Redistributive justice in education – Part 2: Redistribution
https://hail.to/methodist-church-of-new-zealand-emessenger/article/xopRDJP
As noted in Part 1, when Fraser first published her original justice framework in the mid-1990s, she distinguished economic redistribution and cultural recognition as remedies for social injustice. In Part 2, I will focus on redistribution although as Fraser explains, real life is more complex and often involves both.
The just or fair remedy for maldistribution is economic redistribution. Fraser offers ‘class’ as an example of an ideal type social group or ‘collectivity’ that is rooted purely in the capitalist political economy. Expressed in crudely Marxian terms, in this economy the ‘owner’ class take (appropriate) a disproportionate share of the benefits (surplus value) of social cooperation (waged labour), at the expense of the ‘worker’ class. Consequently, Fraser says that it is the structure of the economy that produces socio-economic injustices such as worker exploitation, marginalisation, and deprivation. In other words, these injustices do not simply occur naturally and inevitably.
In educational settings, we see the consequences of class related economic maldistribution reflected, for example, in the vast inequality in discretionary economic resources available to families in rich and poor school communities, irrespective of the level of government funding transfers. Year in, year out, we read mass media reports of the ways in which wealthier families and school communities compensate for inadequate state schooling capital, staffing and operations grants, even after the very modest equity funding transfers we provide as a society to try and ‘level up’ poorer schools. Wealthier families and communities do this, for instance, through: (i) local fundraising, international student revenue, cafeteria and uniform commerce, annual parent donations of several hundred dollars per child or more, and semi-professionalised philanthropic grant seeking to maintain their relative economic advantage; together with (ii) the creation of exclusionary zoning rules and associated neighbourhood housing markets to protect their social advantage; and (iii) family funded specialist educational assessments, supplementary private tutoring and co-curricular enrichment activities to maintain their children’s academic educational advantage.
Fraser argues that the ‘class interests’ struggle that dominated the industrial age has in many senses been displaced in the post-industrial era by the struggle for cultural and symbolic recognition by other collectivities, partly because the prospects of significant economic redistribution have withered. We see this withering, for instance, where governments have over time moved away from a normative commitment to fully funding ‘free’ state education towards a new ‘social contract’ calculus that comprises a reducing public ‘subsidy’ alongside increasing ‘user pays’. As David Miller explains in Justice for Earthlings, there is good empirical evidence that in practice people in many societies have become more tolerant of inequality. And as Guy Standing also explains, in our globalised service and gig economy, a new ‘precariat’ class that endures the most tenuous of links to both the economy and society has replaced the previous industrial proletariat.
The concrete effects of precarity today are real and ubiquitous. They actively shape our views on justice and fairness. How many of us now just routinely walk past people begging on the street or read about children living in garages or cars or couch surfing, without giving it a second thought? Why can’t we seem to agree that everyone in the workforce deserves to earn at least the living wage? Is it acceptable in 2025 for families in our poorest communities to have to rely on exploitative payday lenders and mobile truck shops? Is it OK to have state schooling system settings that produce rich and poor schools by design? Given that all these demeaning economic inequalities do seem at the very least tolerable to many people in our society, what are the political chances of achieving a major redistribution of economic resources in education toward the poorest? Well, here in Aotearoa New Zealand, the sad fact that child poverty continues to seem intractable despite us having the Child Poverty Reduction Act 2018 and an annual Child Poverty Monitor report demonstrates just how difficult meaningful redistribution is under ‘business as usual’ political economics.
On Fraser’s account, the only remedy for class injustice and economic maldistribution on this scale is ambitious redistribution. The struggle for ambitious economic redistribution is first to significantly reduce disparities and then eliminate income poverty and material hardship entirely thereby eradicating the injustice of an impoverished social class as an issue from our society. (Imagine how much more apparent these structural disparities in our political economy would be without the Working For Families tax credits that 58 percent of families receive.)
As Fraser puts it, the last thing needed by the proletariat is recognition of its difference. And maybe the social stigma associated with living in economic precarity partly explains why several years ago a teacher from what was then a decile 1 school told me she and her colleagues hated going to school cluster professional learning sessions with teachers from local higher decile schools because she felt the latter had no conception of the deep poverty-related challenges the decile one school community faced.
Now, while Fraser distinguished redistribution and recognition analytically, she argued that they are closely interconnected and crosscutting in day to day economic and social practice. Consequently, some groups seek both redistribution and recognition. The examples Fraser gives are race and gender. Those who suffer racial or gender injustice are striving both to abolish inequalities in their economic positioning (thereby erasing their race and gender differences), and at the same time having their cultural distinctiveness positively recognised (thereby reinforcing their race and gender differences).
For example, we know that tamariki Māori and Pacific children are grossly overrepresented in the poorest state school communities. This is a consequence of structural economic maldistribution. Justice demands that economic disparities between school communities are at the very least significantly reduced over time (i.e. making Māori and Pacific economic specificity less visible). At the same time, though, according to Fraser, cultural recognition would demand that for Māori, te reo, mātaruranga and tikanga are normalised throughout the English medium education system, and that similar recognition is given to Pacific nations’ languages, knowledges, and customs and traditional values (i.e. making Māori and Pacific cultural specificity more visible).
Fraser calls this the ‘redistribution-recognition dilemma’. How is it possible to resolve this dilemma while working against maldistribution and misrecognition at the same time? In this regard, Fraser distinguishes affirmative and transformative remedies. Affirmative remedies address only the surface appearances of injustice without changing the underlying economic and social structures, while transformative remedies seek to change the underlying structural conditions that produce what we witness in practice as maldistribution or misrecognition.
Currently in education, equity funding is one example of an affirmative economic resources remedy (the Ka Ora Ka Ako Healthy School Lunches Programme is another). In comparable countries in 2018, the average proportion of equity funding for state schools was estimated to be six percent. Under the previous decile system in Aotearoa New Zealand (1995-2022), equity funding was just under three percent of operational funding. In 2018-2019, the Tomorrow’s Schools Independent Taskforce initially recommended a minimum increase to the international average of six percent to be applied across operations, staffing, and property. In its final report following a national consultation exercise, the Taskforce argued that an increase to ten percent across staffing and operational funding was needed (in concert with key structural changes to schooling system policy settings) to have any prospect of beginning to transform the economic inequalities in the system. The then government undertook to progress the Taskforce recommendation as a priority. In the 2022 Budget, it established the Equity Index and increased the proportion of equity funding distributed through the index to a little over four percent from 2023, but for the operations grant component only. In Fraser’s terms this qualifies as affirmation, not transformation.
In the next blog in the series, we take a closer look at cultural recognition as a key dimension of social justice.
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.