|
The nation cannot afford discriminatory barriers that unfairly limit or deny educational access based on factors like race, national origin, sex, or disability. Inequality in education prevents the nation from fulfilling its potential, and ensuring equal educational opportunity remains one of the civil rights movement's top priorities.
Impact:
Racial disparities
The benefits of a commitment to equal educational opportunities are clear. Yet, continuing challenges to equal educational opportunity remain:
- Latino youth suffer from the highest dropout rate of any group. Latinos over the age of 16 are more than twice as likely to drop out of school as African-American students, and four times more likely to drop out of school than white students. (Keeping the Promise: Hispanic Education and America's Future).
- A disproportionate number of minority students are assigned to special education programs, while white students are disproportionately assigned to gifted and talented programs.
- There are disparities in the rates and severity of discipline imposed on minority as compared to white students.
- The use of tests to make high stakes decisions about students' educational opportunities when such tests adversely affect minority students and are not shown to be required by educational necessity.
- Figures show that Latino school-age population is growing faster than any other group in the country; but achievements gap remains, with Latino students falling behind in reading, math and science by age nine. Furthermore, more then one-third of Latino high school students are a grade behind.
Bilingual Education
Recent initiatives to cut back bilingual education, such as California's Proposition 227, eliminating bilingual education in public schools, will only further limit educational opportunities for students with limited English proficiency.
Title IX
The fight for equal educational opportunity also includes efforts to end sex discrimination. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded education programs or activities. To identify just one of its benefits, Title IX has greatly expanded athletic opportunities for women and girls. The National Women's Law Center reports that when Title IX was first enacted 1972, girls made up only 7.4% of all high school athletes; girls were 40% of all high school athletes by 2000. Similarly, in 1972, fewer than 32,000 women participated in intercollegiate athletics, receiving only 2% of all athletic dollars; by 2000, that number had quadrupled, with women comprising 40% of all college athletes. Title IX's success in this area is further demonstrated by American women's recent Olympic successes -- including gold medals in basketball, soccer, softball, gymnastics, and ice hockey. Despite Title IX's success, its work is not yet done. Civil rights advocates point to the continuing need to address sex segregation in technical, vocational, and career education programs in junior and community colleges, the issue of sex-based differentials in the SAT and other standardized tests that do not accurately predict academic performance, and the need for affordable and adequate child care for low-income mothers to enable them to pursue higher education.
Background
It is no accident that equal educational opportunity was at the center of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the pivotal 1954 Supreme Court decision that launched the modern civil rights movement.
In many ways, the drive to end segregated education and put African American and white children in the same classrooms was the most radical and potentially far-reaching aspect of the civil rights movement. Such change was meant to alter the attitudes and socialization of children-beginning at the youngest ages-as well as end the inequality inherent in all "separate but equal: facilities-whether they were drinking fountains, public accommodations, or the schools.
In 1974, the Supreme Court enhanced the rights of "limited English proficient" (LEP) students in Lau v. Nichols, making clear that school districts are required to provide assistance to LEP students that ensure that they receive the same opportunities as fluent English students. This was a result of various immigrant groups demanding that their children's education be facilitated.
An ongoing priority for the civil rights community is support for a strengthened public education system through the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). ESEA is the federal government's single largest investment in elementary and secondary education.
It provides targeted resources to help ensure that disadvantaged students have access to a quality public education, as well as programs to reduce class size, provide education technology, promote safe and drug-free schools, fund bilingual education and support schools in development, and enhancing school systems' capacity. ESEA was originally authorized in 1965 and every five years it has been reauthorized since. ESEA expired in the year 2000 and was recently reauthorized.
Title IX, too, has encountered a number of obstacles since its enactment. In a 1984 case called Grove City v. Bell, the Supreme Court interpreted Title IX very narrowly, constraining its protections to the limited program within an institution that actually received federal funding - e.g., a college's financial aid department - rather than covering the educational institution as a whole. Under this interpretation, athletic programs (considered to be among the most unequal of all college and university programs) were virtually immune from Title IX scrutiny because they rarely receive direct federal funding. But, after a heated political debate, Congress voted in 1988 to override President Reagan's veto of the Civil Rights Restoration Act (CRRA). The CRRA reversed the Court's decision in Grove City, reaffirming Congressional intent to prohibit sex discrimination throughout all of a federally funded education institution's programs.
Useful Web Sites
No Child Left Behind Annual Report to Congress - 2005
www.NoChildLeftBehind.gov
www.yesican.gov
www.ed.gov
www.edweek.org
www.nabe.org
| 
