Education Law Commons^™

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 …

The 'Compelling Government Interest' In School Diversity: Rebuilding The Case For An Affirmative Government Role, Philip Tegeler

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

How far does Justice Kennedy’s “moral and ethical obligation” to avoid racial isolation extend? Does the obligation flow primarily from Supreme Court case law, does it derive from an evolving consensus in the social sciences, or does it also have a statutory basis in Title VI and other federal law? In addition to its value as a justification for non-individualized, race-conscious remedial efforts by state and local governments, does the compelling interest identified in Parents Involved also suggest an affirmative duty on the part of the federal government? And if so, how far does this affirmative duty extend, and how …

Inhibiting Intrastate Inequalities: A Congressional Approach To Ensuring Equal Opportunity To Finance Public Education, Joshua Arocho

Michigan Law Review

What is the purpose of the international law on armed conflict, and why would opponents bent on destroying each other’s capabilities commit to and obey rules designed to limit their choice of targets, weapons, and tactics? Traditionally, answers to this question have been offered on the one hand by moralists who regard the law as being inspired by morality and on the other by realists who explain this branch of law on the basis of reciprocity. Neither side’s answers withstand close scrutiny. In this Article, we develop an alternative explanation that is based on the principal–agent model of domestic governance. …

Civil Rights, Charter Schools, And Lessons To Be Learned, Derek W. Black

Faculty Publications

Two major structural shifts have occurred in education reform in the past two decades: the decline of civil rights reforms and the rise of charter schools. Courts and policy makers have relegated traditional civil rights reforms that address segregation, poverty, disability, and language barriers to near irrelevance, while charter schools and policies supporting their creation and expansion have rapidly increased and now dominate federal policy. Advocates of traditional civil rights reforms interpret the success of charter schools as a threat to their cause, and, consequently, have fought the expansion of charter schools. This Article argues that the civil rights community …

Education's Elusive Future, Storied Past, And The Fundamental Inequity In Between, Derek W. Black

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

School Districts And Families Under The Idea: Collaborative In Theory, Adversarial In Fact, Debra Chopp

Articles

To read the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is to be impressed with the ambition and promise of special education. The statute guarantees disabled students a "free appropriate public education" (FAPE) in the "least restrictive environment." At the core of this guarantee lies an entitlement for the parents of a disabled child to collaborate with teachers and school administrators to craft an educational program that is both tailored to the child's unique needs and designed to help her make progress in her education. This entitlement, and the IDEA generally, represents an enormous advance for children with disabilities--a community that, …

Ua5/3 University Attorney - Committee File, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Unprocessed committee files created by the University Attorney. Committees include the Council on Higher Education Special Committee on Minority Affairs, Administrative Council and Teacher Admissions, Certification, and Student Teaching Committee. This record group is unprocessed and must be reviewed for potential restricted materials before access is granted. Please contact the University Archivist prior to your visit.

Sliding Towards Educational Outcomes: A New Remedy For High-Stakes Education Lawsuits In A Post-Nclb World, Christopher A. Suarez

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Sheff v. O'Neill ushered in a new wave of education reform litigation that may challenge the constitutionality of de facto segregation under state education clauses, but its remedy has been inadequate. This Note proposes a new desegregation remedy-the sliding scale remedy-to address socioeconomic isolation in this unique constitutional context. The remedy employs varying degrees of equity power depending on students' academic outcomes. It balances concerns over local control and separation of powers with the court's need to effectuate right, establishes a clear remedial principle, and ensures that states and school districts focus on students as they implement remedies.

Gender Segregation In The Public Schools; Opportunity, Inequality, Or Both., Bill Piatt

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Should the public schools be allowed to segregate girls from boys in the classroom? There is a history of single-sex education in this country, but there are concerns about single gender classrooms. In recent decades, researchers have begun to assert that requiring boys and girls to be taught together has a negative impact on the educational progress because of inherent differences in boy/girl learning behavior, or even in the development of their brains. Proponents of gender exclusive classrooms point out the voluntary nature of the programs, and the explicit findings of the Department of Education justifying such programs. Opponents argue …

Judicial Decision-Making, Social Science Evidence, And Equal Educational Opportunity: Uneasy Relations And Uncertain Futures, Michael Heise

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Little Rock School District's Quest For Unitary Status, Honorable Robert L. Brown

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

This essay discusses the major judicial benchmarks affecting the Little Rock School District since Brown v. Board of Education, andl additionally touches on attitudinal stumbling blocks between the races where problems continue to arise and where suspicions run deep.

