Local School Districts are Bastions of Injustice

Although many begin as conquests by gangs of armed men, jurisdictions are well founded when they are voluntary associations of people agreeing on a social contract, with consistent legislation evolving thereafter. The citizens of isolated towns may agree to start schools, with no obvious injustice committed; but as these towns grow, and their developed borders come in contact with each other, inequalities may become obvious, with the more developed towns having a natural instinct to preserve their advantages by excluding their neighbors. Similar tensions can arise around all kinds of borders, with poorer peoples being tempted to invade and seize what they don't have other access to, and richer peoples establishing armies and other enforcement officers to defend what they have; and poorer peoples may give up any attempted armed invasion in the face of superior force, and instead attempt isolated acts of covert economic immigration, and then try to change the laws and the culture of the countries in which they've newly arrived; and this may prove more effective than any armed attempt might have proved, especially insofar as they are arriving in jurisdictions with many liberal hearted, sympathetic citizens.

Insofar as established resources are the material manifestation of past labours, the possession of resources such as well endowed schools cannot be regarded as unjust; but insofar as they are the result of having fortuitously inhabited lands with superior natural resources, and especially when it is one's ancestors who have done so, and have forcibly dispossessed more primitive peoples who were there first, such superior inheritances are unjust. When some children inherit much more than others, with the well off ones having exerted no labour that might have earned such superior resources, injustice has definitely arrived, through the inheritance of unearned wealth. Thus humanity requires periodic redistributions of wealth, or social tensions can become unbearable. 

Justice requires fighting the instinct to preserve unjust, unearned material advantages for one's children.

Local school districts are unjust because they depend upon enforced invisible walls that preserve unequal, advantageous resources for undeserving, fortunate local children and exclude those with a valid claim to an equal opportunity in life.

On the Opportunity Gap

Yesterday I shared some of my more skeptical reflections on the achievement gap. I argued (1) it's not clear that the gap can be entirely closed, at least in the foreseeable future, (2) it can probably only be closed by unjust means, and (3) it's not clear why closing it would be a good thing, if that implies that every culture is expected to become nearly identical (unless the most ardent achievement gap closers want to argue that culture is irrelevant to school success, which claim I think so ludicrous as not to be worth countering).

Today I want to return to the theme of justice, and will argue, less controversially, that justice requires we close the opportunity gap, not the achievement gap, in the United States. As a basic source for my argument I want to acknowledge Moral Minds by Marc D. Hauser, a psychologist until recently at Harvard. On page 88, Hauser reports the findings of experiments conducted among several groups gathered in different venues from different cultures around the world who strive together to establish ideal, perfectly just societies. The model which emerges triumphant worldwide combines equal distribution of resources (in education, the most important are time and money), the establishment of a social safety net for those unable to rise to a minimal standard of living (in education, this would combine the minimal level of attainment and achievement expected via basic education) on their own, and the availability of rewards for those contributing well beyond the average to society as a whole. We may regard this model (rather than, for example, the social contract proposed by Professor John Rawls in A Theory of Justice) as the theory of justice most universally supported by the human species, as opposed to the norms that appear operative in other species, such as gorillas, ants, or wolves.

Applying this model to our current situation in education, we already allow rewards, in the manner of honours, scholarships, and college opportunities, to our best contributors, so this isn't much of an issue. But the United States is one of only three countries in the OECD that actually spends less on the education of the poor rather than as much or more, which is the custom elsewhere, and this opportunity gap is unjust.

The foundation of injustice in American education is the local school district.