Law Commons^™

Education Is Speech: Parental Free Speech In Education, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Education is speech. This simple point is profoundly important. Yet it rarely gets attention in the First Amendment and education scholarship.

Among the implications are those for public schools. All the states require parents to educate their minor children and at the same time offer parents educational support in the form of state schooling. States thereby press parents to take government educational speech in place of their own. Under both the federal and state speech guarantees, states cannot pressure parents, either directly or through conditions, to give up their own educational speech, let alone substitute state educational speech. This abridges …

The Legal Origins Of Catholic Conscientious Objection, Jeremy K. Kessler

Faculty Scholarship

This Article traces the origins of Catholic conscientious objection as a theory and practice of American constitutionalism. It argues that Catholic conscientious objection emerged during the 1960s from a confluence of left-wing and right-wing Catholic efforts to participate in American democratic culture more fully. The refusal of the American government to allow legitimate Catholic conscientious objection to the Vietnam War became a cause célèbre for clerical and lay leaders and provided a blueprint for Catholic legal critiques of other forms of federal regulation in the late 1960s and early 1970s — most especially regulations concerning the provision of contraception and …

Forward Together: Building A Field That Works For Families, Center For Public Research And Leadership

Center for Public Research and Leadership

The coronavirus pandemic revealed the necessity, the complexity, and the tremendous value of building strong ties between schools and families. To ensure continuity of learning, schools were forced to rely heavily on families and caregivers to support learning in the home.

But the conversation around family engagement is not new. The value of family involvement in education has been clear for decades, with strong evidence establishing this engagement as a critical driver of student academic and socioemotional outcomes.

Building on this robust research base, the Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY) in 2016 began to explore a strategy of building …

Charting Your Own Path: Anurima Bhargava's Lawyer-Leadership In Action, Davis Polk Leadership Initiative

Davis Polk Leadership Initiative

Anurima Bhargava (CLS ’02) is an accomplished civil rights lawyer who has served as Chief ofthe Educational Opportunities Section of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department ofJustice and Director of the Education Practice at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She is theFounder and Director of Anthem of Us, a strategic advisory and consulting firm that promotesdignity and justice in workplaces, schools, and communities, the Chair of the U.S. Commissionon International Religious Freedom, and produces and advises on documentary films.Throughout her career, Anurima has served on numerous task forces and working groups,including the White House Task Force to Prevent …

Governance Of Steel And Kryptonite Politics In Contemporary Public Education Reform, James S. Liebman, Elizabeth R. Cruikshank, Christina C. Ma

Faculty Scholarship

Entrenched bureaucracies and special-interest politics hamper public education in the United States. In response, school districts and states have recently adopted or promoted reforms designed to release schools from bureaucratic control and empower them to meet strengthened outcome standards. Despite promising results, the reforms have been widely criticized, including by the educationally disadvantaged families they most appear to help.

To explain this paradox, this Article first considers the governance alternatives to bureaucracy that the education reforms adopt. It concludes that the reforms do not adopt the most commonly cited alternatives to bureaucracy — marketization, managerialism, or professionalism/craft — and that …

The Duty Of Responsible Administration And The Problem Of Police Accountability, Charles F. Sabel, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Many contemporary civil rights claims arise from institutional activity that, while troubling, is neither malicious nor egregiously reckless. When law-makers find themselves unable to produce substantive rules for such activity, they often turn to regulating the actors’ exercise of discretion. The consequence is an emerging duty of responsible administration that requires managers to actively assess the effects of their conduct on civil rights values and to make reasonable efforts to mitigate harm to protected groups. This doctrinal evolution partially but imperfectly converges with an increasing emphasis in public administration on the need to reassess routines in the light of changing …

Who's In Control? The Courts, The Legislature And The Public In Colorado's School Finance Debate, Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus, Drew Dunphy

Faculty Scholarship

Colorado's school finance story touches on a number of themes familiar to students of school finance litigation: a struggle between those supporting greater resources and those favoring lower taxes; a shift in focus from equity to adequacy; and the difficulty of fostering an informed, widespread dialogue on school finance given the complexity of the funding system. At the same time, certain factors particular to Colorado – a seeming conflict in the state constitution, a number of strict constitutional amendments, and an unusually strong tradition of local control – have dramatically shaped the state's reform process. With a pending lawsuit seeking …