Education is a positive right, to which children should have equal opportunity and access. Therefore, all public schools should spend roughly the same amount per student. The outcomes of these expenditures, however, depend on a variety of factors. Nevertheless, equal educational opportunity is critical to the maintenance of a democratic society.
Education benefits society because it is viewed as a means to enable citizens to achieve happiness and morality. Thomas Jefferson believed that instruction would enable the citizen to safeguard his or her own liberties: "Guided by a knowledge of history and the reading of newspapers, the individual would exercise reason and moral common sense to make political decisions" (Spring, 1990,p. 45). In Jefferson's viewpoint, equal educational opportunity was necessary to promote natural order in a free society.
Even today, one of the major purposes of education is to prepare students to meet their societal duties, both civic and moral. A consensus of citizens agree that equal educational opportunity is in the best interest of everyone. Various means exist to accomplish equal opportunity, including the integration of schools, requiring the same curriculum for all students, instruction of multicultural curriculum in schools, spending more time on underachieving students, requiring parental participation in schools, and requiring remedial classes. The problem that American schools face is the lack of consensus on what method is most efficient in providing equal educational opportunity.
John Stuart Mill theorized that the state is obligated to maximize the happiness of its citizens, and that education was central to the development of the state. In Mill's view, education had two goals: to expand students's horizons (in order to identify the highest means of happiness) and to ensure the greatest aggregate happiness for the greatest number of people. Superior levels of happiness incl...