ABSTRACT
T he term "equality" has several referents in edu-cation. Researchers and educators consider equality with respect to school finances, expenditures, resources, access to the curriculum, distribution of students for instruction, academic and social mobility, classroom processes, and educational policies. Each of these issues is one dimension of the broader relationship between schooling and social inequality. Jencks (972) argues that the most important research by sociologists of education in the past 50 years has examined how schools maintain or diminish social inequality.
