Results by title
20 books match the query 'Federal Legislation'
Disability Rights and Religious Liberty in Education
The Story behind Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School DistrictBruce J. Dierenfield and David A. Gerber
University of Illinois Press, 2020
Bruce J. Dierenfield and David A. Gerber use the Zobrests' story to examine the complex history and jurisprudence of disability accommodation and educational mainstreaming. They look at the family's effort to acquire educational resources for their son starting in early childhood and the choices the Zobrests made to prepare him for life in the hearing world rather than the deaf community. Dierenfield and Gerber also analyze the thorny church-state issues and legal controversies that informed the case, its journey to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the impact of the high court's ruling on the course of disability accommodation and religious liberty.
Early Childhood in the Anglosphere
Systemic Failings and Transformative PossibilitiesPeter Moss and Linda Mitchell
University College London, 2024
Written by two leading experts in early childhood education, Early Childhood in the Anglosphere offers a unique comparison of early childhood education and care services and parenting leave across seven high-income Anglophone countries. Peter Moss and Linda Mitchell explore what these systems have in common, including the dominance of childcare services, widespread privatization and marketization, and weak parenting leave. They highlight the substantial failings of these systems and the causes and consequences of these failings. But this book is ultimately about hope, about how these failings might be made good through major changes. In other words, it is about transformation: Why transformation is both necessary and possible at this particular time? What transformation might look like? And how it might happen? Part of that transformation concerns the need for new policies and structures. Furthermore, it is about how the Anglosphere thinks about early childhood.
The authors call for a turn away from speaking of early childhood services as “childcare,” conceptualizing it in terms of business and marketized commodities. Instead, they should be envisaged as a public good with universal access for children, supported by well-paid, individual entitlements to parenting leave. Using examples from the Anglosphere and beyond, the book argues that a transformation of thinking, policies, and structures is desirable and doable.
Fifty-Eight Lonely Men
Southern Federal Judges and School DesegregationJ. W. Peltason
University of Illinois Press, 1971
Getting around Brown
Desegregation, Development, and the Columbus Public SchoolsGregory S. Jacobs
The Ohio State University Press, 1998
Getting Around Brown is both the first history of school desegregation in Columbus, Ohio, and the first case study to explore the interplay of desegregation, business, and urban development in America.
Drawing on a broad range of sources, including over sixty interviews, the book details the causes and consequences of Penick v. Columbus Board of Education (1977). Gregory S. Jacobs argues that school desegregation in Columbus failed to produce equal educational opportunity, not because it was inherently detrimental to learning, but because it was incompatible with urban development. As a consequence, the long-term health of the city school district was sacrificed to preserve the growth of the city itself. The resulting middle-class abandonment of urban education in Columbus produced an increasingly poor, African-American city school system and a powerful form of defensive activism within the overwhelmingly white suburban systems.
The title of the book refers not only to the elaborate tools used to circumvent the spirit of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision but also to the need to move beyond the flawed dichotomies and failed policies that have come to define desegregation. The book calls for a reconsideration of the complicated relationship race, class, and housing patterns have with city school reform efforts, a relationship obscured by this country’s vitriolic and occasionally violent battle over busing. Jacobs concludes his study with a “modest proposal,” in which he recommends the abolition of the Columbus Public School District, the dispersal of its students throughout surrounding suburban systems, and the creation of a choice-based “experimental education zone” within the old city school district boundaries.
Readable and relevant, Getting around Brownis essential reading for scholars of recent American history, urban studies, civil rights and race relations, and educational policy, as well as anyone interested in public education and politics.
How Schools Meet Students' Needs
Inequality, School Reform, and Caring LaborKatie Kerstetter
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Making the Unequal Metropolis
School Desegregation and Its LimitsAnsley T. Erickson
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Taking Nashville as her focus, Erickson uncovers the hidden policy choices that have until now been missing from popular and legal narratives of inequality. In her account, inequality emerges not only from individual racism and white communities’ resistance to desegregation, but as the result of long-standing linkages between schooling, property markets, labor markets, and the pursuit of economic growth. By making visible the full scope of the forces invested in and reinforcing inequality, Erickson reveals the complex history of, and broad culpability for, ongoing struggles in our schools.
RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: The Coleman Report and Educational Inequality Fifty Years LaterKarl Alexander
Russell Sage Foundation, 2016
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.
RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: The Elementary and Secondary Education Act at Fifty and BeyondDavid A. Gamson
Russell Sage Foundation, 2015
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.
RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Kerner Commission ReportSusan T. Gooden
Russell Sage Foundation, 2018
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.
