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 …

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 …

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 …