Educational Goods: Values, Evidence, and Decision-Making-A Summary

This is a brief summary of the book Educational Goods: Values, Evidence, and Decision‐Making by Harry Brighouse, Helen F. Ladd, Susanna Loeb and Adam Swift. It provides the introduction to the present symposium on this book, which includes the ensuing contributions from Carey Bagelman, Randall Curren, Michael Hand, John Tillson and Winston Thompson, followed by a response from the authors

Educational Goods Reconsidered: A Response

We gratefully reply to our five commentators, responding to their criticisms and comments under the following headings: parochialism and curriculum; rationality and truth; production and distribution; perfectionism, decision‐making and disagreement; adultism and parents' interests; non‐consequential educational goods; and self‐education

Good education policy making: data-informed but values-driven

In this article, based on their book Educational Goods: Values, Evidence and Decision Making, Harry Brighouse, Helen Ladd, Susanna Loeb, and Adam Swift encourage education decision makers to give careful thought to the values that underlie the data they collect and use to inform policy. Rather than basing decisions entirely on what improves academic achievement, the authors call for attention to a wider array of values, which they call educational goods. These include the capacities to function in the labor market, to participate effectively in the democratic process, to make autonomous judgments about key life decisions such as occupation or religion, to develop healthy interpersonal relationships, to seek personal fulfilment, and to treat others with respect and dignity. Thinking in terms of these values can broaden the conversation about education priorities and bring clarity to decisions involving trade-offs and conflicting aims

The rights of the child: are we creating a world in which all children are enabled to reach their full potential?

This chapter, through the lens of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, reviews whether we are actually creating world in which children’s development needs are recognized and met. The principle focus of the chapter is each child’s right to an education. In particular Articles 28 and 29 of the UNCRC are highlighted to provide a benchmark against which to consider education provision in multiple international contexts. Reference is made to the UN Millennium Declaration, the eight Millennium Development Goals and the UNICEF report “The State of the World’s Children 2016: A fair chance for every child” to enable examination of how a world fit for children is being achieved or not. From examination of the aforementioned reports, three imperatives emerge: economic, education and moral. These imperatives challenge the reader to consider how legislation and policy works towards or hinders the goal of creating a world in which all children are enabled to reach their full potential

Intergenerational justice of what: welfare, resources or capabilities?

An important aspect of intergenerational justice concerns the specification of a 'currency of advantage' that can be used to evaluate distributive outcomes across time. Environmental theorists have introduced several innovative currencies of justice in recent years, such as ecological space and critical natural capital. However they have often downplayed the application of established currencies (such as welfare, resources or capabilities) to issues of futurity. After exploring the merits of a number of rival currencies, it is argued that the currency of 'capabilities to function' provides a promising basis for a theory of justice that takes seriously the rights and duties of intergenerational justice

Privacy, Ethics, and Institutional Research

Despite widespread agreement that privacy in the context of education is important, it can be difficult to pin down precisely why and to what extent it is important, and it is challenging to determine how privacy is related to other important values. But that task is crucial. Absent a clear sense of what privacy is, it will be difficult to understand the scope of privacy protections in codes of ethics. Moreover, privacy will inevitably conflict with other values, and understanding the values that underwrite privacy protections is crucial for addressing conflicts between privacy and institutional efficiency, advising efficacy, vendor benefits, and student autonomy. My task in this paper is to seek a better understanding of the concept of privacy in institutional research, canvas a number of important moral values underlying privacy generally (including several that are explicit in the AIR Statement), and examine how those moral values should bear upon institutional research by considering several recent cases

Citizenship Education and Liberalism: A State of the Debate Analysis 1990–2010

What kind of citizenship education, if any, should schools in liberal societies promote? And what ends is such education supposed to serve? Over the last decades a respectable body of literature has emerged to address these and related issues. In this state of the debate analysis we examine a sample of journal articles dealing with these very issues spanning a twenty-year period with the aim to analyse debate patterns and developments in the research field. We first carry out a qualitative analysis where we design a two-dimensional theoretical framework in order to systematise the various liberal debate positions, and make us able to study their justifications, internal tensions and engagements with other positions. In the ensuing quantitative leg of the study we carry out a quantitative bibliometric analysis where we weigh the importance of specific scholars. We finally discuss possible merits and flaws in the research field, as evidenced in and by the analysis

Educating for Autonomy: Liberalism and Autonomy in the Capabilities Approach

Martha Nussbaum grounds her version of the capabilities approach in political liberalism. In this paper, we argue that the capabilities approach, insofar as it genuinely values the things that persons can actually do and be, must be grounded in a hybrid account of liberalism: in order to show respect for adults, its justification must be political; in order to show respect for children, however, its implementation must include a commitment to comprehensive autonomy, one that ensures that children develop the skills necessary to make meaningful choices about whether or not to exercise their basic capabilities. Importantly, in order to show respect for parents who do not necessarily recognize autonomy as a value, we argue that the liberal state, via its system of public education, should take on the role of ensuring that all children within the state develop a sufficient degree of autonomy