ABSTRACT
Definitions of equity in education are problematic. Social justice and equity are often conceptualized as movements, rather than goals, or desirable end states or final victories (Bauman, 1997). There is the quantitative, distributional equality and the equality associated with social relations, participation and citizenship. There is also equity according to needs or to merit (Gewirtz, Ball and Bowe, 1995). Coleman’s study (1966) suggested that equality of opportunity could not be defined simply in terms of equality of access to resources, but should be measured in terms of equality of outcomes for different social and ethnic groups. Hatcher (1998b) believes that overall standards of achievement can rise while relative inequalities remain, or even widen. However, equality is also conceptualized in relation to the liberal democratic notion of the ‘common good’. For example, Griffiths (1998:302) argues that:
social justice is a dynamic state of affairs which is good for the common interest…The good depends on there being a right distribution of benefits and responsibilities.
There have always been problems associated with the measurement of equality and whether inequality is normative, that is, measured against the norms and standards of the dominant group (Atkinson, 1970; Le Grand, 1991). A common criticism of the ‘equality’ discourse is that it has a relativity problem. Franzway et al. (1989:96) asked ‘equal with what, or whom?’ Equality is now often dismissed as an over-optimistic Enlightenment project, based on a naive moral philosophy, promising liberation and freedom from oppressive power relations. Postmodernism suggests that any kind of progress against oppression is also accompanied by its own systems of power (Morley, 1997a).