After some forty years of litigation the Little Rock School District has been declared unitary in all respects by the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas. There are judicial benchmarks since Brown and three cases bear mentioning. The initial focus of the essay is on the unitary-status decisions handed down by the Federal District Court, and specifically by …

From Pedagogical Sociology To Constitutional Adjudication: The Meaning Of Desegregation In Social Science Research And Law, Anne Richardson Oakes

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

In the United States following the case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) federal judges with responsibility for public school desegregation but no expertise in education or schools management appointed experts from the social sciences to act as court advisors. In Boston, MA, educational sociologists helped Judge W. Arthur Garrity design a plan with educational enhancement at its heart, but the educational outcomes were marginalized by a desegregation jurisprudence conceptualized in terms of race rather than education. This Article explores the frustration of outcomes in Boston by reference to the differing conceptualizations of desegregation in law and social science. …

Solving The Parents Involved Paradox, Lino A. Graglia

Seattle University Law Review

The Supreme Court's decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (Parents Involved) presents the seeming paradox that the Constitution can on one day require a school district to take drastic measures, including busing students across a giant school district to increase racial integration in schools, and then prohibit school districts from taking even the mildest measures, such as using race as a tie-breaker in making student assignments, on the next. How, a rational observer must wonder, can this be possible? The answer is that, as usual in the making of “constitutional law,” the Constitution …

Race-Conscious Student Assignment Plans After Parents Involved: Bringing State Action Principles To Bear On The De Jure/De Facto Distinction, Michael Wells

Scholarly Works

In Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, a sharply divided Supreme Court struck down two race-conscious school assignment plans aimed at achieving greater racial integration of the public schools. Taking Parents Involved as a starting point, this Article looks ahead to the future of litigation over student assignment plans. By striking down the Seattle and Louisville plans, the decision may "require hundreds of school districts to rethink race-based policies that they use voluntarily to desegregate schools." At the very least, the 5-4 ruling almost certainly did not put an end to race-conscious integration plans or …

Moving Beyond Strict Scrutiny: The Need For A More Nuanced Standard Of Protection Analysis For K Through 12 Integration Programs, Deborah N. Archer

Articles & Chapters

In Comfort v. Lynn School Committee, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit evaluated a race-conscious student assignment program using the affirmative action strict scrutiny framework of Grutter v. Bollinger. Comfort is part of a trend of applying strict scrutiny to race-conscious integration programs that has gained new momentum following the decision in Grutter. Invited by the Supreme Court's seemingly unequivocal language in Adarand Constructors v. Pena, that "all racial classifications, imposed by whatever federal, state, or local governmental actor, must be analyzed by a reviewing court under strict scrutiny," federal district and appellate courts confronted with …

Without Color Of Law: The Losing Race Against Colorblindness In Michigan, Khaled Ali Beydoun

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Essay examines affirmative action, while discussing its fall in California, Washington State, and ultimately Michigan.

(Still) Constitutional School De-Segregation Strategies: Teaching Racial Literacy To Secondary School Students And Preferencing Racially-Literate Applicants To Higher Education, Michael J. Kaufman

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

In Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1, the Supreme Court declared that it will continue to scrutinize race-conscious educational decisions to insure that they are narrowly-tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest. This Article develops a strategy for enhancing racial diversity at all levels of American public education that can survive that rigorous constitutional scrutiny. The Article shows that school districts may prove that assigning a meaningful number of racially diverse students to their secondary schools is narrowly-tailored to achieve their compelling educational interest in teaching racial literacy. The constitutionality of this race-conscious educational …

The 2006 Winthrop And Frances Lane Lecture: The Unintended Legal And Policy Consequences Of The No Child Left Behind Act, Michael Heise

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

I'M Confused: How Can The Federal Government Promote Diversity In Higher Education Yet Continue To Strengthen Historically Black Colleges?, Sean B. Seymore

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

A History Of Hollow Promises: How Choice Juisprudence Fails To Achieve Educational Equality, Anita F. Hill

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article combines analysis of case law at state and federal levels as well as federal educational policy in an effort to formulate a framework for addressing educational inequalities, of which the achievement gap is only one result. As individual rights concepts control the discourse of equal educational opportunity, community injury continues to be ignored. Because educational policy aimed at ending educational inequities is governed by equal protection analysis and guided by court decisions, limitations in legal opinions drive such policies. The lack of attention to community harm in law and educational policy limits the ability of education legal reforms …

