The empty form of fairness: Equality of educational opportunity as an instrumentalizing force in education

Abstract

The article investigates the instrumentalizing and ontological effects of the concept of equality of educational opportunity (EEO). Starting with the Coleman report (Coleman et al., 1966), through the democratization of secondary and tertiary education, and reading it in light of the recent debate on educationalization of social problems (Smeyers and Depaepe, 2008), the text inquires what has become of education under the influence of this powerfull concept. The evolution of this becoming is shaped by the paradox of equal treatment and selection, two fundamental principles on which the EEO ideal is based. (Dubet, 2008). The objectivity of evaluation and comparability of results that this ideal implies sets EEO as one of the most important bases for the development of quantitative evaluation and testing, thus transforming the curriculum and shaping educational practices (Stańczyk, 2013; Terrail, 2002). Moreover, the EEO principle brings the educational system to legitimize social inequalities: since it means treating students equally while they have to be ranked and come out segregated, the belief in inequality of intelligence is being reinforced, and inequalities are educationalized instead of being alleviated. Finally, the research shows that EEO policy and the EEO concept is pedagogically empty, mainly serving as an expression, or allegory of our concern with social inequalities (Labaree, 2008; Rancière, 2002), with no real educational means serving this concern. The good news here is that such emptiness leaves room for practices of pedagogical equality being invented and introduced into the school.

Introduction

Since the concept of equality of educational opportunity (EEO) was first introduced into public and academic debate in the late 1960s with the publication of a soon-to-be famous sociological report titled this way, it has become, in words if not always in actions, both an inherent component of, and the goal to, most educational policies of Western liberal democracies. For some time now, the idea of EEO has been the main way of conceptualizing equality as ‘applied’ to education (Gordon, 2017). Thus, although its meaning and its practical implications have evolved over time, along the lines of the dominant ideology or political power, the concept has never ceased to be used, criticized and defended accordingly, in thinking about what purpose education serves.

My aim in this paper is to discuss the importance of the concept of EEO and EEO policies in shaping the way the goals of education are defined, discussed and publicly stated. If EEO is a fundamental and almost unavoidable concept in thinking and talking about educational goals, it might be because the concept has strongly contributed to the submission of educational decisions and processes to the logic and aims of other social spheres, changing not only the theory and reality of what education is for, but of what it actually is.

I start by briefly illustrating the origins of the concept of EEO in the United States and in France, showing how, from the beginning, it has ‘colonized’ education during a period of massive educational growth and unification: the concept, originally defined by sociologists, conveyed conflicted values from other social spheres into the field of education. Consequently, as exemplified in the second section, beyond simply imposing new goals on education, the concept of EEO changes the logic of education itself as it shapes some of its core processes, giving a new form to educational reality. And, the more EEO was recognized as a key principle in education, the more it contributed to import the question of social inequalities into it, by playing an important role in education becoming perceived as the solution to all social problems, but especially that of social inequality. While summarizing that the concept of EEO has obviously helped to submit the educational system to external goals – be they social, economical or political – I conclude by drawing attention to the fundamentally symbolic, representational dimension of EEO’s ‘instrumentalizing’ effect on education.

The birth of equal opportunity education: A new function for the school, a new understanding of equality

The concept of EEO emerged in several Western countries with the massive social changes that came with the late 1950s and 1960s: further fast industrialization and economic growth, the ongoing need for increasing numbers of qualified workers, and the social and political aftermath of WWII gave rise, in all industrialized countries, to a growing concern about wide-reaching access to higher levels of education. The compulsory schooling age was gradually raised, and steps were taken to extensively open secondary schools to groups hitherto formally or quasi-formally excluded. EEO is a ‘child’ of the processes of massive going-to-scale and formal democratization of education, which happened in different ways and at slightly different times in most of the Western industrialized countries. I will discuss here two examples of the development of what Dubet (2008) calls ‘the school of equal opportunity’, in the United States and in France, a process during which education became simultaneously a key step in preparing and selecting workers for the labour market and the policy area in which social inequalities were supposed to be reduced.

