Educational Accommodation and Distributive Equity: The Principle of Proportionate Progress

What do we owe students who, on account of disability, have differential needs and capacities from others? What, for that matter, do we owe all students? A central claim of the present Article is that we cannot answer the former question without also considering the latter. Moreover, a satisfactory answer requires reaching beyond notions of “equality of opportunity,” to probe our deepest commitments regarding distributive equity, or substantive fairness in access to the good of educational development.

This Article offers a novel understanding of these deepest commitments, to advance a new principle of distributive justice, the principle of proportionate priority. It pursues the implications of this principle in depth for the specific setting of educational accommodation for disability—to provide a comprehensive answer to a question recently before the Supreme Court. Its ramifications extend, however, far more widely, not only for educational policy in general, but also for other areas of law and policy.