Historically, private education has been an option mostly for families who could afford the cost or received financial help. Years of research have shown that many families would choose private schools and other educational resources for their children if they did not face insurmountable financial or geographical limitations. Private educational…

Purpose: If PK12 administrators aspire to interrupt bias-based bullying, they need to understand their role in perpetuating structural and social inequality. The purpose of this study was to examine administrators': 1) awareness of gender-based bullying, 2) initial intentions to address bullying, and 3) actions that interrupted or perpetuated…

School finance reforms are not well defined and are likely more prevalent than the current literature has documented. Using a Bayesian changepoint estimator, we quantitatively identify the years when state education revenues abruptly increased for each state between 1960 and 2008 and then document the state-specific events that gave rise to these…

No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds Act have made accountability central to conversations about education policy. But neither statute articulates a clear vision of what constitutes "quality" or "equity" in education, nor do they include a mechanism to ensure that schools have sufficient resources to pursue that…

Just before his death in 1970, John Scopes claimed that his famous trial "had no other effect upon my family" than his sister Lela losing her teaching job in Paducah, Kentucky. He was wrong. My interviews with John Scopes's family members and descendants -- most of whom have never talked about their famous relative until now -- reveal…

This article explores state school funding in Ohio and examines the concepts of equity and adequacy. This is accomplished not by conducting an empirical study but through a thorough review of the current environment of school funding in the state. For Ohio, the concepts of equity and adequacy are especially pertinent when considering that Ohio's…

Student assignment policies (SAPs) in K-12 schools can either reproduce or help ameliorate existing inequality. Some districts are trying to maintain voluntarily adopted integration policies despite the Supreme Court's recent 2007 decision in "Parents Involved," which prohibited most race-conscious school choice policies that were…

In "Vergara v. California" (2014), a trial-level court ruled that California laws governing teacher tenure and dismissal were unconstitutional. This study analyzes "Vergara" in light of the shifting use of the courts to promote equal educational opportunities and the changing power bases of educational interest groups,…

Many school districts have recently revised, or tried to revise, their policies for assigning students to schools, because the legal and political status of racial and other kinds of diversity is uncertain, and the districts are facing fiscal austerity. This article presents case studies of politics and student assignment policy in three large…

Our current conceptions of educational adequacy emerged out of an era dominated by equity-based school resource litigation. During that time of transitioning between successful litigation strategies, legal opinions provided clues as to how future courts might view a norm-referenced approach to establishing an adequacy standard--an approach that…

The anti-slavery ministry of Rev. John G. Fee and the unlikely establishment of Berea College in Kentucky in the 1850s, the first college in the southern United States to be coeducationally and racially integrated, are examined to further understand the conditions surrounding these extraordinary historical events. The Berea case illustrates how…

In this study, I employ geospatial techniques to assess the impact of school attendance zone "gerrymandering" on the racial/ethnic segregation of schools, using a large national sample of 15,290 attendance zones in 663 districts. I estimate the effect of gerrymandering on school diversity and school district segregation by comparing the…

As an institution built on the foundation of a Normal School, collaboration among faculty members and across program areas and academic units has been part of Western Kentucky University's (WKU) heritage since 1906. In addition to the various collaborative initiatives across campus, there are a variety of initiatives that involve various agencies…

"Residential segregation's causes are both knowable and known," writes Richard Rothstein. According to Rothstein, those causes are "20th century federal, state, and local policies explicitly designed to separate the races." Even seasoned policymakers are convinced that the residential isolation of low-income black children is…

Providing a safe classroom and laboratory environment should be the first priority of any career-technical and technology/engineering education instructor. Doing so not only increases the opportunity for student learning, but it also keeps instructors "out of hot water" with respect to legal issues of liability. In today's litigious…