Pursuing Equal Opportunities

This book offers original and innovative contributions to the debate about equality of opportunity. The first part sets out a theory of equality of opportunity that presents equal opportunities as a normative device for the regulation of competition for scarce resources. The second part shifts the focus to the consideration of the practical application by courts or legislatures or public policy makers of policies for addressing racial, class or gender injustices. The author examines standardized tests, affirmative action, workfare, universal health-care, comparable worth, and the economic consequences of divorce.

Educators and policymakers who share the goal of equal opportunity in schools often hold differing notions of what entails a just school in multicultural America. Some emphasize the importance of integration and uniform treatment for all, while others point to the benefits of honoring cultural diversity in ways that make minority students feel at home. In Just Schools, noted legal scholars, educators, and social scientists examine schools with widely divergent methods of fostering equality in order to explore the possibilities and limits of equal education today. The contributors to Just Schools combine empirical research with rich ethnographic accounts to paint a vivid picture of the quest for justice in classrooms around the nation. Legal scholar Martha Minow considers the impact of school choice reforms on equal educational opportunities. Psychologist Hazel Rose Markus examines culturally sensitive programs where students exhibit superior performance on standardized tests and feel safer and more interested in school than those in color-blind programs. Anthropologist Heather Lindkvist reports on how Somali Muslims in Lewiston, Maine, invoked the American ideal of inclusiveness in winning dress-code exemptions and accommodations for Islamic rituals in the local public school. Political scientist Austin Sarat looks at a school system in which everyone endorses multiculturalism but holds conflicting views on the extent to which culturally sensitive practices should enter into the academic curriculum. Anthropologist Barnaby Riedel investigates how a private Muslim school in Chicago aspires to universalist ideals, and education scholar James Banks argues that schools have a responsibility to prepare students for citizenship in a multicultural society. Anthropologist John Bowen offers a nuanced interpretation of educational commitments in France and the headscarf controversy in French schools. Anthropologist Richard Shweder concludes the volume by connecting debates about diversity in schools with a broader conflict between national assimilation and cultural autonomy. As America's schools strive to accommodate new students from around the world, Just Schools provides a provocative and insightful look at the different ways we define and promote justice in schools and in society at large.

Based on author's thesis (doctoral--Oxford University, 2009) under title: Opportunity pluralism.

The provision of state funded and democratically accountable care services represents one of the most potentially transformative advances in gendered social relations and equality for women by ‘defamilizing’ care and providing paid work. But the cost of providing these services, which women have access to them and how they should be provided are always at the forefront of debate, especially during economic crises. Socially funded and publicly accountable care services are therefore a key site of feminist activity, but also the frontline for spending cuts and 'reform' during times of austerity. Gender Equality in Public Services analyses how gender equality work in British public services is changing in response to factors including: equality legislation; the erosion of local democracy, privatisation of public services and new forms of feminist activism and leadership. It also assesses the challenges and opportunities for promoting women’s equality in producing and using public services. Impacting upon developed and developing economies, the arguments in this challenging book explore the potential of equality and feminist activism and leadership for radical and transformational change. It will appeal to advanced students, researchers and practitioners interested in social policy, feminist organization theory, equal opportunities and gender mainstreaming practice.

About the publication The law on education and educational practices in South Africa would exhaust the capacity of any meaningful monograph. Instead, the authors of this book engage six discrete topics that refl ect the broader currents and conflicts in South African education debates: (a) school choice; (b) school fees; (c) the right to an adequate basic education; (d) single medium public schools; (e) school governing bodies; and (f) independent schools. The book has two further aims. First: To move beyond the debates taking place separately in the education policy community and the legal academy, and to demonstrate how these disciplines, working in concert with each other, can advance our understanding of law and education in South Africa. Second: To show that the ANC's complex education agenda must mirror the egalitarian, utilitarian, democratic, and communitarian commitments found within the Constitution. How these competing political claims refl ected in our basic law play themselves out in the enabling education legislation, the case law and government education policy, frames each topic assayed in this work. About the editor: Stu Woolman is the Academic Director at the South Africa Institute for Advanced Constitutional, Public, Human Rights and International Law. Brahm Fleisch is Associate Professor in the Division of Education Leadership and Policy Studies in Wits School of Education.

Egalitarians have traditionally been suspicious of equality of opportunity, but recently there has been a sea-change in egalitarian thinking about that concept. Shlomi Segall brings together these developments in egalitarian theory and offers a comprehensive account of 'radical equality of opportunity'.

This book challenges the official discourse that shapes the debates on Equal Opportunities and Diversity (EO&D) at national, regional and European level and will be a key text for students and researchers of EO&D in many fields.