Fair share of the cost for a fair share of the benefit

Suppose a mother has formed, as best she can, a judgement about how much sending her son to the local comp will contribute to educational justice. She thinks that his presence in the school - and hers in the Home-School Association - will do a little bit for educational standards there, and she's cautiously optimistic that her example will influence others in the right direction. Perhaps she senses that the school is close to a tipping point: the middle-class elements in the catchment area still support it sufficiently for the school to be good enough, but if even a few people like her start opting out it could start a process of cumulative decline. And she's considered the consequences of her decision for her son too. He would be a little bit worse off, all things considered, if he went there rather than to the private school to which some of her friends are sending their children. Kids there get much better academic results and that isn't just because they're different kids. (She's not stupid. She knows that what matters is added value, not raw league tables. Still, she judges that, if only because of peer group effects, her son would do better, in terms of academic results, and the knowledge and skills they represent, at the private school.) Against this she's set all those things he'd get from going to a school attended by a wider cross-section of the population (including girls). Taking all the factors she can think of into account, she judges that he would be slightly better off at the private school. Going to the comprehensive does some good to others at some cost to him. What should she do?

Here's the principle that I think applies to this kind of case: parents should be willing for their children to bear a fair share of the cost if that means that they thereby contribute their fair share to the goal of educational justice. We're not talking now about what is needed to avoid hypocrisy. Hypocrisy-avoidance comes easily. Too easily. Recall the parent who says that she's willing to abolish private schools in order to get educational justice for all but, since that's not an option, has no problem sending her son to Winchester - even though she also accepts that the local comp would be perfectly OK for him and that his going there would do something to make things fairer. She is consistent. But, if the principle I'm proposing is right, she's acting wrongly. She is giving her son's interests too much weight. What she's saying, in effect, is that he is so much more important than other people's kids that it's only for the sake of systemic change affecting the whole society that she's prepared to forfeit his tip-top education in favour of a fair one. My principle says that she should be willing to make that sacrifice for the sake of a much smaller gain. The gain needn't be educational justice for society as a whole. It should be simply his proportionate contribution to educational justice.

I've talked about an individual's school choice making a difference, albeit a very small one, to the extent to which society realises educational justice. Does it make sense to think of an individual decision as contributing a 'fair share' to that goal? I think so. What's wrong with the mother under discussion is her all-or-nothing view. She's like the millionaire who accepts that he has more than is fair, says he'd vote for much higher taxes but, in their absence, gives nothing away to the poor. Of course any individual's contribution will be only a drop in the ocean. That's not the point. He, on his own, can help to reduce unfairness in the distribution of money. Something similar applies in the education case.

That fair share will be very small. The contribution - on the absolute dimension - will make a difference only to other children in one's neighbourhood, not to the population as a whole. And the difference it makes will be only a small part of the difference that would be needed to create genuine educational justice even for the kids in that neighbourhood. In fact, the fair share will be so small that any contribution to educational justice is likely to qualify as a fair share. I've acknowledged that sending your child to the local comp might, under some circumstances, do no good - in absolute terms - at all. If the choice is between the local comp and taking one of a fixed supply of selective places, then it might make no positional difference either. But, if it would do any good, then you'd be contributing no more than your fair share.

Satisfying that part of the principle is relatively straightforward. Going to the local comp wouldn't be doing much to help but it would almost certainly be doing a little and that little is unlikely to be more than your fair share. It's the other part that is likely to justify opting out, the bit that says you (or your son) don't have to bear more than your fair share of the cost. As discussed at length in Chapter 7, sending one's son to the local comp under the current rules may be worse for him than would sending him to the local comp under fair rules. This is the second way of thinking about the 'cost' identified above. Many parents may be willing to give their child only a fair rather than a better-than-fair education. What they're not willing to do is give him one that is worse-than-fair.

