EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES

Equal Opportunities

Equal Opportunities

Introduction

Equal opportunity is the goal of laws, regulations, and policies attempting to ensure that similarly situated people are treated equally in virtually all aspects of life, including jobs, education, housing, public accommodations, and so forth. The United States has a long and difficult history regarding equality based on race, gender, ethnicity, and other characteristics. Women, blacks, Native Americans, Asians, Jews, gays, the differently abled, and others were variously denied the right to vote, not given equal pay for equal work, not allowed to have certain jobs, denied access to equal education, and denied access to public facilities and generally did not enjoy the same rights to pursue the same quality of life as white males. This paper discusses equal opportunities in a concise and comprehensive way.

Equal Opportunities: A Discussion

Alexander, Anderson & Gallegos (2005) mention in an effort to live up to the statement in the Declaration of Independence that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the U.S. Congress has passed laws guaranteeing its citizens an equal opportunity to receive the basics determined to be part of a civilized and humane democratic society: housing, education, employment, voting, public accommodations, and receipt of federal funds. Equal opportunity encompasses a set of laws that are an attempt to rid the country of the effects of its history of denying equality based largely on immutable characteristics such as race, gender, or ethnicity.

Opportunity to learn refers to the degree to which education is freely available and accessible to students in the United States. Although it may seem self-evident that our public institutions should provide a free and adequate education for all children and should adjust their curriculum and teaching/learning methods to ensure that every child has the opportunity to learn (Bogotch, 2005), this concept has always been and will probably continue to be a controversial one. The term has evolved over the years based on changing political and economic circumstances in the country and on the extent to which the society in general views education as a fundamental right of all its citizens.

When state constitutions in the United States were created, most included the principle of free schools and citizen education funded through taxation. Public education in the United States was founded on the belief that in a democracy, the citizenry must have the opportunity to learn. However, this concept was not universally accepted without controversy, and there were many arguments about whether tax dollars should support education for all and about the extent to which the opportunity to learn should or should not be connected to promoting Christian religious beliefs. This issue persists today in the battle for separation of church and state in the school curriculum and continues to impact the degree to which citizens do or do not provide financial support for public ...