Equality, adequacy, and stakes fairness: Retrieving the equal opportunities in education approach

Two approaches to making judgments about moral urgency in educational policy have prevailed in American law and public policy. One approach holds that educational policy should aspire to realizing equal opportunities in education for all. The other approach holds that educational policy should aspire to realizing adequate opportunities in education for all. Although the former has deep roots in American culture and its jurisprudence, a common narrative is that in recent years the equal opportunities approach has been displaced by the educational adequacy approach, which is said both to have enjoyed much greater success in the school financing litigation as well as to be theoretically more defensible. The present article is designed to make a contribution to the retrieval of the equal opportunities approach. It does so by sketching out a theory of equal opportunities in education organized around the idea of stakes fairness that can withstand the criticisms often made of that approach and by showing how that theory is better able than the educational adequacy approach to address the fairness of a more robust educational policy agenda that extends beyond school financing.