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The 1966 Equality of Educational Opportunity Report (EEO)—also known as the Coleman Report—is one of the most important education studies of the twentieth century. Commissioned by Congress as part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the report revealed pervasive school segregation by race, among other inequalities, and began a national dialogue on educational opportunity for minority children. On the fiftieth anniversary of the EEO report, leading scholars revisit its legacy in this special issue of RSF, edited by Karl Alexander and Stephen Morgan. The contributors examine the report’s methods and conclusions through the lens of social science advances over the past half century, and analyze issues such as school reform, persistent racial segregation, and changing educational standards to provide a thoughtful analysis of barriers to educational opportunity today.
 
The issue begins with a reassessment of the EEO’s major findings. Karl Alexander analyzes the report’s conclusion that families exert greater influence on children’s school performance than the schools themselves. He finds that family, school, and neighborhood all interact to shape children’s academic development in ways that are not always separable. Other contributors investigate how racial achievement gaps have changed since the report’s release. Sean Reardon finds that disparities in average school poverty rates between white and black students’ schools are the most powerful correlate of achievement gaps. Barbara Schneider and Guan Saw show that while blacks aspire to attend college at greater rates than whites, fewer blacks than whites now attend four-year colleges in part due to lesser access to college preparation activities, such as advanced-level academic courses.
 
Contributors also evaluate and update the EEO’s proposals to reduce longstanding socioeconomic and racial achievement gaps. Prudence L. Carter argues that effective policies for ending racial disparities must account for inequalities within schools as well as between them. Brian Jacob and coauthors explore whether technological advances since the EEO, including online courses, have the potential to reduce some of the educational inequalities associated with residential segregation.  Ruth Turley shows how renewed partnerships between education researchers and policymakers at the local, regional, and national levels can improve disadvantaged students’ educational outcomes and increase racial and economic integration. By looking forward as well as back, this issue of RSF documents what educators and scholars have learned from fifty years of social science research on educational opportunity.
 

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, a key component of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, was designed to aid low-income students and to combat racial segregation in schools. Over the last several decades, the ESEA has become the federal government’s main source of leverage on states and school districts to enact its preferred reforms, including controversial measures such as standardized testing. In this issue of RSF, an esteemed group of education scholars examine the historical evolution of the ESEA, its successes and pitfalls, and what they portend for the future of education policies.
 
The ESEA has historically enabled the federal government to address educational inequality at the local level. Among the nine articles in the issue, Erica Frankenberg and Kendra Taylor discuss how the ESEA, in conjunction with the Civil Rights Act, accelerated desegregation in the South in the 1960s by withholding federal funding from school districts that failed to integrate. Rucker C. Johnson shows that higher ESEA spending in school districts between 1965 and 1980 led to increased likelihood of high school graduation for students, and low-income students in particular. Students in districts with higher spending were also less likely to repeat grades or to be suspended from school. Yet, as Patrick McGuinn shows, the institutional and administrative capacity of the U.S. Department of Education has never been sufficient to force instructional changes at the school level. This was particularly true with the 2001 renewal of the ESEA, the No Child Left Behind Act, which linked federal funding to schools’ test-score outcomes rather than to programs designed to combat social inequalities.
 
The issue also investigates the unintended consequences of the ESEA and offers solutions to offset them. As Patricia Gándara and Gloria Ladson-Billings demonstrate, ESEA reforms have, in some circumstances, led to the neglect of the needs of minority students and second-language learners. Gándara shows that No Child Left Behind requires “bilingual” education programs to focus on rapid acquisition of English, often to the detriment of those learning English as a second language. Ladson-Billings shows that the ESEA’s standardized testing mandates may suppress innovative teaching methods, and argues for reforms that use multidisciplinary approaches to craft new curricula. Bringing together research on the successes and shortcomings of the ESEA, this issue of RSF offers new insights into federal education policy and demonstrates that this landmark legislation remains a powerful force in the lives of educators and students fifty years after its initial implementation.
 
 

In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate the causes of the more than 150 urban riots sweeping cities throughout the nation. In 1968, the commission released its findings, widely known as the Kerner Report, and warned that the nation was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” This special issue of RSF, edited by political scientist Susan Gooden and economist Samuel Myers, revisits the Kerner Report’s conclusions and recommendations on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. How far have we come? What worked and what didn’t? How does the Kerner Report help us understand racial disparities in the twenty-first century?
 
Articles in the issue examine the extent to which the recommendations in the Kerner Report contributed to policy changes and improvements in the social and economic well-being of urban residents . In their introduction, Gooden and Myers analyze changes in socioeconomic inequality between whites and blacks over the last five decades. They find that while the black poverty rate has declined and black educational attainment has increased, disparities still remain. Additionally, the income gap and disparities in unemployment between blacks and whites remain virtually unchanged. Rick Loessberg and John Koskinen similarly note the persistence of these disparities, but also show that some of the Kerner Report’s recommendations were adopted at local levels and have provided the foundation for increased racial diversity in media, law enforcement reforms, and public housing desegregation.
 
