The Failed Quest for Equal Educational Opportunity: Regulating Education the Way We Regulate Business

The past half century has seen wave after wave of efforts across the U.S. through which regulatory reformers have sought to achieve equal educational opportunity in our elementary and secondary school system. In this Article, I show how these efforts map onto changing approaches to economic regulation in general. More precisely, those seeking to advance the rights of "discrete and insular minorities" to obtain true equal educational opportunities have deployed these quite varied regulatory strategies: "adversarial legalism," "command and control regulation," "deregulation and the unleashing of market competition," "outcome-based regulation," and "managerial regulation." And, as with economic regulation in general, frustration with the seeming lack of success of one regulatory approach to education reform has repeatedly spawned a search for a new strategy. This Article first describes a wide range of shortcomings in the U.S. elementary and secondary educational system in the 1960s. At a time when in many respects our K-12 education scheme could be viewed as a great success, many groups of pupils were being badly treated. The next five sections present strategies that reformers have deployed in efforts to achieve genuine educational opportunity for all students. On the ground-in our schools, as in our business world-these changes have not been anywhere nearly as successful as advocates hoped. The .Article concludes with observations about how educational reform approaches over time have reflected competing visions of who should be in charge of assuring that all .American school children are well educated. In the face of a fractured view of "who should decide" it is difficult to hold anyone accountable for regulatory failure.