News

This section includes press releases and statements about education and racial justice issues.

Mexico City Summit Addresses Needs of Students Shared by U.S. and Mexico

Building on the success of last September’s ground-breaking UC Mexico Initiative research symposium in Mexico City, education officials, policy makers, researchers and educators are gathering again for a summit in the Mexican capital to discuss ways California and Mexico can collaborate to improve educational opportunities for students they share across borders. In a historic first, both the Secretary of Education for Mexico, Aurelio Nuño, and California’s Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson will attend the Summit.

Research Shows Reversal of Civil Rights Era Gains in Southern Schools

This report by Civil Rights Project at UCLA and the Center for Education and Civil Rights at Penn State finds intense segregation of Black and Latino students in the South with charter schools more segregated for Black and Latino Students. Segregation in the South is double segregation for blacks and Latinos, meaning that they are in schools segregated both by race and by poverty in a region where the share of students poor enough to receive free or subsidized lunches has soared to nearly 60% of all students. Both segregation by race and poverty, research shows, are systematically linked to weaker opportunities and student outcomes.

National Assoc of State Boards of Ed encourages states to add school discipline indicator to state-wide accountability plans

The National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) issued a policy brief encouraging states to add a school discipline indicator to their state-wide school accountability plans required by the Every Student Succeeds Act. The brief, co written by CCRR Director Daniel Losen, was based on research findings demonstrating large disparities by race and disability status and linking high suspension rates to negative academic and life outcomes.

New Research Shows Increasing School Segregation in South

Research, to be released on Wednesday, May 24, 2017, by the UCLA Civil Rights Project and the Center for Education and Civil Rights at Penn State finds reversal of Civil Rights era gains, increase in intense segregation for Black and Latino students in the Southern region

Segregation Prevalent in Indiana Schools

Although Indiana has seen rapid growth in the enrollment of non-White students, overall interactions between White and non-White students remain low. For example, the average Black student in Indiana attends a school where 68 percent of the students are non-White, while the average White student in Indiana attends a school where 19 percent of the students are non-White.

MA Students Missed More Than 156,000 Days of Instruction Due to Discipline

This research study shows that the overuse of suspensions in the Commonwealth’s schools is harming educational opportunities for all students, but with the burden impacting black students and students with disabilities more than other groups. The study is the first ever to quantify the school-level days of missed instruction due to discipline, reporting both the black/white gap and the impact on students with disabilities. Researchers find 38 schools averaged greater than 100 days of missed instruction for every 100 enrolled due to suspensions. Black students and students with disabilities missed the most days and most missed instruction was in response to minor misbehavior.

School Suspensions Cost California Billions

New report shows that suspensions have high costs in nearly every district in California. Researchers find that more suspensions leads to lower graduation rates, lower tax revenues, and higher taxpayer costs for criminal justice, welfare, health care and more economic ramifications.

New Report Shows Schools in the Nation’s Capital Remain Intensely Segregated; Charter Schools are most segregated in the City

The UCLA Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles today released a new research report on segregation and its alternatives in Washington D.C. showing that despite the sharply increasing diversity of the nation’s capital, generation after generation of African American students in Washington D.C. have attended intensely segregated schools and still do in a city with a wider racial achievement gap than any state.

Educational Needs of Students We Share Go Unmet. Symposium examines educational experiences of students who attend school on both sides of the border. Seeks solutions to improve learning opportunities.

The United States and Mexico share hundreds of thousands of students, but their educational needs too often go unmet and their potential is imperiled because of poor communication, bureaucratic challenges, language barriers and inadequate and unequal educational opportunities on both sides of the border, said educational researchers from both countries at a research symposium in Mexico City.

California Community Colleges Have Opportunity to Increase BAs for Underrepresented Students

With the passage of California State Bill 850 in 2015 and new community college bachelor’s degree programs due to commence in 2017, California has the unprecedented opportunity to provide an important spur to the state’s economy and make significant gains in BA production among its underrepresented (URM) students.

Statement by Civil Rights Project on Fisher Decision

Today’s decision in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin is an historic reaffirmation of affirmative action as a necessary tool for creating diverse campuses.

School Suspensions Cost Taxpayers Billions

UCLA Study: More Suspensions Lead to More Dropouts; Over a Lifetime, More Dropouts Mean Reduced Tax Revenue, and Higher Costs for Crime, Welfare, and Health Care.

Realizing the Economic Advantages of a Multilingual Workforce

In a new economic analysis, CRP/PDC Co-director Dr. Patrícia Gandára and coauthor Sylvia Acevedo visit the issue of bilingual education from an economic perspective.

Brown at 62: School Segregation by Race, Poverty and State

This research brief shows how intensifying segregation interacts with a dramatic increase in concentrated poverty in our schools, escalating the educational harm.

CRP Co-director calls on advocates and scholars to monitor decentralization of new federal ed law

CRP Co-Director, in a journal article on the new federal education law, calls on education and civil rights advocates and scholars to monitor the massive decentralization of federal education funds to the states. This special issue of the Education Law & Policy Review commemorates the 50th Anniversary of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015.

Study Finds Many Charter Schools Feeding "School-to-Prison Pipeline"

A first-ever analysis of school discipline records for the nation’s more than 5,250 charter schools shows a disturbing number are suspending big percentages of their black students and students with disabilities at highly disproportionate rates compared to white and non-disabled students.

CCRR/CRP supports newly proposed regulations by U.S. Dept of Education to correct flaws in special education law

The Center for Civil Rights Remedies (CCRR) at the UCLA Civil Rights Project applauds the newly proposed regulations, from the U.S. Department of Education, which ensure that states more effectively address the problem of racial inequity in special education identification, placement and disciplinary exclusion. The proposed rules were issued earlier this week, on Tuesday, February 23, 2016 and CCRR encourages their support. Please read our following response (a more complete and official response will be posted within 75 days).

California School Suspensions Decline, Driven by Fewer Punishments for Disruption/Defiance

Districts Making Progress toward Reducing Racial/Ethnic Suspension Disparities, though Gaps Still Remain. Study Shows Higher Test Scores Correlated with Lower Suspension Rates, Reducing Concern that Discipline Reforms May Jeopardize Student Achievement.

More than 800 Scholars File Brief with U.S. Supreme Court Supporting Diversity Policies in College Admissions

More than 800 social scientists from all parts of the U.S. recently submitted a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court presenting evidence on the need to maintain colleges’ rights to consider race as one of many factors in selecting students. We believe that this brief is the most massive outpouring of scholarly support ever for a social science brief in a civil rights case.

Education Secretary Duncan Advocates Shifting Money From Prisons to Schools

CRP's Center for Civil Rights Remedies supports Education Secretary Arnie Duncan's September 30, 2015 proposal to shift funds from prisons to schools.