Race, Class, and Affirmative Action
Sigal Alon is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel-Aviv University.
Russell Sage Foundation, 2015
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.
Realizing Educational Rights
Advancing School Reform through Courts and CommunitiesAnne Newman
University of Chicago Press, 2013
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.
State Learning and International Change
Andrew Farkas
University of Michigan Press, 1998
The Crucible of Desegregation
The Uncertain Search for Educational EqualityR. Shep Melnick
University of Chicago Press, 2023
In 1954, the Supreme Court delivered the landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education—establishing the right to attend a desegregated school as a national constitutional right—but the decision contained fundamental ambiguities. The Supreme Court has never offered a clear definition of what desegregation means or laid out a framework for evaluating competing interpretations. In The Crucible of Desegregation, R. Shep Melnick examines the evolution of federal school desegregation policy from 1954 through the termination of desegregation orders in the first decades of the twenty-first century, combining legal analysis with a focus on institutional relations, particularly the interactions between federal judges and administrators. Melnick argues that years of ambiguous, inconsistent, and meandering Court decisions left lower court judges adrift, forced to apply contradictory Supreme Court precedents in a wide variety of highly charged political and educational contexts. As a result, desegregation policy has been a patchwork, with lower court judges playing a crucial role and with little opportunity to analyze what worked and what didn’t. The Crucible of Desegregation reveals persistent patterns and disagreements that continue to roil education policy.
The Crucible of Desegregation
The Uncertain Search for Educational EqualityR. Shep Melnick
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Examines the patchwork evolution of school desegregation policy.
In 1954, the Supreme Court delivered the landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education—establishing the right to attend a desegregated school as a national constitutional right—but the decision contained fundamental ambiguities. The Supreme Court has never offered a clear definition of what desegregation means or laid out a framework for evaluating competing interpretations. In The Crucible of Desegregation, R. Shep Melnick examines the evolution of federal school desegregation policy from 1954 through the termination of desegregation orders in the first decades of the twenty-first century, combining legal analysis with a focus on institutional relations, particularly the interactions between federal judges and administrators. Melnick argues that years of ambiguous, inconsistent, and meandering Court decisions left lower court judges adrift, forced to apply contradictory Supreme Court precedents in a wide variety of highly charged political and educational contexts. As a result, desegregation policy has been a patchwork, with lower court judges playing a crucial role and with little opportunity to analyze what worked and what didn’t. The Crucible of Desegregation reveals persistent patterns and disagreements that continue to roil education policy.
The Era of Education
The Presidents and the Schools, 1965-2001Lawrence J. McAndrews
University of Illinois Press, 2005
The German Turn
Settler Ideology and Racial Education in the Making of Modern Chile, 1882–1920Romina A. Green Rioja
University of Alabama Press, 2026
How a nation took shape through two classrooms, educating European immigrants in one while assimilating Indigenous peoples in the other, hardwiring race, class, and identity into modern Chile
The German Turn is the history of Chile’s settler ideological project of the 1880s exemplified in education. Romina A. Green Rioja’s big-picture interdisciplinary analysis boasts four historiographies in conversation within the Chilean context. She examines the histories of education, settler colonialism and immigration, Native mission schools, and Mapuche studies at the state and local levels. Chile’s state-building goal was to position the country in the global capitalist economy. Education was seen as a civilizing force for the Mapuche, and the overall goals were to unite the country; teach Chilean students to adhere to class, race, and gender structures; and prepare them for occupations according to these configurations.
Green Rioja finds that Chilean society and state policies demarcated the lines of ethnic, national, and racial preference and exclusion, offering inclusion for those of European ancestry and distance for those of Indigenous descent. Education’s dual role as a tool for inclusion and exclusion ultimately shaped former pupils’ class trajectories and racial belonging. The degrees of belonging depended on community connections, family wealth, and government scholarships that facilitated integration, assimilation, separatism, or the compartmentalization of group identity with the Chilean national identity. The book further considers global-transnational studies on immigration, settler colonialism, and education, showing Chilean policies that appear insular actually align with global patterns and shared policies by other forming nations. This work is a must-read for historians and Latin Americanists to understand Chile’s modernization and its impacts on social structures.
The Grit and the Grind
Building High-Performing Education Systems in an Era of PolarizationJoshua L. Glazer, Cori Egan, William R. Berry, and Amar Fattal
University of Chicago Press, 2026
Offers a much-needed perspective on the connections between community, policymaking, and the improvement of underperforming schools.
