In our unequal society, families of color fully share the dream of college but their children often attend schools that do not prepare them, and the higher education system gives the best opportunities to the most privileged. Students of color hope for college but often face a dead end. For many young people, racial inequality puts them at a…

The Supreme Court has established the parameters within which universities can practice race-conscious affirmative action for college admissions in a series of decisions beginning in l978. The key issues concern the educational impact of campus diversity and whether or not it is necessary to give some consideration to students' race into order to…

Educators and policy makers must confront the race and class disparities in learning opportunities across American society. Nowhere are these disparities more acute than in the country's great metropolitan areas. As the demographic landscape continues to shift, metropolitan areas are fueling the transition to a majority-minority country. This…

This report analyzes the data on changes in patterns of racial segregation and their education consequences over a quarter century, from l987 to 2012. It examines a major transition in the racial and ethnic composition of Connecticut and the changes in integration and segregation in the schools of the state and its urban communities and it…

Purpose: School administrators and policy makers live in a complex, changing policy universe in which there are many competing demands and political pressures. Rarely is there much time to think about sensitive issues of long duration that are not part of the immediate demands they face. This article is about such an issue, a question that will…

The South was the central focus of the "Brown v. Board of Education" decision from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954. The landmark ruling held that laws mandating segregation in the school systems of the eleven states of the Old Confederacy, along with D.C. and six other states, violated the U.S. Constitution. Intense opposition met the…

The United States is home to the largest number of immigrants of any nation (United Nations 2006). In 2005, 38.5 million residents of the U.S. were foreign born. As a result, an increasing number of children in the public schools are either immigrants or the children of immigrants: more than one of every five. Most of these children come from…

Southern California is facing a demographic transformation that will become characteristic of the nation as a whole in coming decades. In this research, we present a historical review of the region's attempt to address school inequity, recent enrollment and segregation trends, and an investigation of whether segregation still matters. Our results…

In June 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review two related cases originating from school districts in Louisville, Kentucky and Seattle, Washington that involved voluntarily adopted racial integration plans. Concerned about the outcome of these cases, 553 social scientists submitted a social science statement to the Supreme Court summarizing…

In recognition of the increased demands facing state education departments in this accountability-focused era, Gail L. Sunderman and Gary Orfield present results from a study on the response of these agencies to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). In this article, Sunderman and Orfield analyze issues of state capacity, compiling data from…