About JiS

Justice in Schools (JiS) is designed to affirm that ethics matter, and then to help educators and policymakers reason through the ethical dilemmas they face. JiS doesn’t necessarily provide answers. Rather, Justice in Schools helps educators and policy makers ask the right questions, offers shared language to talk about the ethical choices they face, and provides frameworks and heuristics through which they can understand others’ points of view.

Moral, political, and educational theory serve as important sources of shared language and ethical frameworks. However, moral and political theory have also generally been developed to specify what the world would ideally be like, if people behaved in truly moral ways toward one another, and if institutions were designed to be truly just. These theoretical insights are important. But they fail to address many of the most important questions that educators and policy makers wrestle with because they don’t explain how justice can be implemented under unjust conditions or in unjust contexts.

Justice in Schools helps moral, political, and educational theorists ask the right questions about justice in non-ideal contexts, develops new language to talk about educational ethics, and provides empirically-informed frameworks for developing a philosophically rigorous and pragmatically useful theory of educational justice.

Justice in Schools pursues these aims by using normative case studies--complex, empirically-researched ethical practice and policy dilemmas--of justice in schools. To learn more about the normative case study method, to read and comment on normative case studies we are currently developing, or to offer your own dilemma of justice, please explore our website further!