The concept, the subject of heated debate from the very onset, crystalized in the United States, with the notorious report edited by sociologist James Coleman (Coleman et al., 1966) titled On Equality of Educational Opportunity. The report was ordered by Congress after Lyndon Johnson’s election in 1964 as part of the Civil Rights Act provisions. The aim was to gain actual knowledge about the effects of school segregation and educational discrimination according to race, colour, religion and economic background. The conclusions from the report, deemed highly controversial among academics, served as a basis to implement radical and strongly debated policies, such as the practice of desegregation busing (mixing pupils of different ‘races’, mainly by driving black students to traditionally white schools). These policies, and the fierce discussions they provoked, only contributed to spreading both the new approach embedded in the report and its conclusions in public opinion and the academic world.

The Coleman report set the path for how EEO was to be defined: the perspective it introduced is the one most commonly brought to mind when we currently think of, or debate, EEO or EEO policies:

it constituted a reformulation of what was meant by equal education, or at least how it should be measured.  … By broadening the survey to include the determinants of achievement, Coleman essentially redefined equal opportunity to mean equal outcomes for students from different ethnic, racial, and economic backgrounds … When we talk about (the lack of) equality of educational opportunity today, this is typically what we mean (Kantor and Lowe, 2017: 572)

A similar approach to EEO became central to educational thinking in France during the 1960s, although within a different social context. The issue at stake there was not so much that of a racially divided educational system, but a class-segregated one. Dubet (2008) describes the evolution of the French education system throughout the 1960s and 1970s from ‘an elite republican school’ to that of ‘a school of equal opportunity’ or mass democratic school. Once again, the growing need of the labour market for qualified workers, along with strong social pressure on the democratization of public services, resulted in a massive opening of middle and high schools to basically any and every student, regardless of their social origin, further leading to the progressive formal unification of schooling. ¹ A considerable increase in access and the relative democratization of the French education system took place between the early 1960s and the late 1980s, beginning with progressive access to secondary school for all social categories carried out under the slogan ‘80% of an age group to the bac’. ² As a result, the school progressively ceased to be focused on its former function of cultural and national integration and took on that of distributing social positions.

Before mass democratization (or desegregation), the school’s sole ambition was to forge a modern national identity through common culture (language and history) and eventually allow limited mobility for ‘talented’ children from lower social classes. The school was not responsible, and not considered responsible, for the social destiny of the pupils, which remained largely determined by their social origin or by their ‘race’ (as in the United States). Commenting on schooling paradigms before the EEO era, Dubet went on to show that,

in this model, social inequalities are a social problem more than an educational problem because, even if school enshrines existing social inequalities, it does not perceive itself as responsible for them. School treats inequalities as an external problem. It perceives itself as a progressive and just institution within an unjust capitalist world (2008: 82).

In such a system, where an educational career is a priori defined by external social criteria, there is clear differentiation between social- and educational inequalities. Although education systems were formally segregated (United States) or de facto organized according to social origin (the lycées or high schools in France being basically accessible only to the bourgeois and elite youth), they had no predominant influence over social destiny, except for elevating a small number of very talented working-class students (Dubet, 2008). However, as school transformed according to the EEO model, education became a system that selected and distributed social positions to everybody, increasingly ‘intervening in the individuals'social failure or exclusion’ (Dubet, 2008: 84). Increasingly, schools based on EEO were becoming, and being perceived as, the social agent distributing the competences and skills on which professional careers and later social positions depended. Social justice and distributive fairness developed as fundamental issues of educational systems, and EEO was the main guiding principle of that change.

To put it differently, the concept of EEO gained importance because, with massive access to education, it became the articulation of the ambivalent nature of schooling in liberal, democratic societies:

on the one hand it tries and embrace fully the modern postulate of a fundamental equality between individuals …  On the other, liberal societies are also merit-based societies, societies that claim the virtue of a fair competition and fair inequalities funded on the individuals merit’ (Dubet, 2008: 89).

The rooting of the EEO concept in social and educational policy came with the introduction of a new perception of the social goal of education, a paradoxical one, trying to ally equality with meritocracy: on the one hand, schools are supposed not only to treat students equally, but to realize or achieve some kind of social equality through education; on the other, evaluation, classification and selection of pupils on the basis of their performance are framed as fundamental roles of the school once it is a mass-oriented, democratic one. ‘The school treats equally pupils that it hierarchizes and selects whose inequality it builds.  … Its exclusion mechanisms come from its mission to integrate’ (Dubet, 2008: 89), which means that ‘by principle, the more the school is egalitarian, the more it is meritocratic’ (Dubet, 2008: 195). As many scholars have consistently remarked (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970; Coleman, 1975; Dubet, 2008; Savidan, 2010; Terrail, 2002), the (schizophrenic?) goal is simultaneously to treat people as equally as possible and to end up with a hierarchy strictly based on educational criteria.

