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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Southern Schools: More Than a Half-Century After the Civil Rights Revolution
- The Civil Rights Project has been following changes in the South for 21 years, and issuing regular reports on Southern states' schools. For the past decade or so, the Civil Rights Project has labeled the South-- long defined by a black-white paradigm--a tri-racial region. The Southern region used in Civil Rights Project reports includes the following states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. since its creation 21 years ago. This short research brief is issued with Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Education and Civil Rights.
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Examining the Crossroads: School Segregation in Indiana
- To examine how demographic shifts are changing the composition of Indiana’s schools, the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy (CEEP) in collaboration with the Civil Rights Project used Common Core of Data (CCD) school enrollment data, from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), to illustrate enrollment trends within and across school districts in the last few decades (1988–2015).
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Suspended Education in Massachusetts: Using Days of Lost Instruction Due to Suspension to Evaluate Our Schools
- This study uses percentages reported by the state to estimate the total days of missed instruction per 100 students enrolled. The authors argue that this school-level analysis is an ideal indicator for the state’s proposed new accountability system because it gives meaningful information to the public about school climate with regard to how much lost instruction is incurred by students, an area that schools have a great deal of control over.
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The Hidden Cost of California's Harsh School Discipline
- The new report calculates the financial consequences of suspending students in each California school district with more than 100 students, and for the state as a whole.
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Our Segregated Capital: An Increasingly Diverse City with Racially Polarized Schools
- This report, the last of a series on 13 states and districts, analyzes the magnitude and trend of racial segregation and its educational consequence among schools in the District of Columbia.
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Texas Top Ten Percent Plan: How It Works, What Are Its Limits, and Recommendations to Consider
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The Promise and Peril for Universities Using Correlates of Race in Admissions in Response to the Grutter and Fisher Decisions
