John Rawls' Difference Principle and Abbott Elementary

“If you give some kids chicks, others will get snakes” teacher Janine Teagues was told, by her colleague Gregory, towards the end of the season one, episode six of the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) TV series ‘Abbott Elementary’. Gregory was referring to the outcome of introducing a ‘Gifted Programme’ for a select number of children within Abbott, the school where this mockumentary is set. Those on the programme were able to access an enriched curriculum which included incubating chicken eggs and observing them hatch. This, unsurprisingly, had a demoralising effect on those children who were not part of the programme, leading to Janine trying to replicate aspects of it for these other children, without the same resources. This resulted in a farcical situation in which she sourced alternative eggs from another colleague, with possible criminal connections, that hatched something entirely different from what she had expected.

For Janine, the central character within the Abbott Elementary TV series, teaching is so much more than just a job. She takes great pride in the role she plays in nurturing young people, who do not seem to enjoy the same privileges as the children attending the local charter school down the road. Abbott Elementary is a public educational establishment, within the US School District of Philadelphia, which serves a largely deprived community, and a population of pupils who are predominantly from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. As a black woman herself, who faced multiple barriers to social mobility, Janine wanted to offer those children within Abbott, identified as having aspiration and talent, the same opportunity of a ‘Gifted Programme’ that she once had. It was important to her to provide those perceived younger versions of herself, with a clear route to exceptional academic achievement.

The writings of the Twentieth Century philosopher, John Rawls (1921-2002), can be applied to discussions over setting up elite pathways such as a ‘Gifted Programme’ within education systems. According to Rawls’ ‘Difference Principle’, people in a society should only be granted advantages over others, if the most vulnerable in society do not lose out as a result. Rather than support arguments for socialism, Rawls’ ‘Difference Principle’ can be used, for example, to argue that it could be permissible for individuals to accumulate great wealth, just as long as this did not compromise the protections that are offered by things such as poor relief, or funded healthcare for those who may be too old or ill to work.

In his seminal text ‘A Theory of Justice’ (1971), Rawls outlines a thought experiment known as the ‘Veil of Ignorance’ in which he asks us to imagine that we are not yet born. In this unborn state, Rawls prompts us to consider, that we do not yet know anything about what we are going to enter into. It could be a family living in riches, or it could be within a community of displaced people fleeing persecution. When wearing such a ‘Veil of Ignorance’, he asks, what sort of place would we want the world to be? What policies or worldviews would we want humanity to adopt? What principles or values would we start to believe in?

Rawls’ ‘Difference Principle’ and his ‘Veil of Ignorance’ thought experiment, are valuable intellectual tools for discussing Episode 6 of Abbott Elementary. Applying the ‘Difference Principle’ for example, prompts us to consider how any alleged benefits of the ‘Gifted Programme’ initiated by Janine, could be outweighed by the damage its existence would quite likely cause, to those children who have not been invited to join it. Imagining ourselves wearing the ‘Veil of Ignorance’ enables us to ask ourselves how we might feel if we were one of those children not invited to join the programme (or if our child was one of those children) and how this might change our views.

An obvious counterargument to the claim (that a ‘Gifted Programme’ should not exist and be of detriment to those children who are not in it) would be that it is possibly more unfair to hold any talented children from deprived backgrounds back, by not having the programme at all. At the beginning of Episode six of Abbott Elementary, Janine shares with a colleague the impact which once being part of a ‘Gifted Programme’ as a child, had on her. Denying the same opportunity to current children within Abbott Elementary, it could be argued, would be denying them the requisite intellectual stimulation, accelerated learning, and inspiration, to transcend the ongoing cycle of intergenerational poverty they were (veil now off) born into. Various studies suggest however, that grouping learners by ability can serve to reproduce social inequalities rather than disrupt them (Ball, 1981; Bosworth, 2023) with white students in the USA for example, more likely to be placed in top sets (Modica, 2015). According to Cole (2008), the notion that some learners are naturally more able than others, which any ‘Gifted Programme’ is logically based on, ‘adversely affects the working class as a whole’ (p.454). It is a notion that carries with it the suggestion, he argues, that some children (typically those from deprived and/or marginalised backgrounds) are biologically inferior to others. Ultimately, therefore, rather than drive social mobility, it could be argued that practices such as gifted programmes, serve to restrict it.

Towards the end of Episode six of Abbott Elementary, Janine’s colleague Gregory informs Janine that he was not selected to join the ‘Gifted Programme’ when he was a child at school. He goes on to cite Gardner’s notion of multiple intelligences, to argue that individual children are unique and that having different talents to those on the ‘Gifted Programme’ does by no means equate to being any less ‘gifted’.

