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

Brighouse, H

Ladd, HF

Loeb, S

Swift, A

English

UCL Discovery

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 00, No. 0, 2020Educational Goods: Values, Evidence, andDecision-Making—A SummaryHARRY BRIGHOUSE, HELEN F. LADD, SUSANNA LOEBAND ADAM SWIFTThis 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 theintroduction to the present symposium on this book, whichincludes the ensuing contributions from Carey Bagelman,Randall Curren, Michael Hand, John Tillson and WinstonThompson, followed by a response from the authors.Educational decision-making involves value judgments. As decision mak-ers aim for improvements, they need standards that tell them what counts asan improvement. However, they typically lack a rich and sophisticated lan-guage for talking about values and articulating trade-offs. The book aimsto enrich the language available to, and to clarify the thinking of, both edu-cational decision makers and the researchers whose work informs their de-liberation, by offering a systematic framework for thinking about the goalsof education.We have coined the term ‘educational goods’ to refer to the knowledge,skills, attitudes and dispositions that children develop both for their benefitand for the benefit of others. We identify, at a general level, six capacitiesthat will tend to support the flourishing of both the agent herself and othersin her society: the capacities for economic productivity, personal auton-omy, democratic competence, healthy personal relations, regarding othersas moral equals, and personal fulfilment. We think of these as the distinctivegoods that education aims to produce.Decision makers typically care not only about the average level of ed-ucational goods that students acquire but also about how these goods aredistributed. Distributive values typically have two components: (1) a dis-tributive rule and (2) an object of distribution (a distribuendum), to whichthat rule applies. We identify three distributive values: adequacy of educa-tional goods (adequacy), equality of educational goods (equality) and thedistribution of educational goods that most benefit those with the worstprospects for flourishing (benefitting the less advantaged).The level and distribution of educational goods are not the only norma-tive considerations at stake in educational decisions. Other values bear on© 2020 The Authors. Journal of Philosophy of Education published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Philosophy of EducationSociety of Great BritainPublished by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.This is an open access article under the terms of the CreativeCommonsAttribution License, which permits use, distribution and repro-duction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.2 H. Brighouse, H. F. Ladd, S. Loeb and A. Swiftthose decisions. First among these, and perhaps particularly salient to edu-cators, are what we term ‘childhood goods’: the features of the child’s dailyexperience that matter independently of their contribution to the develop-ment of educational goods. We also identify four additional values (or kindsof value) that regularly come into play in education decisions: respect forthe democratic process, parents’ interests, freedom of residential and occu-pational choice, and the consumption of other goods such as housing, foodor entertainment.Values are often in tension. Explicit and careful consideration of thesetensions can lead to better policy decisions. Policy makers are sometimesreluctant to discuss trade-offs because they want to avoid talking about thenegative aspects of policy choices. For example, in many countries, both re-searchers and politicians have focussed heavily on student achievement—as measured by performance in tests—and its distribution. A focus on suchoutcomes may come at the cost of other goals such as students’ capacity forautonomy, or their disposition to treat others as moral equals. Despite polit-ical pressures to obscure trade-offs, good policy making requires awarenessof how decisions are likely to affect the full range of values at stake. By of-fering an explicit and extensive, but manageable, list of those values, wehope ultimately to improve the quality of policy decisions.Although our approach focusses on the promotion and distribution ofopportunities for flourishing, it could readily be supplemented by non-consequentialist considerations. Some educational goods (e.g. the capacityfor personal autonomy) may be important for meeting moral claims thatmatter independently of flourishing, and some of those claims may act asconstraints on the pursuit of flourishing and its valuable distribution. Fur-thermore, some of the independent values that can reasonably be balancedagainst educational goods and the distributive values may be important in-dependently of their contribution to flourishing. The most obvious examplehere is respect for democratic processes, which some regard as owed topeople in virtue of their moral status as citizens, not because it makes theirlives go better or contributes to their flourishing.Some think that the current policy environment overemphasises someeducational goods at the expense of others, or fails to meet distributivedesiderata, or fails to give proper weight to other values such as childhoodgoods. We offer them a way of formulating their concerns.The second half of the book illustrates how the framework can usefullyinform decision-making by applying it to three policy areas: school finance,school accountability and school autonomy and parental choice. We pro-pose a four-step process for making decisions that explicitly combines val-ues and evidence. First, identify the values in play. Which valuable out-comes is the policy maker trying to achieve? What values may conflict withtheir achievement? Second, identify the key decisions relevant to those val-ues. This obviously takes contextual work: it involves figuring out whatthe feasible options are and which among them might have some prospectof furthering the values that actually matter. Third, evaluate the options inthe light of the pertinent values. The values guide the search for evidence,and the evidence makes possible the evaluation of the options. Finally, the© 2020 The Authors. Journal of Philosophy of Education published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Philosophy of EducationSociety of Great BritainEducational Goods 3decision maker chooses the option with the best expected overall outcome.This fourth step is rarely easy because it will usually involve trade-offs andincomplete information on the consequences of the different choices. Toarrive at the best option, she has to weigh the values at stake, and we offerno guidance for weighing values. What we do is explain what the values arethat should be weighed.We hope to influence the educational research community as well as de-cision makers. Consciously or unconsciously, educational researchers areusually motivated by value concerns, however vague or diffuse. Our frame-work offers a way of sharpening those concerns and a vocabulary for ex-pressing them. Existing research findings can be interpreted and framedin the terms presented here. Moreover, once clear on the range of valuesat stake, researchers will be better able to focus their efforts on achievingthose findings most useful for decision makers.There is, rightly, much talk of the need for evidence-based policy. But aswell as relying on relevant evidence, policy makers must also think clearlyabout what it is their policies are trying to achieve. Policy should be data-informed but values-driven.Correspondence: Adam Swift, Department of Political Science, UniversityCollege London, London WC1H 9QU, UK.Email: adam.swift@ucl.ac.uk© 2020 The Authors. Journal of Philosophy of Education published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Philosophy of EducationSociety of Great Britain

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

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

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