Law Commons^™

Is Brown Holding Us Back? Moving Forward, Sixty Years Later, Palma Joy Strand

palma joy strand

Brown v. Board of Education brought the democratic value of equality to U.S. democracy, which had previously centered primarily on popular control. Brown has not, however, resulted in actual educational equality—or universal educational quality. Developments since Brown have changed the educational landscape. While the social salience of race has evolved, economic inequality has risen dramatically. Legislative and other developments have institutionalized distrust of those who do the day-to-day work of education: public schools and the teachers within them. Demographic and economic shifts have made comprehensive preschool through post-secondary education a 21st-century imperative, while Common Core Standards represent a significant step …

How Quickly We Forget: The Short And Undistinguished Career Of Affirmative Action, Robert Parrish

Robert Parrish

Diversity initiatives in higher education, also known as affirmative action are nearing their nadir. For those who have been watching the jurisprudence and the progression of events closely this should come as little surprise. These initiatives have been under attack since their very inception and now sit teetering on the brink of being declared unconstitutional as the United States Supreme Court considers Fisher v. Texas. Beginning with Regents of California v. Bakke in 1978, the Supreme Court has gradually and consistently whittled away these higher education diversity programs, leaving them currently in a vulnerable and legally precarious position. The Court’s …

Do California’S Teacher Tenure Laws Violate California’S Constitutional Right To Education, Allen W. Hubsch

Allen W Hubsch

The accompanying note addresses an important and topical issue. In May 2012, Ted Olson, the former Solicitor General of the United States, and Theodore Boutrous, co-chair of the appellate practice at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, filed a complaint in Los Angeles Superior Court, entitled Vargara v. California, naming the State of California, the California Department of Education, the Los Angeles Unified School District and others as defendants.

The complaint alleges that California’s teacher tenure statutes are unconstitutional under the California constitution because such laws have the effect of preventing school districts from providing a quality education to school age …

Whose Choice Are We Talking About: The Exclusion Of Students With Disabilities From For-Profit Online Charter Schools, Matthew Bernstein

Matthew Bernstein

By examining the history of special education law against the emergence of the for-profit and online education movements, this paper explores the charter school movement from a consumer law perspective. It aims to explain why much of the current debate over test scores, “accountability,” and teacher evaluation obscures other systemic faults that implicate the very reasons we have a public education system in the first place. In the last fifteen years, information technologies have fostered the emergence of a new kind of school: the fully-online “cyber” or “virtual” charter. These schools, operated almost exclusively by for-profit, publicly-traded private companies, are …