Although Gardner’s theory has come under widespread criticism (Klein, 1997; de Bruyckere et al., 2015) the broad recognition that learner profiles are multidimensional, is an important challenge to the suggestion that it is possible to neatly group pupils in a school according to their ability. Within any alleged ‘low ability’ group, it could be argued, that there will be learners likely to excel in particular areas of the curriculum, with the capacity to achieve great things and make significant contributions to humanity. There will also inevitably be considerable diversity within such a group, making the practice of dispensing the same generic differentiated ‘easier’ tasks to all of those within it, year after year, problematic. This is not to argue that adjustment should not ever be made for pupils, to enable access to learning. However, a recognition that individual learning profiles are unique, compels us to be more responsive as teachers and to continually refine planning around our assessment of pupil learning. A recognition that learning profiles are unique, also compels us to reject what is known as ‘bell-curve thinking’ in education. This is the assumption that ability within a classroom is naturally and inherently distributed.

According to this assumption, the majority of pupils within a year group will be ‘average’ or ‘typical’, and be at around the middle of the ‘bell curve’, and much smaller groups of either ‘more able’ or ‘less able’ learners will be at each end of it (Fendler and Muzzafar, 2008). The reality however, is not as neat and tidy as this and the fictional stereotypes of an ‘average’ ‘low’ and ‘more able pupils’, do not represent the actual children and/or young people within our classrooms.

The seminal ‘Learning without Limits’ study (Hart et al., 2004), which analysed the practice of nine teachers who all rejected the idea that ability is fixed, offers ‘a more optimistic view of human educability’ by emphasising that the future is changeable. Effective teaching, it is argued, through references to the practices of the nine teachers, can be transformative. Children who start a school year with low prior attainment should not be assumed to have low ability, and the possibilities are there to expand their learning capacity. The best schools, therefore, are not those who merely manage a perceived ‘ability range’, based on ‘bell-curve thinking’. The best schools are those which refuse to see the failure and/or low attainment of a proportion of its pupils, as inevitable.

In his writings, John Rawls challenges the concept of ‘meritocracy’ which is the idea that people should get to reach high positions in society on the basis of ‘merit’ rather than due to the family they were born into. On one hand, this notion of meritocracy feels difficult to disagree with. By underpinning the European Enlightenment of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, and the French Revolution’s challenging of the idea that an absolute monarch had the mandate of birthright in 1789, ‘meritocracy’ is a notion which has shaped Western liberal democracies and the education systems they govern. John Rawls argues, however, that, with the idea of ‘meritocracy’, those who are considered to have ‘merit’ do not have a moral right, to have advantages over those who are not deemed to have it. He also challenges the idea that successful people in a society are self-made. Instead, he argues, ‘fortunate family and social circumstances’ (p. 130) lead to individual advancement.

Rethinking the assumption, that the principle of ‘meritocracy’ is an inherently positive one, enables us to also challenge associated assumptions about children and young people who are marginalised within, or excluded from, mainstream education. It is the idea of ‘meritocracy’ (we could argue, using the writings of Rawls) that maintains the view that those in bottom sets, alternative education provision, or those persistently absent from school, are those that do not have the personalities or natural aptitude for success. A rejection of the idea of ‘meritocracy’ therefore, supports us to appreciate the waste and damage which the exponential increases in school exclusion, in the English school system over the past ten years, represents. It also prompts us to see the 28% of secondary-aged pupils, who miss at least 10% of their education (UK Gov, 2023), not as rejects with innate behavioural issues or low academic ability, but as the untapped talent that the English school system has sadly failed.

Tracy Edwards leads the MA Inclusive Practice in Education at Leeds Beckett University. To find out more about this programme click here.

In the UK, Abbott Elementary has been aired on Channel 4. Season 3 of Abbott Elementary can be viewed on Disney+.

References

• BALL, S. J. (1981). Beachside Comprehensive: A case-study of secondary schooling. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).
• BOSWORTH, R. (2013) What sort of school sorts students? International Journal of Quantitative Research in Education, 1(1), 20–38
• BRUYCKERE, P., KIRSCHNER, P., HULSHOF, C. (2015). Urban Myths about Learning and Education. Tech Trends, 59 (6), pp. 1-209. (Available from: DOI:10.1007/s11528-015-0905-3)
• FENDLER, L. and MUZAFFAR, I., (2008). The history of the bell curve: sorting and the idea of normal. Educational Theory, 58 (1), pp. 63-82 [Available from: DOI 10.1111/j.1741- 5446.2007.0276.x].
• HART, S., DIXON, A., DRUMMOND, M.-J., and MCINTYRE, D., (2004). Learning without Limits. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
• KLEIN, P.D., (1997). Multiplying the Problems of Intelligence by Eight: A Critique of Gardner’s Theory. Canadian Journal of Education / Revue canadienne de l’éducation, 22 (4), pp. 377-394 [Available from: DOI 10.2307/1585790].
• MODICA, M. (2015). Race among friends: Exploring race at a suburban school (New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press)
• RAWLS, J., (1972). A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• UK GOV., (2023). Pupil Attendance in Schools. Available: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/pupil-attendance-in-schools (Accessed on 16/03/24).