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In this article, I explore the utility of effectively maintained inequality theory in examining educational inequality in South Africa at the end of the apartheid era. As an obviously unequal country, South Africa provides an excellent opportunity to test the claim that even with large quantitative differences in achievement, qualitative differences will matter. Using data from the early 1990s, I find that there were extensive quantitative differences in secondary school transitions across respondents in different racial categories. The minority White population was consistently able to achieve both more and better education. At the same time, though, qualitative distinctions mattered. For the majority of the population, particularly Africans, the quality of education attained varied across parental background. These outcomes are important not only for examining the veracity of effectively maintained inequality, both in terms of racial and class differences but also because they illustrate how educational differences have served to perpetuate inequality over time in a society that no longer allows for the explicit denial of opportunity by race.

This research shows how schools in one diverse and disadvantaged inner-city local authority have raised children's attainment to levels that far surpass the national average at KS 2 and GCSE: gifted leadership, targeted interventions, effective teachers who mirror the school's intake, and governor, parent and community involvement = Outstanding

The main argument of the paper is that studying educational inequalities is based on certain ideas about social justice that are often not sufficiently explicated. Some inequalities are irrelevant or less relevant than others when we think about educational justice. The central thesis is that the operationalization of justice, i.e. selection of an inequality from a set of alternatives, is a normative decision. Different normative assumptions lead to different operationalization. The metric of inequalities and the choice of an equitable distributive rule provide a conceptual framework with which to describe how inequalities are assessed in empirical studies. As researchers are obliged to be transparent about the entire research process, they should also reveal their normative accounts more explicitly and thereby empower the reader to evaluate the theoretical foundations of a study. (DIPF/Orig.).