What difference does difference make?
It depends on the difference.
That’s an answer I saw repeatedly to this vague question in your blog posts for this Theme, especially on inclusion. A fine one, too, and not just because the question is vague and needs to be made more precise in order to be answered well (though that, too).
What difference a difference makes depends because it is not—contrary to popular discourse—discrimination per se that we object to, but discrimination without reason. This is true even of discrimination on the basis of race, age, sex, or related identity markers. We say that discriminating on the basis of these markers is wrong because usually they are wrongly taken to indicate differences in merit, e.g. intellectual or athletic ability. But in fact they sometimes do indicate differences in merits of certain kinds. Consider, for example, a director casting an actor for the role of Martin Luther King, Jr. Patrick Stewart’s a fine actor and Maryl Streep a fine actress, but they’re wrong for the job. Discriminating against them here is not wrong because it is discrimination that is incidental to the pursuit of a morally legitimate aim: making a movie.
Similarly affirmative action admissions policies treat race and gender (and other similar identity markers) as qualifications for admission. They do so justly insofar as there is compelling moral reason for us as a society to enhance the diversity of students attending universities. According to many political philosophers, such as Michael Sandel, this is the case. In this lecture here (http://www.justiceharvard.org/2011/02/episode-09/) he argues that universities are not only centers of academic learning but also of civic learning, and that this civic mission cannot be carried out with a whitewashed, male student population.
So, whereas in ordinary discourse we talk about the wrong of discrimination, really this is just shorthand for ‘arbitrary discrimination,’ or discrimination on the basis of factors not related to merit. Recognizing this can make a difference to how we think about difference issues in education.
Many folks, for example, argued that because there are educationally relevant differences between individuals with disabilities, inclusion decisions must be made on a case by case basis. Unlike Ange, few were prepared to say that there are students with disabilities who cannot benefit in any way from inclusion. Some folks did suggest cases that made me wonder, though. Erica D, for instance, describes the case of a severely autistic student, one needing incredible levels of support and presenting significant behavioral challenges. It’s tempting to think that an environment other than the general education classroom would always be best for everyone relative to such students. But autism, like many other disabilities, can be more or less severe and it would be difficult to impossible to formulate a general standard for all.
Robert Fullinwider on the other hand critiques the multiculturalist’s conceptualization of institutional discrimination for neglecting the complexity just reviewed. In this definition, institutions discriminate (unjustly) when they reproduce inequality, but Fullinwider questions that conception because people in burdened social groups “will be adversely affected by almost any broad rule or requirement” (p. 497). Because blacks as a group disproportionately start out attending the worst schools in our educational system, for instance, “If states make teachers pass a competency exam, disproportionately more black teachers than whites will fail.” This claim, regrettably, is too well born out here at MSU where there is a significant and persistent disparity in graduation rates between white and black students. Similarly because blacks have smaller holdings in wealth, for instance, a banking system that gives better mortgage rates to those with bigger down payments will disproportionately burden blacks with higher mortgage rates.
Fullinwider’s point is not that institutional discrimination does not exist. He maintains rather that “Thinking of discrimination or racism merely as the upshot of malicious intent by individuals is too limiting.” Nor is he saying that justice requires us to do nothing about such inequalities. Rather what he is saying is that not every inequality is a form of discrimination or racism because not every inequality is generated by arbitrary policies (which therefore must be forbidden). Looking at what creates the inequalities in the examples above, one might argue, for instance, that a rule requiring teachers to pass a competency exam is not arbitrary (it upholds good teaching standards, protects and benefits children, enhances their learning, etc) and therefore any racial inequalities in pass/fail rates must be redressed through some means other than forbidding states to use competency exams. We must ensure, for example, that exams are not racially biased; we should ensure that states are taking every possible step to equalize educational opportunities and inputs for students of color; and so on. On the other hand, one might argue that it is reasonable to forbid banks to adjust mortgage rates in ways favorable to those making larger down payments insofar as they could easily find other equally adequate ways to control risk and maintain profit margins, e.g. raising interest rates on big investments, which are disproportionately made by whites.
This may seem far and away from education, but different opinions about what constitutes institutional discrimination underwrite important differences about important educational controversies: school choice, the charter school movement, standards and assessment, English language immersion. Multiculturalists tend to stand together on one side of these policies partly because they believe that they involve inequalities constituting institutional discrimination. So what side we stand on will partly depend on our view of this, which ultimately will depend on how we conceptualize institutional discrimination in the first place.
