The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act has deep roots in the civil rights movement; however, the legislation, as currently applied, has done little to address racial inequities in services students with disabilities receive. Too often, schools, districts, and states focus on complying with the regulations, while failing to make necessary…

Today, our schools are more racially segregated than at any time in the last 40 years, mainly because the neighborhoods in which they are located are themselves racially segregated. Yet, the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 2007 Parents Involved ruling, prohibited school districts from implementing even modest race-conscious desegregation plans. If…

As U.S. suburbs become more racially and ethnically diverse, they have the opportunity to make their schools similarly diverse. But integration is not assured, even in districts with significant demographic diversity. Iris Rotberg draws on Montgomery County Public Schools, a suburban Maryland district, to illustrate the opportunities and risks…

Sixty-five years after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, the federal and judicial role in school desegregation has declined. In a more difficult political and legal environment, it has fallen on school districts to develop and implement voluntary integration plans through diversity-minded student assignment…

The NAACP, nation's largest civil rights organization, steps up its opposition to charter schools just as a president and new education secretary appear ready to kick the sector into high gear. In 2016, the NAACP passed a resolution calling on a moratorium on the expansion of charter schools, citing concerns about transparency and accountability,…

Following Brown v. Board of Education, schools known as "segregation academies" that were created for the purpose of allowing White students to be educated without contact with Black students proliferated in the southern United States. While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited such segregation, these schools remained in existence for…

"Gerrymandering" is known best as a tool to manipulate boundaries for voting districts, but school districts have long used the same tool to manipulate school boundaries. The author used geospatial techniques--mapping various kinds of demographic data onto school boundaries--to examine public school attendance zones and their effect on…

This article examines a wide array of research on the link between school choice programs and student segregation and draws implications for the Obama Administration's policy promoting the national expansion of charter schools. The research demonstrates how the proliferation of charter schools risks increasing current levels of segregation…

This past June, a 5-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court declared integration plans in Louisville and Seattle unconstitutional because of their focus on race as one factor in assigning students to schools. The Court's ruling in the "Parents Involved in Community Schools" v. "Seattle School District No. 1" and…

A sociological examination of stages in the development of the race revolution in America. This stage may require separatism. (Author)

Argues for the middle ground (pluralism) between assimilation, in which the dominant culture and race are held to be superior, and segregation, in which students lack preparation for life in a world of diverse people. (Author/WD)

The author was startled by the carelessness and selectivity of Robert Slavin's comments, which give his words the ring of a promotional release rather than of intellectual reflection. He agrees that Slavin is accurate in saying that the scores on reading tests at P.S. 65 in the South Bronx improved during a period in which, among a number of other…

To tackle racial problems in high schools, an Ann Arbor liaison group designed and administered a student questionnaire. Four major themes emerged: segregation (both social and academic), institutionalized discrimination (specifically, tracking), reverse discrimination, and stereotyping. Student response led to a multicultural education program…

Milwaukee (Wisconsin) Public Schools' two new coeducational African-American immersion schools are not segregationist. Key programmatic changes are based on an African social education concept and include staffing based on teaching experience (not race or gender), teacher class assignments lasting two or more years, teacher home visits, staff…

A forecast of actions of the Supreme Court in the seventies based upon the impact of the Court's decisions on the American educational system in the sixties. (MF)