Equality in Education

1. Permissive equality of opportunity

- The permissive view of equality means providing equal educational opportunity to everyone through the abolition of institutional discrimination.
- It abolishes the past discrimination of educational opportunity on grounds of status, sex, religion, region, race, and so on.
- It presupposes that an individual's ability is proportional to the level/amount of education they receive.
- Gifted education or talent education can be cited as examples.

2. Guaranteed equality

- The focus is on removing the economic, geographic, and social conditions that hinder school attendance.
- Support systems for low-income children (economic) and students in island regions (geographic) can be cited as examples.
- The focus is on the physical improvement of educational conditions, such as expanding school buses, granting scholarships, and providing dormitories.
- But it has the limit of not changing the distribution structure between classes itself.

3. Equality of educational conditions (process)

- Not merely equality in attendance, but being able to equally attend an effective school.
- It means not creating differences in teacher quality, school facilities, curriculum, and so on.
- The high-school equalization policy and the equal assignment of students among schools can be cited as examples.
- But the Coleman Report explained that family background is more important, and the effect of process equality was not proven.

4. Equality of results / compensatory equality

- Equality focused on learning outcomes. It therefore presupposes giving more support to learners showing low achievement levels.
- It includes special admissions for students in rural/fishing regions, pre-school compensatory education for low-income children, after-school supplementary learning, and so on.
- The opportunity-balance selection system, rural/fishing-region admissions,
- However, there's an argument that this is reverse discrimination against excellent students.

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