Redistributive justice in education – Part 1: Maldistribution
https://hail.to/methodist-church-of-new-zealand-emessenger/article/xopRDJP
This is the third in a series about social justice in education.
The first blog discussed the enduring local myth of an educational ‘fair go’ in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the second the global issue of justice as fairness in educational practice.(Part 1 and Part 2). In this blog, we consider distributive injustice and its progressive counterpart, redistributive justice as they apply to the fair funding of state education. This blog is in two parts: (i) the injustice of economic ‘maldistribution’; and (ii) the justice of economic ‘redistribution’.
The blog draws on the framework and terminology of redistributive justice in the work of the American critical social theorist and political philosopher Nancy Fraser. Her original framework of social justice incorporated the twin dimensions of (economic) redistribution and (cultural) recognition. She subsequently added a third, overarching dimension: parity of (political) participation. Because the next two blogs will deal with recognition and participation respectively, I will concentrate here on Fraser’s analysis of redistributive justice.
As noted in an earlier blog, the concept of justice we are discussing in this series is commonly defined as ‘the appropriate distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation’. In the context of the economy, the remedy for distributive injustice (maldistribution) is therefore to distribute these economic benefits and burdens more appropriately (redistribution). In education, such redistribution might include: (i) supplementary targeted or weighted ‘equity funding’ to mitigate the barriers to education faced by economically disadvantaged groups of students; (ii) publicly funded material resources such as technology, equipment and consumables to enable students living in poverty and hardship to ‘access’ the curriculum; and (iii) co-locating specialist health, education, social and budgeting services at the most socio-economically disadvantaged school community sites for students and their families whose holistic support needs are multiple, complex and persistent.
By way of comparison, in cultural recognition terms it might mean the intentional valuing of minoritised knowledges and ways of being (e.g. mātauranga Māori, neurodiversity, gender diversity) within the official curriculum (and pedagogy and assessment). And in terms of political participation, it might include greater representation, voice and decision rights for groups that historically have not been permitted or enabled to have much of a say in what classrooms, institutions and the state education system choose to conceptualise, prioritise and practise as ‘education’ (e.g. student councils, mana whenua governance representation as of right, statutory parent advocacy bodies).
On the face of it, these three forms of realignment in favour of the educationally disadvantaged all seem appropriately fair and just but, as we shall see, even if they were politically achievable today, Fraser seriously questions whether such efforts are sufficient to ‘transform’ the underlying structures of the economy and society that generate and perpetuate educational injustices in the first place. Nancy Fraser has also described justice as the ‘master’ or ‘meta’ virtue: only when the basic structure of society is itself just, she says, is it possible to fully develop any of the other virtues we need for social cooperation, such as compassion, empathy, and courage.
Education is one of the principal social institutions through which we promote justice as fair opportunity to acquire the capabilities (or the knowledge, skills, and dispositions) we need to be able to make genuine choices about the life goals we wish to pursue. In pure economic terms, Aotearoa New Zealand is a very unequal society. As Max Rashbrooke reported in Too Much Money in 2021, for example, the wealthiest one percent of our population own over a quarter of the country’s assets, while the poorest half own just two percent. Amid such extremes of wealth inequality, educators (one of the so-called ‘caring’ professions) surely need the virtues of compassion, empathy and courage if they are to persist in the career-long moral struggle for greater justice on behalf of those learners who are not treated well enough, or who are marginalised by prevailing compulsory schooling policy settings. Yet, if the basic structure of capitalist society is inherently unjust, as ours is (i.e. it produces winners and losers by design), to what extent can compassion, an actively engaged concern for the misfortune of others, flourish as part of our shared social imaginary? Do empathetic and courageous educators in our state system simply must resign themselves to working ‘against the grain’ of local community and societal norms in pursuit of redistributive justice?
The basic structure of society is formed and maintained through the capitalist political economy. At the beginning of 2025, in his State of the Nation speech, Prime Minister Luxon asserted that ‘turbocharging economic growth is the key to brighter days ahead for all Kiwis’. Yet, based on how the economy has functioned over the last several decades, we already know full well which groups in our society are most likely to experience those promised brighter days, and which groups not.
in our increasingly consumption-driven lifestyles, our freedom to act in line with our life aspirations is highly predictable at birth. Any freedom we enjoy as children and young people is shaped significantly by our parents’ relative economic wealth (irrespective whether it is earned or inherited, and passively or actively accumulated), and how this is deployed for our benefit. Economic wealth is a powerful gateway to ‘brighter days ahead’, in education and in life. According to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in great part this is because economic wealth is only one of four interrelated and interacting forms of valuable ‘capital’ that we can ‘accumulate’ through life. The others are social, cultural, and symbolic capitals. These forms of capital are interrelated because economic wealth can be ‘converted’ by individuals and households into desirable social capital (e.g. personal, family, sociocultural and employment-related networks), cultural capital (e.g. facility with elite, traditional or popular cultural forms), and into symbolic capital (e.g. mana, prestige, reputation, credentials, possessions). Indeed, if we look carefully at the ways our state education institutions function in practice, we can readily discern which forms of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital are required, embodied and celebrated in them, and which not.
One key point here is that whatever we call it, in our society money, wealth or economic capital really matters in terms of expanding educational opportunities and life chances. Another is that our social standing and political influence are enhanced or diminished by the relative economic resources we hold. Given wealth’s disproportionate influence on our chances of leading a life we choose, then, Fraser’s conception of social justice necessarily homes in on the appropriate structural distribution of resources in both the waged and unwaged economies, throughout our social institutions (including the family) and within and across economically diverse social groups. In large part this is because of the extraordinary ‘multiplier’ effects of economic resources on one’s freedom and opportunity to successfully navigate the inherently unjust structures of our economy and society. How can we interrupt this seemingly inexorable trajectory of economic maldistribution?
Bio: John O’Neill researches in the area of critical education policy scholarship. For many years he has been an education spokesperson for Child Poverty Action Group and the Quality Public Education Coalition.