History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
Youth Voice in School Finance
NEW REPORT: Los Angeles' road to A-G for all
Without Dollars and Sense Powerpoint
Past Educational Opportunity Reports
Civil Rights: A Principled Education
- 07-30-2010
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By UCLA IDEA staff
Themes in the News for the week of July 26-30, 2010
The promise of American public education is to teach, enable, and inspire generations of youth to participate fully and equally in all spheres of civic life—social, economic, and political.
Educational access and opportunity are so tightly linked to the other rights Americans cherish that education itself stands as a civil right. As President Obama leads much-needed education reform, civil rights groups and advocates are looking carefully at the civil rights implications of the reform proposals. Their views are varied, but their hopes and concerns appear to coalesce around three fundamental principles or indicators of education as a civil right.
The first is universality. Does a high-quality education reach every student in every community? On Monday, a group of eight civil rights groups, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League, issued a framework for reform that was mindful of this principle (Washington Post). The groups are concerned that Race to the Top, will pit states, schools and others against each other leaving low-income and minority students further behind. Though they laud some aspects of the president’s education agenda, they stressed, “…It is our responsibility to seek to close and ultimately eliminate the opportunity and achievement gaps experienced by communities of color."
Broadly speaking, the Obama administration seems committed to universality, but it is not clear to everyone how incentive-based, competitive programs can overcome gaps among groups and schools (The Atlantic, Bloomberg). Speaking to the National Urban League Wednesday, Secretary Arne Duncan said, “In so many ways, our reform agenda is all about equity… Competition isn’t about winners and losers. It’s about getting better” (U.S. Dept of Education, Education Week). The administration will have to work hard to be sure that betterment prevails over winners and losers.
Informed participation is another principle of education as a civil right. Do students, parents and local communities have the information and resources to make sound decisions and course corrections? The reform framework created by the Civil Rights coalition highlights the importance for schools to report on learning opportunities and to ensure student and parent participation in meaningful decision making.
Similarly, Communities for Excellent Public Schools (CEPS) considers the administration’s four reform models to lack community engagement and research. Instead, CEPS favors a participatory model proposed by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University (Washington Post). CEPS says the four models put forth — turnaround, restart, school closure, and transformation — will not work since they lack community input, a focus on educational change and consideration of local issues.
A third principle of civil rights is fairness. Do school policies and practices provide students with due process? Do educators treat all students with dignity and respect? The Office of Civil Rights, under the direction of Assistant Secretary Russlynn Ali, is launching investigations of discipline practices that lead to extremely high rates of suspension and expulsion for African American males. The broader rights community shares Ali’s concern with racially disparate discipline policies and worries more generally about the overuse and misapplication of discipline practices that effectively exclude students from the educational process.
It is fitting that in a week when advocates and policy makers in Washington, D.C. talked about universality, informed participation, and fairness, tens of thousands in Arizona and across the nation exercised their rights to speak, assemble, and petition the government to redress their grievances.
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