Urban Legends, Desegregation And School Finance: Did Kansas City Really Prove That Money Doesn't Matter?, Preston C. Green Iii, Bruce D. Baker

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article examines whether conservative critics are correct in their assertion that the Kansas City, Missouri School District (KCMSD) desegregation plan clearly establishes that no correlation exists between funding and academic outcomes. The first section provides a summary of public education in KCMSD prior to 1977, the beginning of the Missouri v. Jenkins school desegregation litigation. The second and third sections analyze whether the Jenkins desegregation and concurrent school finance litigation (Committee for Educational Equality v. State) addressed these problems. The fourth section provides an overview of school finance litigation and explains how KCMSD desegregation plan has been …

Caught In The Trap: Pricing Racial Housing Preferences, A. Mechele Dickerson

Michigan Law Review

In The Two-Income Trap, Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Warren and business consultant Amelia Warren Tyagi reach a startling conclusion: a two-income middle-class family faces greater financial risks today than a one-income family faced three decades ago. Middle-class families are caught in an "income trap" because they budget based on two incomes and face financial ruin if they lose an income or incur unexpected expenses. The authors suggest that most middle-class families cannot quickly adjust their budgets because their largest monthly expense is the fixed mortgage payment. The parents maintained that they had to allocate a significant portion of …

For Whom Does The Bell Toll: The Bell Tolls For Brown?, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

This review essay analyzes Derrick Bell's provocative new book, Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (2004). In Silent Covenants, Professor Bell reviews Brown v. Board of Education, and inquires "whether another approach than the one embraced by the Brown decision might have been more effective and less disruptive in the always-contentious racial arena." Specifically, Professor Bell joins black conservatives in critiquing what he describes as a misguided focus on achieving racial balance in schools and argues that the quality of education for minority children, in particular Blacks, would have been better today …

Symposium: "A Look At Brown V. Board Of Education In West Virginia: Remembering The Past, Examining The Present, And Preparing For The Future"

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reform Or Retrenchment: Single Sex Education And The Construction Of Race And Gender, Verna L. Williams

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

As parents, policymakers, and educators search for solutions to the crisis in the nation's public schools, single sex education emerges time and again as a promising strategy, particularly for African American students. This article argues that, in order to comprehend fully the implications of single sex schooling in inner city schools, examining the history of sex-based and race-based segregation in education is essential.

History demonstrates that sex and racial segregation in education has supported gender and hierarchies and the attendant subordination of African Americans and white women. For example, when public education became available for Blacks, its primary purpose was …

Comparing Remedies For School Desegregation And Employment Discrimination, Candace Kovacic-Fleischer

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

INTRODUCTION: Ten years after the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, now a symbol of the beginning of the end of racial discrimination, Congress passed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII opened the workplace to all races and women in ways that had not previously existed. While discrimination in the workplace has not disappeared in the forty years since Title VII's enactment, one sees minorities and women in a greater variety of jobs, and at higher levels, than one would have seen a generation ago. The promise of Brown, however, has not been …

Resisting Retreat: The Struggle For Equity In Educational Opportunity In The Post-Brown Era, Lia Epperson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Emotional Segregation: Huckleberry Finn In The Modern Classroom, Sharon E. Rush

UF Law Faculty Publications

This paper explores the harm of teaching The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in public school classrooms. Such harm can be broadly described as emotional segregation, which occurs when society sanctions disrespect. To illustrate the effects of emotional segregation, this article explores the reaction Black students and parents have to the novel to that of White students and parents. White students eagerly imagine being Huck and going on his adventures. Black students, however, cannot and should not even be asked to try to imagine being Huck and betraying their racial identity. But then who are the Black students supposed to identify …

Emotional Segregation: Huckleberry Finn In The Modern Classroom, Sharon E. Rush

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In this article, I explore emotional segregation and how it functions in the context of Huckleberry Finn for both personal and academic reasons. Recently, I read Huckleberry Finn because it had been assigned to my daughter's middle school class. I was concerned for her welfare because she is Black and worried how the book would affect her. To understand her reactions, I had to understand the controversy surrounding the book, particularly as a White mother I have reflected quite deeply on the question whether the book is racist. I define "racism" as a belief in the myth of White superiority …