Law Commons^™

Arkansas’ Plan For Accountability And Achievement: Analyzing The Esea Waiver Request, Misty Newcomb, Greg Michel

Policy Briefs

In October 2011, President Obama developed rules for states to individually develop requests for waivers to the accountability requirements of No Child Left Behind. This week, the Arkansas Department of Education (ADE) submitted the plan for the state of Arkansas’ request for waivers.

Middle Income Peers As Educational Resources And The Constitutional Right To Equal Access, Derek W. Black

Faculty Publications

Concentrated poverty in public schools continues to be a leading determinate of the educational opportunities that minority students receive. Since the effective end of mandatory desegregation, advocates have lacked legal tools to address it. As an alternative, some advocates and scholars have attempted to incorporate the concerns of concentrated poverty and racial segregation into educational litigation under state constitutions, but these efforts have been slow to take hold. Thus, all that has remained for students in poor and minority schools is the hope that school finance litigation could direct sufficient resources to mitigate their plight. This Article offers another solution. …

Can The Law Keep Pace With Technology? Regulating Student Use Of The Internet And Cyberspace, Charles J. Russo, Allan G. Osborne Jr.

Educational Leadership Faculty Publications

Who could have anticipated the effect of the Internet on education, or of social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace? Yet given the relatively new state of the law, as the legal system struggles to keep pace with technological advances, the courts are reaching markedly different outcomes on the extent to which education officials can punish students who violate school rules, especially if their behavior originated out of school or involved First Amendment free speech claims.

In light of the legal and technological challenges facing school business officials (SBOs), school boards, and other education leaders, the first part of …

Quality Counts 2012, Misty Newcomb, Gary W. Ritter

Policy Briefs

In an attempt to gauge the educational progress of the nation and each state, Education Week has published state report cards since 1997 in its annual Quality Counts series. The 16th annual report - Quality Counts 2012 - was released in January. Overall, Arkansas ranked 5th among the 50 states and was one of only nine states in the U.S. that received a B. This policy brief examines Arkansas’ rank in each category of the report as well as the quality of the report itself.

The Development Of Domestic Violence As A Field: Honoring Clare Dalton, Elizabeth Schneider, Cheryl Hanna

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Decriminalizing Campus Institutional Responses To Peer Sexual Violence, Nancy Chi Cantalupo

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

The Fallout From Our Blackboard Battlegrounds: A Call For Withdrawal And A New Way Forward, Mae C. Quinn

Journal Articles

In 1973, Time magazine described a national school system under siege.2 In its article "Blackboard Battlegrounds: A Question of Survival," Time reported that troubled urban youth were rejecting education, terrorizing teachers, and turning the country's schoolyards into battlefields. 3 Claiming that simple survival in the face of such insurgency had become the top priority of school administrators, the article quoted one educator as stating, "'You can't teach anything unless you have an atmosphere without violence."' Despite concerns about a culture of aggression and hostility within the education setting, the article went on to laud new national experiments in increased school-based …

Asperger’S Syndrome And Eligibility Under The Idea: Eliminating The Emerging "Failure First" Requirement To Prevent A Good Idea From Going Bad, Lisa Lukasik

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Illich, Education, And The Wire, Erin E. Buzuvis

Faculty Scholarship

This Article focuses on two texts—first, Illich’s 1971 "Deschooling Society," which calls for abolishing institutionalized education in favor of decentralized, personalized relationships that promote intentional learning; and second, The Wire’s fourth season, which is particularly focused on the exercise in futility that is the Baltimore public school system. Read together, these texts explore the problem of institutionalized education and the solution Illich proposes of intentional learning communities. But while both texts help us understand the shortfalls of institutionalized education, neither is particularly prescriptive when it comes to undoing the current state of affairs and weaning our society off of institutions, …

"Hope And Despondence": Emerging Adulthood And Higher Education's Relationship With Its Nonviolent Mentally Ill Students, Susan P. Stuart

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Comparing Single-Sex And Reformed Coeducation: A Constitutional Analysis, Nancy Chi Cantalupo

