Equity, Equal Opportunity, and Education

Since the Brown decision by the Supreme Court in 1954, issues of and in education have been a major concern of teachers, administrators, and educational researchers and policymakers. Many of the most widely discussed and controversial debates in education, from Brown to Bakke, have grown out of diverse assumptions about opportunity; educational philosophers and theorists have devoted thousands of pages to the review and analysis of these assumptions. Therefore we take it as no trivial task to explain and justify, at the outset, the addition of our analysis to an already swollen body of literature. While several authors have written quite lucidly on certain aspects of the issue of for education, there has not been a thorough and comprehensive philosophical analysis and critique of the concepts of equity and equal opportunity and related issues in education. In 1969, the dean of American philosophy of education gave the rallying cry: The concepts of justice and equality that are latent in much of our educational policy need to