The rise of this paradoxical function of the school went hand in hand with quantitative evidence-based EEO, as this was inspired (or even commissioned) by a social policy perspective. It resulted in the popularization of viewing ‘the education system … as a discrete system of organizational variables that could be manipulated and optimized through evidence-based policy interventions’ (Kantor and Lowe, 2017: 578). With the concept of EEO, it is very much a structural, quantitative understanding of (in)equality that enters the schools, one based on the social background of the students and their comparative performance as members of these groups. As Kantor and Lowe (2013, 2017) consistently demonstrate, it is not so much the controversy over the main findings of the Coleman report – that organizational and financial features of the school had no real impact over their educational outcomes, being largely dependent on the family backgrounds of students – that constitutes the report’s main legacy, but a new way of understanding equality in education. The report – based on one of the biggest data sets ever collected, that of over 600,000 students – gave very strong evidence that there were structural inequalities among social groups of students according to their respective racial and class backgrounds; it carried a statistically defined, macro-structural, ontologically sociological perspective, all intertwined within a clear policy context – that of class and racial inequality. The research approach adopted in the report was the stepping stone for operationalizing educational inequality in exactly the same manner as done in sociology, that is, by comparing the treatment and results of social groups defined by sociologically meaningful factors.

What needs to be pointed out here is that neither the goals carried by the EEO concept, nor even the mere understanding of what EEO is, stemmed from the inner logic or values of the educational process itself. Rather, they were imposed on school education as a consequence of societies’ new expectations for it, born out of more general trends in the social sciences and social policies, such as the need for a more broadly educated workforce, the political thrust for reducing inequalities, or the belief in the role of research-informed political decision-making. This had two major consequences: the first was that, obviously, the concept of EEO was sensitive to the dominating social or political ideologies and tended to ‘spread’ these in education. What EEO stands for, or aims at, has since the 1960s evolved with the changing political and economic climate. ³ The second was that the sociologically defined concept of EEO imposed on education from the outside was, from the onset, pedagogically empty, meaning that it did not imply, define or aim at any particular educational practice or experience. This aspect of EEO is what I turn to in the following section.

Instrumentalism as ontological change: The empty form of fairness

The present analysis does not leave room for tackling the impossible task of capturing the nature of the ‘core’ of the educational. Although it goes without saying that the education system always functions within a social – that is, cultural, legal, economical and political – context, by which it is profoundly shaped, I do nonetheless start from an assumption that there is such a thing as ‘education’, that it has its inherent logic, and that it can be observed and analysed as a social reality sui generis, constituted mainly by specifically educational daily practices and experiences, and by how the subjects participating in them – teachers, students, education workers of all kinds and to some extent parents – comprehend them, and how it affects and influences them. ⁴ In this section, I would like to show how the selective role of the school and a new understanding of equality implied by EEO shape the core of education.

To understand what the school of EEO is from the perspective of the practice and experience of its main participants, we need to go back to the unavoidable tension between equality and selection that it introduced into education. As already noted, the school became not only a place where people learn and are taught but also – or mainly – a place where teachers have to select and hierarchize students on the basis of the evaluation of their performance, most commonly using grades. This new ‘selection’ function that the school took on translated into the language of educational practice (marking, grading, ranking, selecting, orientating) and experience (being evaluated, graded, selected, listed, rejected). ⁵ Terrail (2002), relying on multiple empirical studies, explains how this function is ‘accepted, interiorized and legitimized’ and how its requirements have come to dominate others, even those – like education, integration or socialization – that seem to be the school’s primary raison d’être. Teachers, students and parents have predominantly internalized this, and see selection and hierarchy as a natural component of education, which has fundamental consequences for the ways education is practised and experienced (Bebi, 2001; Dubet and Martuccelli, 1996; Stańczyk, 2013; Terrail, 2002).

A basic aspect of this process is adapting the contents and/or methods of teaching to the goal of selecting people and evaluating them, as well as teaching in regard to the methods and criteria of evaluation

‘whereas training practices are supposed to happen in a defined sequence, that is, teach, train and evaluate what has been learned, and select and orientate on the basis of the results of evaluation, one can easily observe that the constraints of selection are already present in the evaluation procedures, and moreover contaminate the way teachers think of and practice their education activity' (Terrail, 2002: 55–56).