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

On The Need For Public Boarding Schools, Kevin Woodson

Law Faculty Publications

Nowhere is the inadequacy of American public education more striking than in high-poverty, urban schools populated by disadvantaged minority students. Despite decades of legal, policy, and scholarly efforts aimed at addressing the challenges facing these schools, the academic prospects of poor students are currently as grim as they have been in recent memory. Reformers seeking to address this problem have largely focused on transforming public education from within by focusing on school conditions or teacher performance.. These efforts have largely failed to bring about real progress: despite decades of litigation and reform, our nation’s most disadvantaged children continue to lack …

A New Era For Desegregation, Danielle R. Holley-Walker

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Middle-Income Peers As Educational Resources And The Constitutional Right To Equal Access, Derek W. Black

Faculty Publications

Concentrated poverty in public schools continues to be a leading determinate of the educational opportunities that minority students receive. Since the effective end of mandatory desegregation, advocates have lacked legal tools to address it. As an alternative, some advocates and scholars have attempted to incorporate the concerns of concentrated poverty and racial segregation into educational litigation under state constitutions, but these efforts have been slow to take hold. Thus, all that has remained for students in poor and minority schools is the hope that school finance litigation could direct sufficient resources to mitigate their plight. This Article offers another solution. …

Canines On Campus: Companion Animals At Postsecondary Educational Institutions, Rebecca J. Huss

Law Faculty Publications

This Article focuses on the issues that arise when students wish to attend a postsecondary institution accompanied by an animal. The Article begins by analyzing the federal law applicable to students bringing service and assistance animals to campus. The use of animal-assisted activities on campus is also explored. The Article continues with an examination of policies allowing students to have companion animals in campus housing. Concerns raised by administrators about allowing animals on campus are then considered. Finally, the Article sets forth the measures an educational institution should implement to ensure compliance with the law and proposes actions that can …

A New Sheriff In Town: Armistice In The War On Drugs And Students' Civil Rights, Susan P. Stuart

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Educating English Learners: Reconciling Bilingualism And Accountability, Rosemary C. Salomone

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In late July 2011, an estimated 5,000 individuals converged on Washington, D.C., to protest the direction of state and federal education policy. Fueled by social media, the Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action was a grassroots effort organized largely by teachers, with principals, school board members, and activists lending support. Featured speakers included prominent education figures, like historian Diane Ravitch and Jonathan Kozol, a former teacher known for his writings on school inequalities. Specific points of contention focused on high stakes testing and test-based accountability, key elements in the Obama Administration’s Blueprint for Reform and Race …

Lessons Learned About Classroom Teaching From Authoring Computer-Assisted Instruction Lessons, Barbara Glesner Fines

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Raising The Bar: Law Schools And Legal Institutions Leading To Educate Undocumented Students, Karla M. Mckanders, Raquel Aldana, Beth Lyon

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This paper explores the adoption of best practices for the admission and graduation of undocumented students as lawyers and promoting their integration into the legal profession. Law schools are already both knowingly and unknowingly admitting and graduating undocumented students. It is our contention in this paper, after careful analysis, that no law precludes law schools from admitting undocumented students, offering them in-state tuition or other types of private and even public financial aid in states that permit it, or allowing them to participate fully in the law schools’ educational opportunities. We acknowledge that there are tensions around the decision to …

Undo Undue Hardship: An Objective Approach To Discharging Federal Students Loans In Bankruptcy, Aaron N. Taylor

All Faculty Scholarship

A debtor seeking to discharge student loans in bankruptcy must prove that paying the debt would cause an undue hardship upon him and his dependents. Undue hardship, however, is an undefined concept, flummoxing debtors, creditors and judges alike. The result of this ambiguity is rampant inconsistency in the manners in which similarly-situated debtors (and creditors) are treated by the courts. This article argues that the undue hardship standard should be replaced by a framework that uses debt service thresholds to determine the propriety of federal student loan bankruptcy discharges. Eligibility for discharge would depend on outstanding loan amounts, debtor income …

Deconstructing A Decade Of Charter School Funding Litigation: An Argument For Reform, Lisa Lukasik

Scholarly Works

For over a decade, North Carolina's charter schools and traditional public schools have been embroiled in litigation over access to local public funding. This litigation shows no sign of abatement. In fact, disputes between charter schools and traditional public schools over local funds are likely to continue until the North Carolina legislature revisits the state's charter school funding statute and modifies the means by which local funds are transferred to charter schools.

