K-12 Education
We are committed to generating and synthesizing research on key civil rights and equal opportunity policies that have been neglected or overlooked.
Well before the passing of the "Leave No Child Behind" Act of 2002, which renewed the nation's interest in K-12 education, The Civil Rights Project had been focused on critical issues affecting this country's elementary and secondary students. CRP believes that equal educational opportunity is a necessary prerequisite to equal educational outcomes. Further, CRP believes that all students benefit from ethnically diverse educational experiences. For the past several years, a main focus of our research has been to demonstrate concrete educational benefits derived from attending diverse elementary and secondary schools. Research in the area of K-12 Education has been extensive with the hopes of having a broad impact nation-wide.
Our current research interests related to K-12 education include:
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The effectiveness of Title I reforms
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Dropout trends and remedies
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The impacts and benefits of racial and ethnic diversity in education
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The racial disparities in policies and practices related to special education and school discipline
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Resegregation trends and remedies in our nation's public schools
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Effective educational policies for language minority students (English Language Learners)
Recent K-12 Research
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The Impact of Affirmative Action Bans in Graduate Education
- This report contributes to the mounting evidence about the detrimental effects bans on affirmative action have had on the representation of students of color in postsecondary education. Specifically, the bans in Texas, California, Washington, and Florida have reduced by about 12 percent the average proportion of graduate students of color across all the fields of graduate study included in the evaluation.
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Spaces of Inclusion? Teachers’ Perceptions of School Communities with Differing Student Racial & Socioeconomic Contexts
- In a nation experiencing rapidly shifting demographics, a broadened definition of inclusive education is appropriate. Differences in ability--but also by race and ethnicity, sexuality, gender, religion, and class--are found in classrooms across the nation, and our teaching force must respond accordingly.
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Suspended Education in California
- This report and companion spreadsheet covering nearly 500 districts reveals to the public the unusually high levels of risk for suspension as well as the stark differences in discipline when these risks are presented by race, gender and disability status.
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Integrating Schools in a Changing Society: New Policies and Legal Options for a Multiracial Generation
- An up-to-the-moment look at available policy options for promoting school integration.
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Collection of the University of California Linguistic Minority Research Institute
- The collected works of LMRI are available via UC's eScholarship.
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Discipline Policies, Successful Schools, and Racial Justice
- This research makes clear that unnecessarily harsh discipline policies are applied unfairly and disproportionately to minority students, dragging down academic achievement. The report documents a trend across the United States in which minority students routinely receive major penalties, including school suspensions, for minor school offenses. The materials also show how criminalizing kids detrimentally affects student learning, and criticizes the federal government’s minimal efforts to collect data in any uniform way on the large number of students kicked out of school.
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Diversity and Educational Gains: a plan for a changing county and its schools
- In response to the Jefferson County, Kentucky, school board’s request, the authors prepared a plan that builds upon and extends the nationally respected Jefferson County Public School accomplishments in operating diverse schools for nearly four decades. The authors reviewed the existing plan, and proposed a new plan to make the district's desegregation plan more effective and efficient, paying particular attention to decreasing excessive transportation times for students.
