Background: For over 50 years, special education has been used as a tool to maintain racial segregation, particularly in schools located in low-income communities of color. This study utilized tenets found in disability critical race theory (DisCrit) and inclusive school leadership literature to examine the perceptions, practices, and challenges…

Purpose: In this article, I explore White racial purity desire as an underexamined ideology that might help us understand the compulsion of disciplinary violence against Black boys in U.S. public schools. By pointing to the dearth of research on sexual desire as a site of racial conflict and through revisiting Civil Rights-era fears about…

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…

Background: In 1954, the "Brown v. Board of Education" case involved four states and their school segregation laws and policies. During that period, de jure and de facto segregation were a way of life in America. Sixty years later, as most schools across the country have resegregated, the authors ask the question of whether we should be…

Purpose: This article examines factors that affect school board policy making about student diversity within two southern urban-suburban school districts experiencing changing demographics: Jefferson County Public Schools and the Wake County Public School System. Both districts have a history of voluntary integration efforts, and research shows…

Purpose: In this essay, we examine the racial politics of education in the six decades after "Brown". We consider the state of educational policy in an era in which market reform advocates often invoke the spirit of the "Brown" decision even as the Supreme Court has largely vacated the legal framework provided by…

The net result of the changes in the Supreme Court since the "Brown" decision in 1954 is to impede cases proceeding through the Court, to reduce corrective remedies for offending school districts, and to discourage lawsuits against segregated school districts. (Author/IRT)

Harold D. Lasswell's concept of the decision seminar and its associated idea sets have been successfully applied to educational problems, desegregation cases, and research. Lasswell's idea sets include decision phase analysis, a social process model, five intellectual tasks, and eight value/institution categories. (RW)

Summarizes and analyzes constitutional doctrine dealing with school desegregation and reviews whether the courts have kept school desegregation law clear and understandable. (Author/JM)