The Ethics of Pandering in Boston Public Schools’ School Assignment Plan

Abstract

How can access to public elementary schools of variable quality be justly distributed within a school district? Two reasonable criteria are (a) that children should have equal opportunity to attend high-quality schools; and (b) school assignment policies should foster an overall increase in the number of high-quality schools. This article analyzes Boston Public Schools’ (BPS) new school assignment plan in light of these criteria. It shows that BPS’ plan violates equal opportunity by giving middle-class families privileged access to existing high-quality schools. BPS arguably panders to more-advantaged families, however, in order to pull them into the system and deploy their economic, political, and social capital to increase the total number of high-quality schools. Is this ethically defensible? To answer this question, we need to develop an ethical theory of pandering: of privileging the interests and preferences of already unjustly privileged actors because the consequences tend to benefit everyone. Such a theory will need to be ethically pluralistic and weighted along a contextually sensitive continuum, rather than rendered in all-or-nothing terms.