Law Commons^™

Verboten: Forbidden Homeschooling In Germany And Its Conflict With International Religious Freedom., Jacob A. Aschmutat

Jacob A Aschmutat

Germany maintains strict compulsory education laws that prevent families from educating their children at home. Germany strictly enforces these laws, with little regard to the families’ incentives to remove their children from the public schools. As such, these laws contain no exemption for families interested in homeschooling for religious purposes. The absence of such an exemption seems to contradict the internationally recognized right to religious freedom, a right concretely granted through three international treaties that Germany has both signed and ratified. Several decisions by the European Court of Human Rights give little to no credence to the notion of religious …

Transformative Teaching And Educational Fair Use After Georgia State, Brandon C. Butler

Brandon C. Butler

The Supreme Court has said that copyright’s fair use doctrine is a “First Amendment safety valve” because it ensures that certain crucial cultural activities are not unduly burdened by copyright. While many such activities (criticism, commentary, parody) have benefited from the courts’ increased attention to first amendment values, one such activity, education, has been mired for years in a minimalist, market-based vision of fair use that is largely out of touch with mainstream fair use jurisprudence. The latest installment in the history of educational fair use, the 11th Circuit’s opinion in the Georgia State e-reserves case, may be the last …

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 …

School Funding Inequality In District Funding And The Disparate Impact On Urban And Migrant School Children, Rachel Rose Ostrander

Rachel Rose Ostrander

Today schools are more segregated than ever before in our recent history, and it is largely due to problems with the disparity of funding between districts. While lower funded schools attract migrant low income and inner city urban families due to decreased property values, the demographic of students becomes increasingly homogenous, and more affluent families move to better communities with better schools and more resources, creating an urban-migrant dilemma in education. While this is not the intended outcome, it is none the less the de-facto outcome. So why is this de-facto segregation occurring, and the school funding disparity issue not …

Reforming Teacher Pensions, Leigh Anenson

Leigh Anenson

Pension reform has taken center stage in the public policy debate as states struggle to deal with the fallout from the Great Recession. Retirement benefits are not only a critical component of income-maintenance for public retirees, but also a source of economic stimulus to every state economy. In this article, we integrate and extend the pension reform movements in law, education and economics by studying teacher pensions across the United States. Our interdisciplinary approach concentrates on defined benefit plans in states that do not contribute to Social Security. Focusing on this vulnerable and important group of government workers, we aim …

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 …

North Carolina’S Superintendent Of Public Instruction: Defining A Constitutional Office, Andrew P. Owens

Andrew P. Owens

In 2009 a superior court case determined the fate of the Governor’s initiative to streamline education leadership by promoting a State Board of Education member while greatly reducing the Superintendent of Public Instruction’s powers. The judge’s decision in favor of Superintendent Atkinson turned on “the inherent constitutional authority” of her office; yet no one really knows what authority is inherent to the office, where that authority derives, or how to go about analyzing the office’s constitutional role. In short: what does it mean to be the Superintendent of Public Instruction? This paper explains the origins and meaning of the Superintendent …

Countering Criminalization: Toward A Youth Development Approach To School Searches, Sarah Jane Forman

Sarah Jane Forman

Every since New Jersey v. T.L.O., the dominant narrative, particularly in inner-city schools, has been that school children are dangerous and violent, drug dealing, gang affiliated, and out of control. Under the rubric of school safety, students are stripped of the full protection afforded by the 4th Amendment while being subjected them to a model of school discipline that utilizes law enforcement officers to enforce school rules. Such policies alienate targeted youth from mainstream society, increasing the lure of counter-culture ideas, decreasing the legitimacy of the rule of law, and feeding the school-to prison pipeline. In section one, I examine …

Achieving Diversity In The Parents Involved Era: Evidence For Geographic Integration Plans In Metropolitan School Districts, Julian Vasquez Heilig, Meredith Richard, Kori Stroub, Michael Volonnino

Julian Vasquez Heilig

In the wake of the Parents Involved decision, which rendered unconstitutional voluntary school integration plans using individual student race, districts have adopted a number of alternative integration strategies to combat the re-segregation of America’s schools. One promising approach, developed by Berkeley Unified School District, uses neighborhood demographic and socioeconomic characteristics as proxies for student race and ethnicity in assigning students to schools. This study provides the first empirical assessment of such “geographic integration models” by 1) modeling how accurately neighborhood demographic and socioeconomic characteristics predicted student race/ethnicity, and 2) estimating the potential increases in school diversity under such a plan. …