What Is Fairness In The American Education System

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According to an article entitled “What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success” in the The Atlantic magazine: “Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location.” Today I will be discussing to the objection to this argument that it is unfair to wealthy parents to deny them the option of paying more access to better education for their children. The merits of this objection are that it points out areas of unfairness and restricting access to minorities. The weaknesses of this argument are that it does not address the inequalities of the education system and how that …show more content…

In order to justify restricting wealthy parents from using their resources, you must prove that both the poor and wealthy will benefit from this restriction. If not, refusing access is proven unfair and will not solve the problem of inequality in the education system. By decreasing what the rich have access to, it will not elevate what the poor have in any way. In this, the problem is not the amount of money people have in the education system, but it is the inequality of access for the haves and the have-nots. Here, there is a tension between the ideas of taking from the rich to level them with the poor and raising the amount of access the poor have to better educational resources. 
 Singer’s response to this tension is the idea of fairness as compromise. He would claim that fairness as compromise is the least intrusive method of settling the tension between educational access between the rich and the poor. It is the least intrusive because it evens out this tension because it is a procedure that does not use political power to make a party “worse off”. If there is no fairness as compromise, Singer would say that a refusal to abide by the laws would be justified: “…to obey (…) is to ask (the rich) to give up (their) claim to power completely, without any reciprocal concession from the other party.” (Singer, 37) If the government decided to restrict access through legislation, …show more content…

Like Singer, Rawls believes that all parties need to benefit from an action performed in a democratic society. Furthering Singer’s point, he also believes that all parties must do their part within society to receive any benefit from that society. He claims that: “fair terms of cooperation specify an idea of reciprocity or mutuality (where) all who do their part as the recognized rules require are to benefit as specified by a public and agreed upon standard” (Rawls, 6) If the standard of the society is that everyone receives the same high level of educational access, then it is fair to restrict the rich from using money to gain more access, however, if the standard of society is to have unequal standards of education across socioeconomic areas then it is not fair for a wealthy family to be restricted. This thought comes from Rawls argument of individual rational advantage where claims that “what counts as a benefit must be from the perspective of our own conception of the good” (Week 12 Handout, 4). Like Singer, Rawls believes that a decision must benefit all parties and not just one party: “The idea of rational advantage specifies what it is that those engaged in cooperation are seeking to advance from the standpoint of their own good” (Rawls,

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