Introduction: Contesting Equity in the Twenty-First Century

Equity has long been one of the main goals of public education in the United States, even though public schooling has often fallen short of the ideal in practice. Notions of what educational equity requires have shifted over time. Currently, as this issue's articles show, many ideas about educational equity are contending with each other in policy and politics. The political environment is not just complex but also challenging. At a time when resources for public institutions are increasingly scarce, the demographic disparities between the school-aged population and the older population may make the pursuit of equal opportunity especially contentious, particularly as seniors are more likely to vote than younger adults. Our goal for this issue is to participate in the ongoing scholarly debate on equal opportunity, with the ultimate goal of a deeper understanding of how equal-opportunity policies work and what kinds of politics produce and either sustain or undermine these policies.