Abstract

Injustice is a central dimension of the American educational landscape. Students, parents, and educators experience injustice through interactions with discipline policies, standardized curriculum, or high stakes testing, among other things. Yet, as much as those concerned with American schools call attention to injustice, they disagree about what, exactly, is unjust. This dissertation addresses this challenge by developing a novel approach to theorizing about injustice. This project is comprised of five interrelated parts. First, I present a normative case study detailing the conflict surrounding efforts first to close and then re-open Dyett High School in Chicago that functions as a common thread in my analysis throughout this dissertation. Second, building from the work of Judith Shklar, I analyze the theoretical possibilities and limitations of, in Shklar’s terms, taking injustice seriously. Third, I describe a robust methodological approach, which I term an ecological approach, that addresses the limits of extant theorizing about injustice I identify in the previous section. This approach draws on Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecology of human development as an analogue, though it is crafted for normative theory. Fourth, using contemporary disputes over school closure as a guide, I show how attending to claims of injustice through an ecological approach reveals the challenges surrounding the notion of democratic sacrifice, as developed by Danielle Allen, in the context of education reform. Finally, I analyze a dispute between Tommie Shelby and Elizabeth Anderson regarding racial segregation to demonstrate the value of an ecological approach beyond the normative analysis of instances of injustice. I show how an ecological approach enables theorists to name and address limits in traditional approaches to nonideal theory. Taken together, this account ultimately clarifies the importance of attending to injustice in education policy and theory. It also provides new language to describe injustice to theorists, policymakers, students, and educators alike.