Other contributors study the urban areas that were sites of the riots. Reynolds Farley shows that in Detroit, residential segregation has declined and interracial marriage has increased over the last fifty years. However, on key economic measures such as income and wealth, African Americans have fallen even further behind whites than they were in 1967 due to dramatic changes in Detroit’s labor market. In their study of wealth inequality in Los Angeles, Melany De La Cruz-Viesca and coauthors show that much of the wealth gap between blacks and whites is due to disparities in home ownership, a subject neglected in the Kerner Report. Marcus Casey and Bradley Hardy study the evolution of African American neighborhoods since the Kerner Report and find that neighborhoods directly affected by riots in the 1960s still remain among the most economically disadvantaged today.
 
The Kerner Report endures as a classic touchstone in the nation’s search for a path toward equality. Together, the articles in this special issue demonstrate the long-term influence of the report and show where further progress is needed to close the racial divide.
 

No issue in American higher education is more contentious than that of race-based affirmative action. In light of the ongoing debate around the topic and recent Supreme Court rulings, affirmative action policy may be facing further changes. As an alternative to race-based affirmative action, some analysts suggest affirmative action policies based on class. In Race, Class, and Affirmative Action, sociologist Sigal Alon studies the race-based affirmative action policies in the United States. and the class-based affirmative action policies in Israel. Alon evaluates how these different policies foster campus diversity and socioeconomic mobility by comparing the Israeli policy with a simulated model of race-based affirmative action and the U.S. policy with a simulated model of class-based affirmative action.

Alon finds that affirmative action at elite institutions in both countries is a key vehicle of mobility for disenfranchised students, whether they are racial and ethnic minorities or socioeconomically disadvantaged. Affirmative action improves their academic success and graduation rates and leads to better labor market outcomes. The beneficiaries of affirmative action in both countries thrive at elite colleges and in selective fields of study. As Alon demonstrates, they would not be better off attending less selective colleges instead.

Alon finds that Israel’s class-based affirmative action programs have provided much-needed entry slots at the elite universities to students from the geographic periphery, from high-poverty high schools, and from poor families. However, this approach has not generated as much ethnic diversity as a race-based policy would. By contrast, affirmative action policies in the United States have fostered racial and ethnic diversity at a level that cannot be matched with class-based policies. Yet, class-based policies would do a better job at boosting the socioeconomic diversity at these bastions of privilege. The findings from both countries suggest that neither race-based nor class-based models by themselves can generate broad diversity. According to Alon, the best route for promoting both racial and socioeconomic diversity is to embed the consideration of race within class-based affirmative action. Such a hybrid model would maximize the mobility benefits for both socioeconomically disadvantaged and minority students.

Race, Class, and Affirmative Action moves past political talking points to offer an innovative, evidence-based perspective on the merits and feasibility of different designs of affirmative action.

In Realizing Educational Rights, Anne Newman examines two educational rights questions that arise at the intersection of political theory, educational policy, and law: What is the place of a right to education in a participatory democracy, and how can we realize this right in the United States? Tracking these questions across both philosophical and pragmatic terrain, she addresses urgent moral and political questions, offering a rare, double-pronged look at educational justice in a democratic society.

Newman argues that an adequate K–12 education is the right of all citizens, as a matter of equality, and emphasizes that this right must be shielded from the sway of partisan and majoritarian policy making far more than it currently is. She then examines how educational rights are realized in our current democratic structure, offering two case studies of leading types of rights-based activism: school finance litigation on the state level and the mobilization of citizens through community-based organizations. Bringing these case studies together with rich philosophical analysis, Realizing Educational Rights advances understanding of the relationships among moral and legal rights, education reform, and democratic politics. 

The reputation of a college or institution depends upon the integrity of its faculty and administration. Though budgets are important, ethics are vital, and a host of new ethical problems now beset higher education. From MOOCS and intellectual property rights to drug industry payments and conflicts of interest, this book offers AAUP policy language and best practices to deal with all the campus-wide challenges of today's corporate university:
 
• Preserving the integrity of research and public respect for higher education
• Eliminating and managing individual and institutional financial conflicts of interest
• Maintaining unbiased hiring and recruitment policies
• Establishing grievance procedures and due process rights for faculty, graduate students, and academic professionals
• Mastering the complications of negotiations over patents and copyright
• Assuring the ethics of research involving human subjects.
 
In a time of dynamic change Recommended Principles to Guide Academy-Industry Relationships offers an indispensable and authoritative guide to sustaining integrity and tradition while achieving great things in twenty-first century academia.