This principle is not quite as generous as it looks. Parents should judge their children's education across the board - taking into account the beneficial impact of parental influence and other factors that may compensate for below-average schooling. Some well-off and well-educated parents should regard as acceptable for their children schools that would be unacceptable for others whose parents had less going for them. (Remember my academic friend who thought that his being well off - financially and culturally - meant that his son would have a fair chance even in a below-average school.) Remember also that the vast majority of the population goes to state comprehensives and that the relevant comparison is with the chances of the average child. Still, it is less demanding than the other justifications that we have looked at so far. It does not require that sending one's son to the local comp would be sacrificing him to emotional trauma, or condemning him to being bullied, or giving him only a no-better-than-fair chance of avoiding poverty. Nothing dramatic like that. All that's needed is that the local comprehensive be such that sending him there, though indeed making a fair contribution to educational justice, will mean that he bears an unfair cost. She is willing to vote for a fair system, one that makes him worse off than he could be if he were allowed to opt out. Why should he pay a heavier price just because others are not willing to vote for a fair system?

To conclude discussion of this justification, let's consider the happy scenarios where the presence or absence of a single child doesn't seem to make any difference. The individual decision is futile not in the pessimistic sense that it does nothing to improve a failing school but in the optimistic one that the local comp is perfectly all right and will continue to be so whether or not any particular child goes to it.

Suppose the local comp has a good mix of children, peer group effects are working well, and there is no danger of your own decision to opt out leading to a general exodus by those with the option of following suit. In those happy circumstances, it could indeed be true that one more or less bright and well-motivated child will make no difference. What should we think about a mother who appealed to that fact to justify opting out? One who reasons that, since her own decision will - for happy reasons - contribute nothing to improving the local comp, she might as well send her son to Eton? We should notice that she lacks any justification for opting out in the first place. And, more relevantly here, we should think that she and her son are failing to contribute their fair share of the cost. Her decision, on its own, contributes nothing. But the local comp is only as good as it is because other parents are sending their children to it. If each of them - or those who have the option of opting out - reason as she does, then the school may well tip into decline. The local comp is good, and educational justice more fully achieved, because the parents who could opt out have decided not to. She wants that outcome - a good local comp - but she isn't willing to contribute her fair share to the cost of sustaining it. For her to send her son to Eton would be to free ride on their contributions. And that would be unfair.

It is unfair to take advantage of others' willingness to play their part in a cooperative strategy that yields a desirable aggregate outcome. This is true whether or not the individual's decision will, in fact, make any difference to that outcome. Suppose a lawn will stay in good condition as long as no more than one person walks across it every day. Everybody wants it to be nice and they see that the best way to achieve this outcome is to put up a sign forbidding anybody from walking on the grass. Then an individual realises that, as long as she's the only one, she can take advantage of everybody else's obeying the rules and keep the lawn nice. So whenever others aren't looking, she takes a short cut across the lawn. Even if she's right to think that her obeying the rule makes no difference, I hope you agree that she's acting unfairly, refusing to contribute her fair share of the cost of the collectively beneficial practice of keeping the lawn in good condition. A good comprehensive is like that nice lawn. (So is a society free of measles, mumps and rubella. That's why parents should be willing to have their kids vaccinated even if there are indeed some risks attached and even if enough others are having the jab to keep the diseases at bay. Not to do so is to free ride on the willingness of others to bear their fair share of the cost of producing the beneficial outcome.)

Justification 17: Opting out will do more - in the long run - to bring about educational justice

Justification 16 claimed that nothing would be gained by the choice not to opt out. Changing the rules can bring about educational justice but individual decisions make no difference. That might have been what Harriet Harman had in mind when she wrote 'I believe passionately that you cannot use one child as a piece of social engineering' (though I suspect that she meant it would be morally wrong, not empirically impossible). Now we turn to a more extreme version of this. The mother invoking Justification 17 says that sending her child to the local comp will actually make things worse. Not worse for him, worse for educational justice. Opting out will contribute more to educational justice than would opting in.

It's no good leaving unfairly advantaged educations to the children of those who do not see that their education is unfairly advantaged! The rules wrongly permit parents to buy their children a better educa-tion than others are getting. Those who have had that better education are likely to emerge from it particularly well placed to influence public policy on education (and on everything else). The rational way to promote the cause of educational justice is to take advantage of the existing unfairness and maximise the chances of one's child being among the movers and shakers of the next generation. This is like the rich egalitarian who says: I would give away my money to the poor. But holding on to it enables me to keep in with the bigwigs in my society, moving in important circles that would become inaccessible to me if I did that. So, all things considered, staying rich and influential is the best way for me to promote social justice.

