John E. Coons

By Nature Equal: The Anatomy of a Western Insight

Acknowledgment and ApologyForewordIntroduction: In Search of a Descriptive Human Equality3Pt. IHuman Equality: What does it Mean?171What Has Been Said?222The Host Property393Making the Host Property Uniform66Pt. IICould the Philosophers Believe in Human Equality?914Could the Enlightenment Believe? Individualism, Kant, and Equality1015Nature, Natural Law, and Equality123Pt. IIICould the Christians Believe in Human Equality?1456The Framework for a Christian Obtensionalism1487Repaving the Road to Hell: The Pelagian Issues1648The Repaving Project, Part II: An Equal-Opportunity Creator191Pt. IVGood Persons and the Common Good2159Harmonies of the Moral Spheres21810Harvests of Equality232Notes261Index349

Schooling Policy Begins with a Decision about Authority.

Every child gets assigned to a public or private school chosen by some adult. The question is which adult should hold that authority by law and exercise it in practice. Our Federal Constitution recognizes the authority of custodial parents; but our systems of tax-based schools effectively dethrone working-class parents and the poor; most of whose children get assigned by government strangers. America must decide whether it trusts only those parents who can afford to pay. A host of practical considerations favor the effective empowerment of all custodial parents for the good of the child, the parent, the family and society.

School Integration Through Carrots, Not Sticks.

Stephen D. Sugarman Professor of Law Boalt Hall University of California Berkeley, California T he time is ripe for promoting the racial integration of schools through financial incentives instead of by exclusive reliance upon coercion. Although substantial progress has been made in the more than twenty years since Brown v. Board, we fear that the desegregation effort is stagnating, especially in large urban centers. Moreover, the problem of racial isolation has become one which courts and coercion are unlikely to resolve. Voluntary arrangements inevitably will assume greater importance, and we think that states should try financial incentives to stimulate them. To that end, we have drafted a Model Integration Incentive Act, recently published in Parents, Teachers and Children: Prospects for Choice in American Education (San Francisco, Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1977). The Model Act was circulated among legislators, educators and political analysts and introduced in the 1977 session of the California Legislature as SB 1064. In October, 1977, the California Senate Education Committee held hearings on SB 1064. As a result of these first reactions we have now revised the Model Act. In this essay we provide (1) a discussion of some of the more difficult policy issues that must be resolved in drafting an integration incentive plan, (2) a revised version of the Act itself, and (3) some cost estimates based on California school district data.