For instance, the choice of testing as a form of evaluation is frequently justified in terms of objectivity and fairness (more than adequacy, as a matter of fact). The simultaneous imperatives of equal treatment and differentiation draw most school systems towards evaluating and valuing knowledge that is easy to quantify, measure and compare.

This new approach implied a strong focus on good, reliable, comparable measurement of the ‘inputs’ allocated to statistically defined social groups, and of their respective educational ‘outcomes’ as a prospect for their future social status. As mass secondary and higher education grew, and computer technology for data analysis became available, the pressure on measurement resulting from Coleman’s report became part of a more general process of making statistical educational results attained by individuals and schools the basis for diagnosis of the education system (Hutt, 2017). Symbolically, however, the overwhelming amount of data provided in the report marked the beginning of statistics reflecting educational achievement among different social groups as a basic means of comparison between the ways these social groups are treated and of assessment as to the scale and nature of inequalities. Thereafter, the need for statistically sound and comparable data measuring educational achievement became fundamental, not only in assessing the efficiency of the education system, but for debating its egalitarian or inegalitarian character, a concept deeply rooted in the EEO framework.

For example, I personally experienced and analysed the changes introduced to the final evaluation exam in high school in Poland (Egzamin Maturalny). In 1999, it became a national external examination, with percentage results, on the sole basis of which candidates were to be recruited to higher education. A detailed analysis of the new form of the evaluation in the case of the social sciences examination ⁶ shows that it has far fewer open and interpretative questions than before (an entire part dedicated to critical reading and interpretation of real-life sources on a given subject, such as newspaper articles or data sets was removed), and essays carry less weight in the overall point count than the test questions (Blumsztajn, 2016). The intention here, as in the literature examination that was turned into a test, was to provide a more ‘objective’ type of achievement evaluation, that is, allowing for easier (fairer?) comparison between students. A more down-to-earth exam was supposed to give better chances to those deprived of cultural capital (those, for instance, who were not used to reading long articles in weekly or monthly magazines), which was crucial if it was to determine their admission into university (as well as improving tertiary education enrolment data). This in turn meant that the content of tasks for evaluation now tended to be disproportionately centred around factual knowledge and use of specific words or techniques, instead of evaluating the students’ skills in critical reading or understanding of social processes. As a result, the new final exam format influenced not only how students were taught, but also how they had to prepare for the exam, which obviously strongly influenced the whole educational process. It is, of course, nothing new that the selective function of a school changes its practices and teaching content, but it is worth noting that it is the ‘equal treatment’ ideal that drives the focus on evaluation processes rather than on educational ones, the expected fairness and objectiveness of the evaluation being more important to the meritocratic component of EEO than any educational component in itself. The EEO principle plays a fundamental role here, because its inherent fundamental goal of a fair competition puts additional pressure on the objectiveness of grading and evaluation procedures: the ideals of fair assessment, comparability and objectivity are projected from the evaluation process onto the teaching process and the curriculum, shaping what education ultimately is.

Another thing that the EEO approach does is turning students, or pupils, into professional achievers. Students internalize the EEO paradigm of school utility in their understanding and interpretation of education, mainly because the school itself instils the message. The teachers themselves, whether consciously or unwittingly, tend to transmit, especially onto their socially underprivileged students, an instrumentalized understanding of what school is for (Bautier and Rochex, 1997; Terrail, 2002), which translates into the way school is perceived and practised by many of those students.

During the first years I was in school, I didn’t know why I was going there. I thought I was studying to get instruction, to know how to read. Then, later, when I turned 9, I understood I was studying to have a good future’ (Terrail, 2002: 282),

said one student from a socially deprived suburb in his last year of middle school. As education is made key to social mobility or presented as such, as school strengthens its ability to select, reject or promote, being a student becomes an occupation – more akin to a professional activity than to a particular once-in-a-lifetime educational experience (Dubet, 1996; Stańczyk, 2013). The aim is not to learn, to socialize or to revolt, but to succeed: ‘to pass from class to class, to continue the educational path “as far as possible”, to be able to pretend to do a good job’ (Bautier and Rochex, 1997: 3). School instrumentalization becomes the rule of students’ practice:

The students implement real investment strategies. They work on the important subjects, leaving aside the others, or, instead, they multiply their options to improve their grade average. Their workload is dependent upon the anticipated benefits … , this instrumentalizm creates a need for the effects of their work to be predictable. In other words, it is the nature of the grading exercise that commands the learning … . The description of the pupil’s profession consists in listing efficient methods, tricks, sometimes magic behaviours that allow to stay in the race or even to succeed (Dubet and Martuccelli, 1996: 249).

