic achievement was less related to the quality of a student’s school, and more related to the social composition of the school, the student’s sense of control of his environment and future, the verbal skills of teachers, and the student’s family background.

* school funding was not closely related to academic achievement;

* smaller classes had no effect on academic achievement.

* school laboratories had no effect on academic achievement.

* school counseling had no effect on academic achievement.

* higher teacher salaries had no effect on academic achievement.

* higher teacher qualifications had no effect on academic achievement.

* even after family background factors were controlled, private and Catholic schools provided a better education than public schools.

* busing had failed, largely because it had prompted “white flight.”

Coleman did predict that black children who attended integrated schools would have higher test scores if a majority of their classmates were white. But it was Pettigrew who, after reanalyzing the data, concluded that black students attending mostly white schools had achievement levels much higher than those in segregated schools. Also, in these schools, the white students’ performance was no worse than that of whites in segregated schools.

However, as I pointed out above, Pettigrew apparently thought all blacks were the same, those who lived in neighborhoods that were integrated (i.e., middle class) and those from the inner city (i.e., very low-SES). The analysis did not take into account the difference in the homes, the language models, and the other differences in child-rearing practices between integrated blacks and urban blacks. The relevant difference was that when integrated blacks entered school they were far advanced over the inner-city blacks in skill, knowledge, and language proficiency.

This is at least why all your hypothesis, which is all these correlation studies give you anyway, has failed in practice.

To the extent that we have conducted legitimate research, the research goes decidedly against your hypothesis. See the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study, the Minnesota Twin Family Study and Brouchard’s Reanalysis, and the Minnesota Texas Adoption Research Project and Willerman’s various analyses. The findings are consistent. Placing a low-SES child in the nurturing environment of a high-SES household and high-SES school has failed to yield significant academic gains. By age 17, the adopted children performs like a low-SES child, despite the change in environment.

Also, to the extent any study you can dig up contends to show “consistently positive” results you can bet the studies also are not statistically significant (p > 0.05), not educationally significant (s < 0.25), don’t adequately define or control for SES, and/or do not use a valid testing instrument.

If you have any cites for your studies, let me know.

24

Greg Anrig 02.13.08 at 6:59 pm

You haven’t responded with specificity to what I wrote and keep conflating race with income, and home environment with schooling. Put your actual name on your posts and I’ll go through the trouble of putting together a bibliography. I would understand, though, if you felt that might not be helpful to your career.

25

KDeRosa 02.13.08 at 8:23 pm

I have responded to your post with sufficient specificity or at least the specificity it deserves. Many of Coleman’s findings, like the ones I’ve listed, were hotly disputed, and you can find many “studies” that purport to show opposing conclusions. Your explanation for the failure of busing is not supported by the data. Race and income are different, but the results are generally the same since blacks tend to have a lower SES than whites. Home environemnt and schooling are different, but the adoption research shows that improving both home environment AND the school environement has had no effect, so it stands to reason that changing just the school enviroment (at least the non-instructional aspects) will also have no effect.

My blogger profile.

26

Sebastian 02.13.08 at 9:14 pm

Are we all in agreement that these tests show meaningful differences in educational achievement? The position of the main teachers’ union in the US is that standardized testing is a bad tool for such a purpose.

27

Tracy W 02.14.08 at 5:38 am

My guess is that kderosa would find comparable fault with studies supporting the theory of evolution, global warming, and other phenomena for which countervailing evidence is negligible. No serious scholars of education policy question Coleman’s findings, because so much subsequent research has supported his conclusions.

To test the hypothesis that “disadvantaged children in the more integrated school will do better, other things being equal”, you need to make sure that other things are equal. Unfortunately for the purposes of scientific research in most parts of the world, which school a child attends is heavily affected by parental choice on such matters as where to live. A disadvantaged child who happens to be in an integrated school may plausibly differ in many ways from a disadvantaged child who is in a segregated school. Perhaps reported parental income is low, but the parents can live in a rich area because their grandparents brought them a house there. In the case of racial groups, a child living in an integrated area may very plausibly differ in many ways from a child of the same ethnic group living in a segregated area in many ways other than which school they attend, and their parents may well differ from the parents living in segregated areas. Consequently we need to control for this plausible source of difference before we can conclude that putting disadvantaged children in a more-integrated school will improve their educational outcomes.

So what you want is an experiment that randomly assigns children to more- or less- integrated schools. As far as I know the Coleman report did not draw on such research. Consequently its results are untrustworthy compared to a study that uses random assignment. As is any subsequent research that does not use random assignment.

Studies supporting the law of evolution use even more controlled experiments than is possible in educational research (we can’t breed a bunch of genetically-identical children as our starting point like genetic researchers do with fruit flies). I have not looked at the studies of global warming as closely, so I do not know how they control for confounding factors. However, I get the impression that they are more substantive than finding a statistical correlation and calling it a day. And if we could run a thousand Earths in a properly-controlled experiment of global warming, the results of that experiment would trump any number of statistical correlations.

And it doesn’t matter if I, or kdeRosa is a serious scholar of education policy or not. What matters is the quality of the education research.

28

Tracy W 02.15.08 at 9:08 am

Harry B – have you attempted to email me those references? I’ve checked my inbox and seen no sign of them, but I do suspect that this address loses a bit to spam filters (while of course letting through my fair share of emails about Viagra and advice on how to save money on inter-state phonecalls.)

29

functional 02.17.08 at 7:37 pm

Greg Anrig says:

Cross-distict voluntary programs like those in St. Louis and Boston, which enable low-income minorities to attend predominantly middle class and white schools, have produced consistently positive results.

Since you use the word “voluntary” there, have you ever heard of the term “selection effects”?

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