Law Commons^™

Disparate Impact, School Closures, And Parental Choice, Nicole Stelle Garnett

Journal Articles

We live in an era of parental choice. Today, forty-two states and the District of Columbia authorize charter schools, and twenty states and the District of Columbia permit students to use public funds to attend a private school. During the 2012-2013 school year, nearly 2 million children attended charter schools, and nearly 250,000 children received publicly funded scholarship to attend a private school. The expanding menu of publicly funded educational options is one (but by no means the only) factor contributing to the current, intensely controversial, waves of urban public school closures. In school-closure debates, proponents of traditional public schools …

The Case Of Dixon V. Alabama: From Civil Rights To Students' Rights And Back Again, Philip Lee

Journal Articles

On February 25, 1960, African American students from Alabama State College participated in a sit-in at a segregated lunch grill at the Montgomery County Courthouse. The lunch grill refused to serve the students and ordered them to leave. The students left and went to the courthouse corridor, where they remained for an hour before going back to campus.

When Alabama State College learned of the students’ actions, it summarily expelled them without notice or hearing. In expelling the students, the college relied on Alabama State Board of Education regulations that allowed it to expel students for “conduct unbecoming a student …

Going Back To The Drawing Board: Re-Entrenching The Higher Education Act To Restore Its Historical Policy Of Access, Twinette L. Johnson

Journal Articles

This article explores both the historical entrenchment of the Higher Education Act (“HEA” or “the Act”) and ongoing attempts to retrench it. In it, I argue that Congress should return the HEA to its historical roots and enact reauthorizing legislation that will set the course for re-entrenching the Act and its historical policy. This re-entrenching will properly set the focus of the Act on providing widespread higher education access by creating and implementing new pathways (funding and otherwise) to that access.

In the article, I discuss the entrenchment of the HEA into American culture in an effort to understand the …

Where Schools Close In Chicago, Randall K. Johnson

Journal Articles

This article tests the assumption that schools close disproportionately in disadvantaged parts of the city in order to explain where schools close in Chicago. It does so by introducing a new CPS closings data set.This data set sheds some light on the phenomenon by identifying 130 schools that closed over time, twenty-seven ZIP codes that experienced CPS closings, and three demographic characteristics of each ZIP code. As a result, the dataset helps to explain how CPS closings relate to race, income, and location.