On the one hand, the evaluation process becomes what legitimizes knowledge, not the other way around: the important thing is what is going to be evaluated, independently of the worth it has for, or the sense it makes to, the student. On the other hand, being a student requires ever-increasing technical and social competence in choosing the right school, the right classes, the right options, in getting to understand the actual expectations of the teachers and their grading system. Numerous studies cited by Terrail (2002) and Dubet (1996, 2008) show that this constitutes a growing part of the students’ actual educational preoccupations and aptitudes, taking over what should be considered the ‘core’ of the educational, that is studying, thinking, understanding, exploring, discovering, making sense or relating to others and the world (Biesta, 2013; Masschelein and Simons, 2013; Pennac, 2007). Dubet and Martuccellii (1996) note that the students experience a growing dilemma between their genuine interests and inclinations, and the choices that would yield the best results in terms of their educational and professional career. Perhaps symbolic of this changing reality of school as it has become a place of educational and social opportunity, is the reform that came to life 2 years ago in the French educational system: while formerly, access to university was unconditionally gained on the basis of positive results of the baccalauréat exam (itself being formally the first higher education degree), senior high school students now apply with CVs and motivational letters to multiple higher education institutions of their choice. The difference between educational success and professional career is blurred, education is being gradually assimilated into a job recruitment process – making school reality a work experience for the students.

To sum up, the selection function of schools allied to the EEO policies implies constant (self)evaluation and measurement. This reinforces a tendency to quantify and measure the effects of education as such, which in itself, is highly problematic, because it reduces the whole educational process to these measures. Whether egalitarian or meritocratic, the EEO goal furthermore consistently ‘objectifies’ school practices and experiences: when an ‘objective’ (measurable) education becomes the ultimate goal of policymakers and thus the substance of educational practice, it ends by ‘objectifying’ (materializing, making real and manifest) the very conditions within which those practices occur. The categories used to measure and compare educational reality, shaping language and thought about that reality, tend to become its essence as they gain power over it. Categorization by social groups, performance percentages in tests, rank positions, all related to the EEO principle, become the means by which we describe education, the ways we perceive it and, according to a process identified by Michel Foucault (1993) in his reflections on knowledge and power, make them the reality of education.

Instrumentalizm as legitimization: EEO or the ‘educationalization’ of social inequalities

I want to go on and inquire into the further consequences that the EEO ‘imprint’ has, not only for education, but also for equality. It seems crucial to note that the interiorized and ideologically endorsed concept of EEO leads to an outcome opposite to its intention, by introducing into the school inequalities that are external to it. As I will try to show next, under the EEO school regime, social inequalities are made – or to put it another way ‘verified’ ⁷ – into ‘educational’ ones, thus becoming reinforced and legitimized.

A fundamental aspect of this process related to what the internalization of EEO paradoxical goals (equal treatment and selection) means for teachers’ theorization of their own practices. As Terrail (2002: 57) remarks, evaluating ‘is less about verifying the reality of knowledge acquisition than about ensuring the expected differentiation of the students’ performances’.

[E]ach practice has to be legitimized … , if evaluating the pupils means ranking them along a hierarchical scale, it must be that they can be ranked; it must be that it is in the order of things that some of them are excellent, some good, some average, some weak and some mediocre,  … [that] they are equipped with differentiated school competencies which can be defined, measured and ranked (Terrail, 2002: 59–60).

As the teachers are expected (and expect of themselves) to give every pupil the same opportunity (which, most commonly, would mean treating them similarly), and at the same time are supposed to make decisions about differentiating their pupils, teachers must find an external legitimization of these assessed differences that are soon to become inequalities: typically, the justification would be via the concept of

inequality in the repartition of intellectual resources. This unequal repartition is … a given you have to work with … . Pupils’ performances tell whether and how much they possess this type of substance that can be called intellectual capacities, aptitude, intelligence (Terrail, 2002: 60–61).

