Abstract

There are two leading accounts of the principles of educational adequacy by Elizabeth Anderson and Debra Satz. Anderson’s and Satz’s accounts have been criticized for being insufficiently value-pluralist, and both lack a metric of justice. In this paper, I revise the principle of educational adequacy in order to address these problems. I argue that although the principle of educational adequacy cannot be the only principle in a complete theory of educational justice, it can tell us what basic justice in education requires in measurable terms. I highlight two core commitments that Anderson and Satz share: a commitment to 1) democratic egalitarianism and 2) sufficientarian equal citizenship. Then, I reformulate these commitments in a way that accounts for the role that other egalitarian values have to play in a complete theory of justice in education. Finally, I claim that progress towards educational adequacy can be measured using the capabilities approach.