1.5.9.5 Equality of Opportunity vs Outcomes

Version 1.0 October 2022                             (Previous Version)

Some people support equality of opportunity, but not equality of outcome.  Consider education:

●   If each child should have an equal opportunity to receive a quality education, should we publish students’ test or exam results which show unequal outcomes?  Half of the students will be below average on such measures.  Or a tenth will have the lowest scores and a tenth the highest scores.

●   Is this to say that half, or a tenth, of students are failures?  Receiving low grades at school can have a major impact on a child’s future, preventing them from obtaining further education or professional qualifications.  The grades students obtain is correlated to their socioeconomic status: children of richer parents generally get higher grades than other children.  Is any of this fair? 

●   Is it better to not publish the test results, or rank students in any way?  Or is it best not to have exams or tests at all, but just publish that the student completed that year or course of study.  But is that being unfair to students whose higher grades would often lead to greater economic success? 

A major goal in education should be to cultivate an informed citizenry, so that individuals are able to evaluate the information presented to them and the services delivered, especially from government.  Education for a job, or the job market, must be secondary because a) each person needs the skills to choose a fulfilling life, including what job they have (if any), and b) the job market is changing so rapidly that specific jobs may not be available or required in the near future.

The ideal educational outcome is therefore to so substantially to improve access to high quality education that, although students are still tested and ranked, they are (virtually) all performing well, rather than some doing well and others doing poorly.  If all students reach a high standard, no-one should fail.  The benefit of ranking from the top to the bottom is not absolute.  Continuing to use a relative measure (she was in the bottom 10%) is inappropriate, ineffective and unfair if everyone, including the bottom 10% did very well.

Similar issues arise with housing, health care and incomes.

●   Should the government provide everyone with equally good, or equally bad, housing?

●   Should the government provide everyone with equally good, or equally bad, health care.

●   Should the government provide everyone with an equal regular income.

Or should we at least attempt to provide higher quality services, in housing, health care, legal aid, etc so that even the worst off have a tolerable standard of living and reasonably fulfilling life.

It seems many socially conservative, religious, or business oriented observers reject equality of outcomes as a goal because they perceive that it is dragging down the successful rather than pulling up the strugglers.  This is another ‘straw dog’ argument: no-one (or no-one reasonable) actually wants that.  But we can try to find different initiatives to counter the impediments the poor and minority groups face, to reduce the undeserved inequality of outcomes. 

This must be done in addition to ensuring there is adequate funding.  It means we need to try new initiatives that are untested and accept that some of them will fail, for a variety of reasons, perhaps because they turn out to be unfair and/or don't improve the outcomes of the target group.  Every step will be controversial, but we should try.