Hypocrisy-wise, this does the trick. If a parent really believes that opting out is likely to do more for educational justice than would going to the local comp, then opting out is quite consistent with a sincere commitment to removing the option to opt out. Whether it's a valid justification, however, depends on the plausibility of some rather speculative causal claims.

I'll happily concede that opting out is likely to increase the chances of one's children ending up in a place where what they believe should happen to the education system makes a difference to what happens to that system. But are they likely to share - or to continue to share - your beliefs about what should happen to it? That depends on the relative impact on their beliefs of (a) your beliefs and (b) those promulgated by the school and (probably) endorsed by the other children who attend it. Not many schools go out of their way to spread the view that schools like them should be abolished. So appealing to this justification means taking something of a risk. Indeed, some parents fear that going private will make their children less likely to endorse their view about educational justice (and other political or moral matters) and regard that as a reason not to do it! Surrounding them by teachers and kids who think that their school is morally OK is not an obvious recipe for producing adults who realise that it isn't.

My guess is that this type of justification is in fact quite widely invoked by children who go to the kind of school that they believe should not exist. I have in mind those of an age to think this kind of thought, perhaps deciding at 16 where to do their A levels. I've known quite a few who think something like this: I believe that the kind of school I am attending should be abolished. Part of my objection concerns the kind of political and social attitudes such schools typically engender, but, being confident of my own ability to withstand the relevant engendering processes, I can justify my going to this school. Since, by going to this school, I stand a superior chance of gaining access to high-quality higher education, and to the ruling elite, and so of my social and political views making a difference to what actually happens to our society - including its education system - there is a strong case for my attending. (I've known students at Oxford, disapproving of the elitism they take it to embody, who justify their own decision to apply there on similar grounds.) It's a good question whether such children are any better at predicting their own future beliefs, and any less likely to be falling prey to self-deception about their real reasons for their choices, than are their parents.

This justification on its own may look rather implausible, but, as parents hardly need to be told, any school choice is going to involve a balancing of a number of different considerations. Suppose that a parent is convinced that sending her kid to the local comprehensive will contribute next to nothing to educational justice and give him an unfairly poor education. The prospect of her morally enlightened child getting an unfairly good chance of having his views make a difference to education policy in the future may well look a more compelling consideration than it would in other circumstances. The hazardousness of predictions about children's future beliefs makes it hard to see this justification outweighing reasons pointing in the other direction. And it is a justification particularly prone to self-serving self-deception. But it could still count, as one among others, as a good reason to choose an option that you think should not be available to anybody.

Conclusion

Providing educational justice is, in large part, a collective action problem. A problem that may depend for its solution on coordinated political action, action to change the rules. Under the wrong empirical circumstances, it could be that an individual parent's decision to support the local comprehensive would bring almost no justice-benefit at all. Even where that's not the case, it might still be unreasonable to demand that of a parent - if sending her child there would be requiring him to bear an unfair burden.

Contrast the case of money. A rich individual who has more than she should have can, by giving away the excess, directly and on her own improve the lives of some who have less, thereby making the world a little bit fairer. Her making that positive contribution does not depend on propitious circumstances. And the amount that she gives away is under her control. Having worked out, as best she can, what would be the right amount for her to hold on to, she can give away the rest, so there's no suggestion that contributing to a fairer distribution of money might require her to bear more of the cost than she would be willing to bear. Of course, giving up one's unjust excess as an individual may well be more costly than changing the rules so that everybody has to do the same - even if one ends up with the same amount of money either way. It's surely more demanding to live as someone who once had lots of money and is surrounded by friends and relations who still do than it is to live among others who, like you, have no more than they should. Even in the case of money, then, everybody's doing it reduces the cost of doing it. Nonetheless, it remains true that the individual can make a contribution to justice and she has discretion over how much she chooses to make.

The dynamics of educational justice are different in both respects. The individual may hardly be able to contribute anything on her own. (When I talk about the morality of school choice in the US, I sometimes get the sense that it's much less of an issue there not only because of the more individualistic culture, but also because state schools in major cities are often considered to be so big and so bad that it simply does not occur to parents that they might, through their own choices, make any difference to the education of other children. They are inauspicious terrain for the instigating of benign snowballs.) And, even where her choice can make a difference, she faces a discrete set of choices - given by the school rules and the aggregate effects of other individuals' choices within them - that may make it impossible for her to make any contribution without her child bearing an unfair burden.