Procedures, Justice, and Choice In Basic Education Policy

This article is about the way in which justice and procedures are related in the development of policies meeting new claims to choice in basic education. Building upon established approaches to procedural justice, I propose to study the interaction between questions of justice and procedures by way of the “gate model” as developed by Peters (1993) and Habermas (1994). This model is then applied in an analysis of education policymaking in Great Britain and Germany to demonstrate how the procedures through which political decision making is channelled reflect persisting problems of substantive justice.