Informing the Debate 2011: Bringing Civil Rights Research to Bear on the Reauthorization of the ESEA

Informing the Debate:

Bringing Civil Rights Research to Bear on the Reauthorization of the ESEA

Event Agenda

Presenters:

Gary Orfield and Patricia Gándara, Co-Directors, The Civil Rights Project
Christopher Swanson, Research Director, Editorial Projects in Education
Daniel Losen, Director, The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at The Civil Rights Project
Erica Frankenberg, Assistant Professor, Pennsylvania State University

Respondents:

Bethany Little, Senior Education Advisor, Senate HELP Committee, Sen. Tom Harkin
Damon Hewitt, Director of the Education Practice, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
Jim Ferg-Cadima, Regional Counsel, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund
Tanya Clay House, Director of Public Policy, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law

Event Summary

At this event, leading scholars presented research findings on the civil rights implications of education policies and discussed them in terms of the reauthorization of the ESEA. The briefing was attended by congressional staffers, agency experts, researchers, and representatives of major education and civil rights organizations. Civil rights advocates and Congressional staffers opened the discussion to explore what lessons could be learned.

Policy papers on the following are attached:

School accountability and turnarounds (Orfield): The need for effective turnarounds and an entirely separate response to ensure robust yet reasonable accountability for low-performing subgroups;
Improving graduation rates and reducing suspension rates (Swanson and Losen): School accountability and the need to address early warning indicators of dropping out; special attention to issues of school climate and use of disciplinary exclusion with slide presentation by Daniel Losen. (presentation slides)
Meeting the needs of English learners (Gándara): accountability, appropriate test use and inadequate support of ELs;
Promoting diversity (Frankenberg): mechanisms of school choice, inter-district transfers, magnet schools; the promise and pitfalls of increasing the numbers of charter schools, with slide presentation by Erica Frankenberg. (presentation slides)

and

CRP Resource List includes a multitude of resources available on this website and others.

Background

The Civil Rights Project sponsored this briefing on the major challenges in the renewal of the federal education law known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The CRP has held a series of such briefings, the first in 1992, which saw the release of studies commissioned from across the nation on ways in which federal education law could produce real gains. Those first studies were published in 1999 by the Civil Rights Project as, Hard Work for Good Schools, Facts not Fads in Title I Reform. The Project’s subsequent national and regional conferences, and commissioned papers on the dropout issue, were directly related to the inclusion of dropout accountability in the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. After NCLB was enacted, we followed the implementation in six states and published a series of reports, which gave early warning of many problems that later became apparent across the nation, as well as two books, NCLB Meets School Realities (2005) and Holding NCLB Accountable (2007), which contained many ideas for improving policies.

This 2011 briefing was not intended to give comprehensive treatment to all of the many issues involved in renewing federal law, such as the proposals to assess the difference individual teachers make. During the conference we distributed four policy briefs on important new issues we hoped would have a deep impact on U.S. schools in the next decade or more. These briefs dealt with civil rights issues related to central proposals of the Obama administration to change accountability, improve federal policy toward the tenth of American students who are English language learners, reverse the intensifying and educationally destructive concentration of U.S. students in segregated concentrated poverty schools, and limit the extraordinary costs of dropouts and unfair treatment in schools that helps lead to the dropout catastrophe harming many communities.

The short policy briefs linked above include citations to many longer scholarly studies as well as to numerous reports by the Civil Rights Project.

To access the Policy Briefing Agenda and List of Resources see attached pdf.