Tag: Education

Grating Race-Conscious Student Assignment Plans in the Cauldron of Parents Involved v. Seattle School District

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School districts today remain racially segregated partly due to vestiges of past discrimination and an expanded resegregation of our public schools. While the resegregation today remains mostly de facto, it still presents great dangers to race relations in our country if, from their impressionable years, students are not exposed to the benefits of diversity as part of an overall educational experience. As Chief Justice Warren noted in Brown v. Board of Education, “[s]eparate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Consequently, various school districts across the country have voluntarily adopted race-conscious plans in order to ensure a diverse educational experience for students. As revealed in our examination of Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 and seven pre-Parents Involved cases, these voluntary plans have come under increasing attack. This has spurred great fears of legal repercussions in school administrators, leading them to abandon efforts to implement race-conscious plans or to dismantle those already in place. The media is not helping calm those fears either, and the misperception lingers that race-conscious plans are unconstitutional. If we are to diminish or reverse the growing trend of resegregation and ensure our students are educated in diverse schools, we must educate administrators and policymakers about the continued viability of race-conscious plans in schools. Our article is one step forward in that direction. Read More …

Section 529 Prepaid College Tuition Scholarships: Help in Uncertain Economic Times

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The economy is wretched. The United States’ economic recovery is dependent, in part, on the country’s position in a global economy. If we as a nation wish to remain competitive in a knowledge-based economy that requires a higher level of education, we must facilitate greater access to postsecondary education. Unfortunately, in the last two decades, the United States has fallen from first to tenth place in the world in the proportion of its population that has obtained that all important postsecondary education. President Obama has set a goal of restoring the United States to first place by 2020. Read More …

Trading Diplomas for Dollars: How Michigan Lawmakers Could Use Education as an Economic Development Model

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As our nation struggles to endure one of the worst economic crises of its history, and cities across the nation suffer the dire consequences of depressed economies, one major city stands out. That city is Detroit. In 2008, the United States Census Bureau reported that Detroit was the poorest large city in the nation. This statistic is not surprising, considering the many economic problems beleaguering the city. High concentrations of urban poor, as well as the rapid collapse of the major mainstay of the state’s economy—the automobile industry—and the concomitant rise in unemployment and loss of population, all problems by themselves, have collectively resulted in, among other things, an ever-shrinking tax base for the city. To see evidence of the severe economic problems facing the city, one need only drive down a neighborhood street, where, in many instances, “decaying neighborhoods, weedy, trash-strewn lots and vacant, burned-out houses” are the physical tokens of an all-too-common scene: neighborhoods consumed by extreme poverty and urban blight, exacerbated in recent times by the housing catastrophe, and plagued by violent crime, the highest rate experienced by any large city in the nation. Read More …