Disproportionality, education and social justice

Education plays a crucial role in both offering opportunities for individual social mobility and at the same time legitimating large-scale structural inequalities. In the United States, in particular, the ideology of schooling is that it offers opportunities to scale the class structure — that ‘investing’ in schooling on an individual level will have some sort of ultimate ‘payoff’ in terms of status and/or income. The notion that schooling offers opportunities for mobility tends to characterize the ideological underpinnings of education in democratic Western societies, although this ideology is articulated somewhat differently based on historically defined class structural constraints in various nations. The notion of a more open class structure generally means that people have to accept their position as at least partially deserved, as not simply ascribed or passed on.