Addendum to the Educational Goods Framework: the call for guidance for collective decision-making

This article focuses on the four-step schema introduced by Harry Brighouse, Helen F. Ladd, Susanna Loeb, and Adam Swift for operationalizing the Educational Goods Framework and making ‘value-led and data-informed’ decisions in education. The four steps are (1) identify the main values at play; (2) identify the key decisions relevant to those values; (3) assess the options in light of the values and evidence; and (4) establish what is the best policy overall in the circumstances. In this article, we point out the ambiguities in this four-step approach and argue that its lack of clarity carries the danger of causing ethical problems in certain real-world educational contexts. We demonstrate our points through two cases in El Salvador, a country with non-ideal features that render it challenging to implement Brighouse and Swift’s idealized vision of rational, impartial, and informed decision-making processes. We conclude with a call for adding normative guidance on collective decision-making as an addendum to the Educational Goods Framework and note its potential utility in contexts beyond El Salvador.