This Article deconstructs the state's charter school funding statute, the decade-long series of appellate decisions interpreting it, and the administrative and legislative responses to each appellate decision. It …

Reutter’S The Law Of Public Education, Charles J. Russo

Educational Leadership Faculty Publications

This textbook-casebook incorporates recent developments in education law into its conceptual framework by offering updated analysis of major topics in education law. With new material in all of its sixteen chapters, the book includes significant updates on church-state relations, employee rights, and student rights.

Legislating Inclusion, Lia Epperson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Open Textbooks And Provincial Government Policy: A Look At The Issues, Lisa Di Valentino

FIMS Publications

In 2012, the British Columbia government announced a plan to fund a program that will result in the creation of open access textbooks for 40 lower-year university courses — the first such program in any of the provinces. This paper will argue that Ontario should follow British Columbia’s lead and invest in the development of a project to create and promote the use of open textbooks. The introduction will discuss the concept of open textbooks and the various initiatives and legislation that have been introduced in the United States, and British Columbia’s plan will be described in more detail. The …

Changing The Conversation In Education Law: Political Geography And Virtual Schooling Book Review Essay, Aaron J. Saiger

Faculty Scholarship

In Five Miles Away, A World Apart, James E. Ryan concludes that the educational reforms of the hour, school accountability and school choice, will exacerbate rather than undermine the systematic educational advantages enjoyed by wealthier Americans. Paul Peterson, in his Saving Schools, argues that increasingly centralizing American schools have become sufficiently centralized that, as a labor-intensive industry, few productivity gains are available from governance reform, even as demand escalates for the customization of education to individual needs. Both volumes therefore pin their hopes for change upon political geography-the relationship between people and educational institutions in space. Ryan argues that changing …

The Lawmaking Family, Noa Ben-Asher

Faculty Publications

Increasingly there are conflicts over families trying to “opt out” of various legal structures, especially public school education. Examples of opting-out conflicts include a father seeking to exempt his son from health education classes; a mother seeking to exempt her daughter from mandatory education about the perils of female sexuality; and a vegetarian student wishing to opt out of in-class frog dissection. The Article shows that, perhaps paradoxically, the right to direct the upbringing of children was more robust before it was constitutionalized by the Supreme Court in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925). In …

Bringing The Market To Students: School Choice And Vocational Education In The Twenty-First Century, Lia Epperson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Religious Consumers And Institutional Challenges To American Public Schools, Aaron J. Saiger

Faculty Scholarship

The paradigm of American K–12 education is shifting as the institution of local educational polities, each responsible for own its 'common schools,' faces competition from programs of school choice. Although charter schools and related reforms are generally studied in terms of quality and equity, the rise of consumer sovereignty as an alternative to political sovereignty as an organizing principle for educational governance has much wider ramifications. Paradigms of choice have already begun dramatically to alter religious education and its relationship to public schooling. Moreover, because these paradigms rely upon consumer preferences and the aggregation of those preferences by markets, the …

The Education Duty, Scott R. Bauries

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

A constitution is an instrument of entrustment. By adopting a democratic constitution, a polity places in the hands of its elected representatives its trust that those representatives will act to pursue the ends of the polity, rather than their own ends, and that they will do so with an eye toward the effects of adopted policies. In effect, the polity entrusts lawmaking power to its legislature with the expectation that such power will be exercised with loyalty to the public and with due care for its interests. Simply put, legislatures are fiduciaries.

In this Article, I examine the nature of …

American School Finance Litigation And The Right To Education In South Africa, Scott R. Bauries

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This paper addresses the South African Constitution's invitation to the Constitutional Court to 'consider foreign law' when interpreting its provisions. Focusing on the education provisions found in section 29 of the Constitution, I make two claims. Firstly, contrary to the developing consensus, American state supreme court jurisprudence in school funding cases makes a poor resource to aid the interpretation of the basic South African right to education, regardless of the quantum of education that the Constitutional Court decides is encompassed by the word 'basic'. Secondly, however, certain aspects of these same American decisions, particularly the space they provide for a …