School reform remains a fraught issue in the United States as educators, policymakers, and communities strive to improve outcomes for all students. In The Grit and the Grind, Joshua L. Glazer, Cori Egan, William R. Berry, and Amar Fattal examine two ambitious efforts to improve the lowest-performing schools in Memphis, Tennessee. The book offers a rare inside look at the political, organizational, and educational challenges of improving schools at scale.
The two initiatives, the Achievement School District (ASD) and the Shelby County Innovation Zone (iZone), shared a common goal but pursued it through fundamentally different approaches. The ASD was a state-run turnaround district that removed schools from local control and placed them under the management of charter organizations. By contrast, the iZone operated through existing district institutions, relying on local educators and leaders to drive improvement. Despite common goals and substantial resources, the reforms developed in strikingly different ways. Drawing on years of research in Memphis, the authors move beyond familiar debates about charter schools and district reform to explore a deeper question: What does it take to improve schools in complex, pluralistic, and contested democratic societies? Their analysis reveals that educational improvement is simultaneously professional, organizational, and political. Efforts to enhance educational opportunities depend not only on curriculum, leadership, and expertise, but also on the legitimacy, trust, and community support that allow educational systems to learn from experience and sustain improvement.
At once a study of reform, organizations, and politics, The Grit and the Grind challenges simple explanations of success and failure, showing that meaningful improvement is forged through the slow, uncertain work of building systems capable of earning community trust while continuously strengthening teaching and learning.
The Handbook of Broader Impacts
Strategies for Enhancing the Societal Impacts of ResearchLaurie A. Van Egeren
Michigan State University Press, 2026
The Handbook of Broader Impacts is an essential resource for researchers, administrators, policymakers, and anyone interested in the societal benefits of research. The volume brings together experts who trace the history of broader impacts as a U.S. National Science Foundation policy, explore its relationship to engaged scholarship, and provide models for institutional infrastructure and support. The book equips readers with tools to build the institutional capacity to advance the societal impacts of research, from developing researcher identities and competencies to navigating promotion and tenure. The Handbook of Broader Impacts explores a wide range of initiatives—open science, science communication, citizen science, informal STEM learning, K–12 partnerships, undergraduate research, teacher development, international collaborations, and more. By blending policy context, practical strategies, and real-world examples, the handbook spells out the value of broader impacts and demonstrates how research can contribute to direct and meaningful change.
The Story of Act 31
How Native History Came to Wisconsin ClassroomsJ P Leary
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018
Since its passage in 1989, a state law known as Act 31 requires that all students in Wisconsin learn about the history, culture, and tribal sovereignty of Wisconsin’s federally recognized tribes.
The Story of Act 31 tells the story of the law’s inception—tracing its origins to a court decision in 1983 that affirmed American Indian hunting and fishing treaty rights in Wisconsin, and to the violent public outcry that followed the court’s decision. Author J P Leary paints a picture of controversy stemming from past policy decisions that denied generations of Wisconsin students the opportunity to learn about tribal history.
Who Should Pay?
Higher Education, Responsibility, and the PublicNatasha Quadlin
Russell Sage Foundation, 2022
Who Should Pay? draws on a decade’s worth of public opinion surveys analyzing public attitudes about whether parents, students, or the government should be primarily responsible for funding higher education. Quadlin and Powell find that between 2010 and 2019, public opinion has shifted dramatically in favor of more government funding. In 2010, Americans overwhelming believed that parents and students were responsible for the costs of higher education. Less than a decade later, the percentage of Americans who believed that federal or state/local government should be the primary financial contributor has more than doubled. The authors contend that the rapidity of this change may be due to the effects of the 2008 financial crisis and the growing awareness of the social and economic costs of high levels of student debt. Quadlin and Powell also find increased public endorsement of shared responsibility between individuals and the government in paying for higher education. The authors additionally examine attitudes on the accessibility of college for all, whether higher education at public universities should be free, and whether college is worth the costs.
Quadlin and Powell also explore why Americans hold these beliefs. They identify individualistic and collectivist world views that shape public perspectives on the questions of funding, accessibility, and worthiness of college. Those with more individualistic orientations believed parents and students should pay for college, and that if students want to attend college, then they should work hard and find ways to achieve their goals. Those with collectivist orientations believed in a model of shared responsibility – one in which the government takes a greater level of responsibility for funding education while acknowledging the social and economic barriers to obtaining a college degree for many students. The authors find that these belief systems differ among socio-demographic groups and that bias – sometimes unconscious and sometimes deliberate – regarding race and class affects responses from both individualistic and collectivist-oriented participants.
Public opinion is typically very slow to change. Yet Who Should Pay? provides an illuminating account of just how quickly public opinion has shifted regarding the responsibility of paying for a college education and its implications for future generations of students.