The Role of Ethics and Social Justice in Policy Development
When it comes to the development of policies in education, the latter is inextricably linked to the core concepts of social justice. The problem, though, lies in the fact that this particular process heavily relies on politics and that triggers unnecessary controversy within the modern community. The real-life problem that contributes to those controversies is the multicultural genuineness of the community that was exposed to the federal and state standard reforms that transpired throughout the last ten years (Fowler, 2013).
Not to mention that one of the most critical problems is immigration and numerous research articles hypothetically discussed the ethical basis of this event and its subsequent influence. In this case, we may address the issue of ethics in education by applying some of the ideas regarding political liberalism in order to mitigate the disagreements within the community and reach a verdict that suits everybody. On a bigger scale, one of the problems that also have to be dealt with is the concept of accountability.
This means that the disagreements that were triggered by immigration or any other ethical issue occasionally tend to breach the principles of equality and liberty of the minorities. Also, we may consider the racial education gap when discussing ethical issues inherent in education (Dobbie & Fryer, 2009). This particular question may lead us to the decisions concerning local accountability and social justice in education. Ultimately, the ethical and social justice issues force the schools to come up with a revised curriculum (Warnick, Bitters, Falk, & Kim, 2016). This is done in order to take into account the diverse foundations of the community and make curriculum way more flexible than it was before. There is nothing more important than preserving the local cultural interests of the children who are exposed to social injustice.
The Types of Equity in Funding of Education in the United States
There are two types of equity that are recurrently applied by the government when dealing with education. The first one is called vertical equity, and another one is tax equity (there are more types of equity, but these two are particularly pivotal for the US education system) (Hess & McShane, 2014).
To start with, vertical equity is utilized to collect taxes in a way that presupposes that the more one earns, the more taxes they have to pay. The underlying ethical principle behind this type of equity is the belief that those who are basically not able to pay a sufficient amount of taxes should not be forced to do so while the individuals with higher incomes should contribute more to the tax fund (Biesta, 2016). Tax equity is commonly perceived as a variation of local property taxation. This means that everyone has to pay an equal amount of taxes regardless of any external or internal factors (Henry, Lingard, & Rizvi, 2013).
Despite the governmental efforts, this type of equity does not reflect the equivalent ability of citizens to pay for the education and can be characterized as disproportional. Based on the information presented above, it may be assumed that the citizens have to be flexible when it comes to taxation because the latter is relatively ineffective in the area of education. Another issue that is characteristic of the US education equity is the mechanism of financing educational facilities (Fowler, 2013).
It is different in every state and that majorly contributes to the intricacy of the system as a whole. The federal government subsidizes not more than 10%, and the residue is fragmented equitably between local property taxes and sales/ state income taxes. Evidently, this contributes to the fluctuation of the funds available to the students state-wide and undermines the principle of equality of educational opportunity.
References
Biesta, G. (2016). Good education in an age of measurement: Ethics, politics, democracy. London, UK: Routledge.
Dobbie, W., & Fryer, R. (2009). Are high quality schools enough to close the achievement gap? Evidence from a social experiment in Harlem. Web.
Fowler, F. C. (2013). Policy studies for educational leaders: An introduction (4th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.
Henry, M., Lingard, B., & Rizvi, F. (2013). Educational policy and the politics of change. London, UK: Routledge.
Hess, F. M., & McShane, M. Q. (2013). Common core meets education reform: What it all means for politics, policy, and the future of schooling. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Warnick, B. R., Bitters, T. A., Falk, T. M., & Kim, S. H. (2016). Social media use and teacher ethics. Educational Policy, 30(5), 771-795. Web.