This dissertation traces the way hair is framed in judicial texts about dress code policy in the U.S. between 1969 and 2023. Using 46 court cases from district, appellate, state supreme, and federal supreme courts, the study first considers how dress code is brought to courts over these 54 years, and the kinds of legal claims made in these cases.…

The Supreme Court ruled in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973) that there is no constitutional right to education, but that has not stopped families and education activists from arguing that this right is implicit in the Fourteenth Amendment. Nicholas Tampio contends that, based upon the history of federal involvement in…

A decade of research on school discipline has made society keenly aware of the "elephant in the room." Overwhelmingly, Black students are "wounded" permanently when they are suspended over and over for offenses that are overlooked when their white counterparts commit the same infraction. Since Black students are suspended…

This study addresses the segregation of English language learner (ELL) students in schools across Texas. We descriptively analyze levels of racial, economic, and linguistic isolation experienced by ELL students across the state of Texas. We also examine the association between segregation by race/ethnicity, economic disadvantage, and language…

Since the separate-but-equal era, students attending schools with high concentrations of Black students have attempted to improve the quality of their educations through school finance litigation. Because of the negative effects of racial isolation, Black students might consider mounting school finance litigation to force states to explicitly…

The instability of the U.S. economy and its competitiveness in the global market has lead to increase request for investment in Higher Education programs. There exists a rising awareness among scholars of how inextricably education is tied to the strength of the economy, the well being of its populace, as well as the importance of a diversified…

The U.S. District of Columbia's Federal Circuit Court decision in "Hobson v. Hanson" (1967) case eliminated racial discriminatory tracking practices in the nation's capitol's public schools. The court ruled that D.C. Public Schools' tracking violated African American and low income students' rights to equal opportunities to education…

The Supreme Court's opinion in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case legally ended decades of racial segregation in America's public schools. Originally named after Oliver Brown, the first of many plaintiffs listed in the lower court case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS, the landmark decision actually resolved five separate…

If one was an African-American student in a large Northern city 50 years ago, his public school, very likely, would have been segregated--even in New England. Only one year earlier, in "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas," the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that legally sanctioned school segregation violated the 14th Amendment…

In the fall of 1953, the Supreme Court of the United States received the case of "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka" (347 U.S. 483, 1954) that raised essential questions, including whether separate but "equal" facilities in education can be provided for black students in the United States or whether the consideration of…