@article {1281541,
	title = {The Ethics of Pandering in Boston Public Schools{\textquoteright} School Assignment Plan},
	journal = {Theory and Research in Education},
	volume = {13},
	number = {1},
	year = {2015},
	note = {For an open access version of this article, please click here.},
	pages = {38-55},
	abstract = {How can access to public elementary schools of variable quality be justly distributed within a school district? Two reasonable criteria are: (a) that children should have equal opportunity to attend high-quality schools, and (b) school assignment policies should foster an overall increase in the number of high-quality schools. This article analyzes Boston Public Schools{\textquoteright} new school assignment plan in light of these criteria. It shows that Boston Public Schools{\textquoteright} plan violates equal opportunity by giving middle-class families privileged access to existing high-quality schools. Boston Public Schools arguably panders to more-advantaged families, however, in order to pull them into the system and deploy their economic, political, and social capital to increase the total number of high-quality schools. Is this ethically defensible? To answer this question, we need to develop an ethical theory of pandering: of privileging the interests and preferences of already unjustly privileged actors because the consequences tend to benefit everyone. Such a theory will need to be ethically pluralistic and weighted along a contextually sensitive continuum, rather than rendered in all-or-nothing terms.},
	url = {http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1477878515569034},
	author = {Meira Levinson}
}
