Civil Rights in Education

This study investigates how teachers interact with immigrant-origin youth in particular school-based “contexts of reception” that mediate youth’s educational opportunities. One under-studied context is “sheltered instruction” where English learners (ELs) are placed into separate content-area courses to target their linguistic needs. This qualitative study highlights the unintended consequences of ELs’ placements by examining three in-depth teacher cases. Teachers’ accounts reveal how EL content-courses designed to increase access were in fact stigmatizing spaces where students made social distinctions and engaged in impression management to mitigate perceptions that they lacked intelligence because of their programmatic placements. Teachers also managed stigma in distinct ways, representing different orientations and communication strategies in response to students’ experiences of stigma. This investigation raises questions about the tensions embedded in how language status, race, and classification intersect with the very solutions intended to ameliorate inequalities, as well as teachers’ roles in the education of immigrant-origin EL youth.

I would claim that differential space is the conceptual culmination of the major spatial themes of  Lefebvre's spatial project. That said, I argue that it is essential to consider differential space and the right to the city as related intimately. Lefebvre developed both concepts in the politically volatile Parisian years of the mid-1960s. He did so partly in response to the evident political tensions and spatial contradictions impacting on France, especially Nanterre University and Paris in this turbulent epoch. Lefebvre developed the concept of the right to the city in his 1968 book Le droit à la ville: publication of which predated the May disturbances of that year. In the same year his book L’irruption de Nanterre au sommet was published in which he begins to develop the concepts of: urban utopia, urban society and differential space. It is unlikely to be coincidence that these books followed in close succession and I contend the right to differential urban space is a fundamental right to the city. Lefebvre counter-poses the abstract homogenised space of neo-capitalism against heterogeneous space of difference and the everyday lived space of ordinary urban inhabitants. I want to suggest here that although the powerful spatial practice and dominant representations of space subjugate the urban realm through the production of abstract space, it is possible for differential space to emerge.

Pre-colonial Africa was neither an educationally nor a technologically unsophisticated continent. While education was an integral part of the culture, issues of language identification and standardisation which are subject to contentious debate today were insignificant. Children learned community knowledge and history by asking questions instead of being taught in a hegemonic alien language. This article argues that education and development should take place in a broader context of human rights, and explores the links between three areas often dealt with separately, namely: language, education and development. The authors of this paper demonstrate that changing the face of the multi-dimensionalities of poverty within societies is possible only when education is constructed in a rights perspective over the favoured colonial languages, which are not an integral part of the culture and resources of a community. The authors make a distinction between the right to education and rights in education, the latter of which are found to be more significant for the challenges Africa faces. It is argued here that the elements of

Pre-colonial Africa was neither an educationally nor a technologically unsophisticated continent. While education was an integral part of the culture, issues of language identification and standardisation which are subject to contentious debate today were insignificant. Children learned community knowledge and history by asking questions instead of being taught in a hegemonic alien language. This article argues that education and development should take place in a broader context of human rights, and explores the links between three areas often dealt with separately, namely: language, education and development. The authors of this paper demonstrate that changing the face of the multi-dimensionalities of poverty within societies is possible only when education is constructed in a rights perspective over the favoured colonial languages, which are not an integral part of the culture and resources of a community. The authors make a distinction between the right to education and rights in education, the latter of which are found to be more significant for the challenges Africa faces. It is argued here that the elements of

This paper demonstrates that school choice is a civil rights issue, but not as currently framed. First, school choice, on average, does not produce the equity and social justice that proponents spin. Second, school choice has created a motely alliance between privatizers and traditional civil rights proponents that is not in the best interest of poor and minority students. Moving our schools from the public sector to the private sector is a false choice. Instead, as the research concisely demonstrates, parents and students should be able to choose a neighborhood public school with the important characteristics that are already established in the research literature and consistently observed in wealthy high-performing public and private schools. Access to those choices in democratically-controlled neighborhood public schools is the civil rights issue of our time— large-scale privatization of education is not.

Much of the sociological and historical literature, ignoring long standing interclass disputes over integration, takes for granted that during the 1950s, all blacks, parents, and members of civil rights organizations included, sought desegregation. This article examines the interests of different segments of New York City’s black community regarding the public schools during that era. I use contemporary newspaper accounts of protests and more recent theoretical insights to analyze and interpret differences in expressed goals and demands. This article not only documents considerable educationally oriented protest in a Northern city during a decade often overlooked by scholars, but highlights important class-based differences within a single city’s black community regarding changes needed. Of particular interest to social movement scholars are findings that reveal a large disjuncture between the demands of the grassroots parents’ organizations and established, elite civil rights organizations.While civil rights organizations sought abstract ideals of integration, parents demanded tangible improvements in their children’s schools. Class-based cultures and experiences are posited as the root of this disjuncture.

This is a creative non-fiction personal narrative i wrote about my awakening to Civil Rights in America. The original reason for writing the piece was to make students aware of the Civil Rights Movement, something many of them, including African-Americans, are woefully unaware of in the wake of the Ferguson lynching.

What do I mean by that? Lynching of African-Americans in the South was meant to send a signal that they were not to attempt to rise above their station. Ultimately, it did not matter who was lynched or why, as long as the rest of the black community got the message. I believe that the police, and renegades such as Neighborhood watchmen in Miami, have abrogated the right to send signals to young blacks that they "better know their place. It is my further belief that the reason for police lynchings is" that we have forgotten the Civil Rights struggle and that until we remember lynchings will continue to occur with increasing regularity.

This was a keynote address given at the celebration of the U.S. Civil Rights movement at Moldova State University in Chisinau, Moldova. The address summarized efforts in the U.S. to privatize public education and use market-based reform of schools and explored how these efforts could be a threat to the heritage and accomplishments of the civil rights movement.

"La Vonne I. Neal is ready for action.

Ready to disrupt cultural disparities in education. Ready to upend
the rising numbers of students of color leaving high school without
diplomas. Ready to remove institutional obstacles that dissuade
people of color from becoming teachers. Ready to enact potentially
transformational remedies."

Confronting persistent and widening inequality in educational opportunity, advocates have regarded the right to education as a linchpin for reform. In the forty years since the Supreme Court relegated that right to the domain of state constitutional law, its power has surged and faded in litigation challenging state school finance systems. Like so many of the students it is meant to protect, however, the right to education has generally underachieved, in part because those wielding it have not always appreciated its distinctive forms and function. Deconstructed, the right to education held by children has been formulated doctrinally as both a claim-right, imposing affirmative duties on the state to act, and an immunity, disabling certain state action. These two strands — oft-manifested as the claim-right to educational “adequacy” and an immunity entailing “equality” of educational opportunity — once considered irreconcilable are actually interlocked by the right’s core, historical f...