Does the U.S. Constitution guarantee a right to education? The Supreme Court declared that it does not in "San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez," a 1973 case alleging that disparities in spending levels among Texas school districts violated students' constitutional rights. This issue's forum contains two essays. The first…

The federal government has been heavily involved in education since the mid-1960s, intervening in everything from early childhood education to graduate schooling. This paper lays out the principles that should govern federal involvement in seven specific areas and briefly examines the effects of Washington's policies. The areas are elementary and…

Ralph Carr had neither expected, nor wanted, to be governor. Carr was at the midpoint of his second term as governor when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Public sentiment and the popular press overwhelmingly supported the incarceration of Japanese Americans. On February 18, 1942, for example, one Colorado newspaper editor…

For more than a century, public education in the U.S. has been defined as schools that are funded, regulated, and exclusively delivered by government. The past 25 years have brought some diversified forms of delivery through charter schools and various private-school scholarship mechanisms. Nevertheless, most discussions and debates over school…

April 2015 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the landmark legislation that has provided the foundation of federal education policy in the United States. In "Presidents, Congress, and the Public Schools," longtime policy analyst Jack Jennings examines the evolution of federal education…

The federal government's role in PreK-12 education has long been contentious and continues to evolve. Many have written about education governance, but few have attempted to define an appropriate role for the federal government. That is the core purpose of this essay. The authors articulate a set of principles to guide the federal role in…

This September, Oxford University Press is publishing "Out of Range: Why the Constitution Can't End the Battle Over Guns." Written by Mark Tushnet, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, "Out of Range" explores competing interpretations of the Second Amendment and discusses how the entanglement of…

Judicial intervention in educational matters supplements the legislative actions of the Constitution in protecting the rights of children. (LH)

Reviews case law, constitutional principles, and early American writings which deal with the idea of private property. Concludes that, in the future, the issues of laissez-fare capitalism, government regulation, and the welfare state will require further clarification of our conception of private property. (JDH)

Discusses the issues addressed in the 2002 U.S. Supreme Court term, such as the First, Fourth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments, cruel and unusual punishment, sex offender registries, fair housing, cross burning, jury selection, affirmative action, abortion protests, and copyrights and the public domain. (CMK)

Presents a lesson in multiple parts designed to explain the importance of standardized weights and measures and to demonstrate how governmental activities have changed standards and influenced commerce. (JDH)

The school segregation cases, generally cited as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) were first argued in the Supreme Court of the United States in December, 1952. On June 8, 1953, six months after the first arguments and nearly a year prior to the decision, the Supreme Court ordered that the cases be re-argued in the…

Provides a lesson intended to stimulate students' interest in the concept of justice and to focus attention on how the U.S. Constitution protects and promotes justice. (JDH)

Debates over the separation or accommodation of religion and government have divided the United States since its founding. This collection of over 70 primary documents represents the ideas and issues on the interpretation of the United States Constitution's First Amendment clauses pertaining to establishment and free exercise of religion. The…