This way of perceiving the students currently functions as a sort of pedagogical and psychological common sense, profoundly internalized by all educational actors. Thus teachers, managers and policymakers need an explanation, a non-educational one, for this inequality they produce. Basically, it can be either a biological one or that of social heredity – the latter tends to be currently dominant, if not established. ⁸ In any case, the quasi-assumption of this extra-educational inequality is now a given with which teachers work. It is crucial to see the kind of vicious circle produced here, a mechanism of progressive sanctification of an unequal distribution of talent or intelligence and production of what can be called a ‘culture of failure’ (Terrail, 2002), where some must imperatively fail for the system to work properly. In a school that promises to ensure EEO for all students, and, in the name of this very principle, asks of its teachers that they select these students and rank them, the idea of an ‘essential’ or ontological – albeit a social ontology – extra-educational difference between the students becomes a fundamental and indispensable truth about the nature of education.

This empirically perceived truth is mirrored in teachers’ practice: the unequal repartition of the substance called intelligence, understood as an intellectual disposition for abstraction and as a genuine interest for knowledge, is translated into lower expectations and accounts for different pedagogical practice. Research has proven that teachers tend to adapt the way they teach to the social background of their students: when dealing with what they have identified as a disadvantaged public, teachers frequently opt for relying much more on concrete examples, contextualization and repetition, than on abstract thinking and logical reasoning (Bautier and Rochex, 1997; Bebi, 2001; Terrail, 2002, 2004).

Confronted by a working class public, teachers predominantly ask themselves questions on adapting their pedagogy, that are not as important in ‘good’ classes … ; the solutions they choose, as a recurrent principle, are to substitute description for argumentation, illustration to demonstration (Terrail, 2002: 300).

The very empirical examples of these sociological studies largely echo the more general and philosophical critique that Jacques Rancière voiced about ‘adapting’ school programmes to the new, less privileged social groups that have joined democratized education (Rancière, 2010). Aside from probably ‘locking working-class students in a relation to knowledge and to school that does not allow them to build the skills and attitude required to succeed in school’ (Bautier and Rochex, 1997: 4), an essential consequence is that the idea of EEO, by naturalizing the function of social mobility associated with education, has given a whole new weight to differences among social groups, constantly ‘actualizing’ them as a reality of educational experience. This process is both constituent and reinforcing of the students’ self-identification with their social background, and leads to a public perception of education as a socially stratified system.

In fact, in a school governed by the EEO principle, students from different social groups are constantly treated as representatives of those groups. Endlessly reminded of their social provenance, they can never free themselves from the stigma of their social identity. This is also reinforced through a particular learning experience provided to them in line with their social origin. In Beaud’s (2003) seminal research on the generation that benefited from the last big wave of school democratization in France, the interviewed lower-class students repeatedly criticized the information the teachers required from them at the beginning of the year, such as the professions of the parents or siblings. They clearly felt categorized in terms of social status. As much of earlier sociology of education research has shown (Meighan, 1993), these categorizations are projected on the students and tend to crystallize in their own self-identification.

As I have shown in the first section, the EEO principle for educational justice introduced a very ‘un-educational’ interpretation of (in)equality in education, based on traditional sociological categories. One’s individual achievements are aggregated into statistical entities and interpreted in relation to his, her or their social background. As a result of the EEO principle and EEO policies, the schools' identity is imposed from the outside, defined basically on statistical terms relating to the social composition of its student body, especially if it is dominated by underprivileged groups. The school system is managed by education policymakers much more in terms of what kind of public attends different schools, than in relation to their diverse programmes, inherent qualities or weaknesses of the pedagogical process: if a school’s performance is measured, it is in the context of the public it teaches. The labelling effect of the Zones d’Education Prioritaires ⁹ in France can be seen as an example of this.

Another striking instance is provided by Kantor and Lowe's (2013) account of the No Child Left Behind programme, which basically ended in

reinforcing class- and race-based differences in access to educational resources rather than increasing the resources available to those who lacked them.  … Why and how this happened became apparent when researchers began studying the consequences of the NCLB's requirement that test scores be disaggregated by subgroup (Kantor and Lowe, 2013: 37).

The authors point to one significant consequence of the fact that teaching and administrative staff who had to accommodate a high percentage of low-income students and students of colour,

faced the historically insurmountable barrier of annually raising the test scores of multiple subgroups,  … they sought to meet this goal by narrowing the curricula in their schools to focus on preparation for the requisite tests in reading and mathematics at the expense of other subjects (Kantor and Lowe, 2013: 37).

