This article examines the role of education in reducing social and economic inequality. Although the positive relationship between education and earnings suggests that a society can increase economic equality by equalizing educational attainment, highly unequal economic and social structures can actually diminish the educational system’s power to increase equality. Two key conclusions emerge from this discussion: (1) the only way to reduce social and economic inequality is to pursue policies that equalize the distribution of income and wealth in society and (2) improving the quality of education and educational access can have a significant effect on economic and social inequality.
The author examines several reforms designed to increase educational quality and assesses the potential impact of each on inequality. Less promising approaches include structural reforms like privatization and decentralization. Governments are likely to have more success if they direct interventions to low-income schools. Reforms to improve the quality of teachers—such as increasing the time per day that teachers actually teach, equalizing the distribution of teacher quality, and improving the overall capacity of the teaching force—are also likely to result in greater educational equality. While these reforms are significantly more expensive and politically difficult than others that have been attempted over the past twenty years, they represent the greatest chance for education to increase social and economic equality.