The political morality of school composition : the case of religious selection

Our aim in this paper is to provide a clear and coherent analytical framework for identifying and assessing the heterogeneous normative concerns raised by religious schools, and to illustrate its merits by applying it to the regulation of admissions to such schools. It is a virtue of the proposed framework that it applies to questions about religious schooling quite generally. We concentrate on admissions both because they are currently a focus of policy debate and because there is very little detailed normative discussion of schools’ selecting their students on the basis of religious criteria. The issue of selection by academic ability commands a good deal of attention, while familiar debates about elite private schools primarily concern the propriety of selection by ability to pay. But selection by religion, which raises concerns that include but extend beyond the distributive issues central to those other debates, tends to pass under the radar. Discussion of religious schooling from a normative theoretical perspective has focused far more on curriculum than selection (Thiessen 1993; Hand 2003, 2004 and 2012; Siegel 2004; Groothuis 2004; Gardner 2014). We seek to explore what is stake in policy decisions concerning not what such schools may teach but whom they may teach