Again, the quest for a sociologically defined equality came to shape the reality of an unequal educational experience. Instead of focusing on the learning process and its impediments, the framework assumes a causal, or statistical at least, relation between someone’s performances and their social characteristics. Educational achievement was in fact perceived as mirroring social structure and, as such, started to be treated as one of that structure’s components, mirroring social inequalities within the educational system.

Such an instrumentalization of education, implying an EEO principle working through processes of selection and hierarchization, has one fundamental consequence: that of legitimizing existing social hierarchy and inequalities. Within the EEO framework, school is considered a fair (because it is equal) mechanism of selection: the results of school competition are morally sanctioned and never called into question, hierarchies and inequalities produced by an EEO-driven school are socially legitimate, the responsibility falls entirely on individuals, specific social groups or schools. What is troublesome in this logic is that it not only imposes the responsibility for building equality or inequalities – which are basically of a social nature – on education, but it also uses education to legitimatize its unequal results.

Mass democratic education has operated a transfer of inegalitarian mechanisms into the heart of the school and the educational experience of individuals.  … the nature of the educational system has changed: its way of treating inequalities evolved from exteriority to incorporation … . Inevitably, the more the school interiorizes social problems, the more it participates in their construction (Dubet, 2008: 88).

This mechanism has been described in numerous attempts, probably most famously by Bourdieu and Passeron (1970), showing how school naturalizes talent or aptitude that is obviously the product of inherited social position and that is decisive for future social status (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1964, 1970; Nordmann, 2008). It seems important, however, to point out how much this process relies on the concept of EEO that has been entrusted by political power, policymakers and public opinion, with materializing in education conflicting but fundamental values of Western liberal democracies, such as equality, the need for high quality human capital and a meritocratic vision of fairness. As Kantor and Lowe (2017: 577) describe in detail how, since the 1960s, EEO policies ‘divorced questions of educational equity from questions about the effects of racial discrimination and income inequality on school outcomes’, they closely relate this separation to the stable tendency of Western liberal democracies to ‘educationalize’ social problems.

The concept of educationalization is not a new one, and has been the subject of several waves of academic discussion, as retraced historically by Smeyers and Depaepe (2008). It implies a strong belief in the social utility of education and its functionality to other social spheres. The current general approach to educationalization is that, as the redistributive paradigm of the welfare state was being criticized and then dismissed in most Western countries, social policy turned to rely more and more on education as a means of addressing, or reducing, social problems of all kinds.

Modern Western societies have shown an increasing tendency to educationalize social problems … . We ask education to ameliorate race and class inequality … . We ask it to promote economic competitiveness … . American society asks its system of education to take responsibility for remediating all of these social problems (Labaree, 2008: 447).

It is by no means a coincidence that social inequalities appear first in Labaree’s (2008)enumeration, as inequalities related to class, gender, but also race or minority cultural background (especially in multicultural societies) ¹⁰ are one of the social problems more widely debated as being educationalized (Kantor and Lowe, 2013). As the brief recall of its origins and basic implications shows, the principle of EEO developed exactly at a point when education was achieving the ‘greatest institutional success of the modern era [growing] from a modest and marginal position in the eighteenth century to the center of modern societies in the twenty-first’ (Labaree, 2008: 447–448). The moment of the school’s becoming a mass, universal, unified institution (either formally or de facto) obviously coincided with the time when its role as a social problem solver developed. Among these fundamental social problems are social inequalities, which are early and easily taken on by the school as one of its basic tasks (the Coleman report might serve here as good illustration). As a notion, EEO is used and stands out as a translation of social inequalities into their educational incarnation. In many Western countries, when social equality was becoming increasingly undermined as a generally accepted social value, education had already been made accessible to all social groups, with the EEO principle enabling the public debate on social inequalities to be transformed into a discussion about educational inequalities, and the causes and solutions thereof allowed to be transferred into educational reality: ‘attention [was displaced from] underlying structures of injustice … with responsibility [being] typically vested in educational institutions’ (Bridges, 2008: 462). The process of educationalizing has instrumentalized education, using it, mainly through the EEO guiding principle, to make it bear the responsibility for social inequalities, the roots of which clearly lay outside the educational. And, as education has consistently failed to solve the problems society has nonetheless continued to burden it with, one tends to conclude that the education system has been ‘a convenient whipping boy that we can blame for its failure to achieve our highest aspirations’ (Labaree, 2008: 448). This could in fact be just a very simplified version of the attacks made by critical sociologists of education ever since the democratization of the school system and the beginning of EEO policies: by way of educationalizing social inequalities, they ‘stabilize and legitimize a social structure of inequality [and] government by providing an institution that can be assigned difficult social problems and that can be blamed when these problems are not solved’ (Labaree, 2008: 459).

