Dealing fairly with winners and losers in school: Reframing how to think about equality of educational opportunity 50 years after the Coleman Report
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although the policy and methodological legacy of Equality of Educational Opportunity, the so-called Coleman Report published by the US Department of Education in 1966, is widely recognized, the way in which it played a role in shaping theorizing about equality of educational opportunity has been less well-explored. This article reconsiders the Coleman Report in light of how it has contributed to the framing of how we think about the very idea of equality of educational opportunity and its normative capacity to evaluate the education system. The main argument is that the Coleman Report helped to crystallize the concept of equality of educational opportunity as being fundamentally about how education provides ladders of opportunity and enables upward mobility for socially disadvantaged students. This framing has, however, created certain normative blind spots that have seriously impeded its ability to engage certain issues in education. The normative blind spot singled out, in particular, is the competitive structure of the current education system – the school system is structured so that some children win, while some lose. The competitive nature of schools has often been challenged, from a wide range of perspectives, but rarely utilizing an equality of opportunity framework. Given this normative blind spot, the more constructive dimension of the article is to advance an alternative theory of equality of educational opportunity that is better able to function as a regulative ideal for competition in the education system, one that identifies standards or principles of fairness to guide policy on how to deal fairly with winners and losers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".