But there is more to it. The educationalization of social problems (not least social inequalities) has from the very onset been driven by conflicted, irreconcilable values, and the expectation that education is the 'institution through which we can express our social goals without violating the principle of individual choice that lies at the center of the social structure, even if this comes at the cost of failing to achieve these goals’ (Labaree, 2008: 448).

Labaree (2008) goes on to demonstrate that it is precisely the almost perfect ability of the school system as an institution to simultaneously embody and hide this contradiction of social goals and individual interest that is at the heart of the educationalization process and the institutional success of the school.

It is not hard to see how the concept of EEO, built on a paradoxical association of equality and selection, of social mobility and individual meritocracy, perfectly fits as a symbol of these conflicting goals, as ‘an institutional expression of the contradictions in the liberal democratic mind’ (Labaree, 2008: 456–457), serving both ‘to promote equality and inequality’. If EEO has been such a long-lasting idea in education, it might be due to its usefulness as an agent of the educationalization of social inequalities. And this usefulness, one might conclude, stems not from its effective contribution to the tackling of social inequalities but, on the contrary, from its ability to durably express, or represent, the social concerns related to them by giving them an institutional, educational form.

Conclusion: EEO – an end without means

I have analysed here how the concept of EEO has swiftly become the basic incarnation of educational fairness in educational policy and theory, and participated in submitting educational practice to the logic of other social spheres, as a crucial agent of the growing educationalization of social problems. More substantially, the EEO principle has largely contributed to giving a new form to educational reality, through the paradoxical objectives it imposed, equal treatment on the one hand, evaluation, selection and hierarchization on the other: ‘schools adopt the form of these goals into their structure and process.  … Social mobility tends to persist in the formalism of student hierarchies arranged according to their accumulations of grades, credits, and degrees’ (Labaree, 2008: 455). As I have illustrated throughout this article, EEO has influenced how students apprehend and fulfil their social role at school, assimilating it to constitute an externally defined professional activity, and how teachers understand their position as key actors in the social selection process, internalizing and reproducing a fundamentally inegalitarian perception of school reality. Comparability of school performance between individuals as well as between sociologically defined groups, far from providing a method or a tool to achieve equality, became an objective in itself, an empty expression of the EEO concern that structured the nature of educational practices and experiences. ‘We hold schools responsible for expressing our values rather than for actually realizing them in practice,  … schools are institutional expressions of cultural values’, concludes Labaree (2008: 458). Paraphrasing this thought, we could say that school has not so much changed to achieve EEO, as it has in fact evolved to take the form of EEO’s policy agenda, to express a paradoxical ideal of equal treatment and hierarchically framed results. Labaree speaks of a socially useful formalism that allows us to reconcile the expression of important and contradictory social values, implying the school is really not supposed to achieve any of those social goals. More radically, one could say that

[a]n education system is not only a means used by a society or by a power to reach their goals. Society or power only ever choose ends that are already implicit to their ‘means’. School is their tool as much as it is first of all their allegory (Rancière, 2002: 16).

Is not EEO a very powerful concept for representing ‘equalized inequality’ (Rancière, 2002: 11)? What is crucial here is to understand that if, as I have tried to exemplify, school has changed in its essence to represent the EEO value, it has become its form, its vehicle, its illustration – but, paradoxically, not its means. To be a tool at the service of the EEO objective, education should put its own resources, its own nature at the service of this objective. But because the concept of EEO is pedagogically empty, as it is defined on another ontological layer, it does not imply any pedagogical reflection, nor pedagogical technique, nor pedagogical adaptation. On the contrary, it imposes its logic on the educational, giving a new institutional form to the EEO end, but leaving it without pedagogical means. And that might be, interestingly, a promising conclusion: regardless of the form of the school, there could be room for developing a truly pedagogical, educational practice of equality, such as the one suggested by Rancière (2004) and its pedagogical followers (Masschelein and Simons, 2013; Biesta, 2010, 2013, Vlieghe and Zamojski 2019).