Mexican American educational history has become a vibrant field of study since the late 1980s. In the last seven years, however, it is notable that this research has inspired community-based efforts to preserve and publicly commemorate challenges to unequal education. In this commentary, we discuss the archival recovery of the "Francisco…

Background/Context: In the 1973 "Rodriguez" decision, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Constitution does not guarantee a substantive federal right to education. So far, this holding has not been adequately contextualized with many other statements the Court has made concerning the nature of education in the constitutional order. For…

Background/Context: School segregation scholarship underlines that litigation challenging the segregation of Mexican American students in Texas schools stressed their legal racial identity as white. "The other white race strategy," as scholars call it, granted Mexican Americans the right to access resources designated for the country's…

Background: In the past decade, the laws governing teachers' employment have been at the center of legal and political conflicts across the United States. Vergara v. California challenged five California state statutes that provide employment protections for teachers. In June 2014, a California lower court declared the statutes unconstitutional…

Background/Context: Urban educational systems have garnered focused examination as bastions of educational inequity, particularly along race and class cleavages. These systems are often cited as inefficient bureaucratic institutions plagued by financial mismanagement and political corruption that produce dismal achievement outcomes. Contemporary…

Background/Context: This article examines a 2011 court case in which an Ohio state court convicted and jailed a poor, single, Black mother of two school-aged children for "stealing an education." Using a false address, the mother, Kelley Williams-Bolar, enrolled her daughters in a public school district that was more privileged and amply…

Background: Over the past decade, courts increasingly have considered cases that involve clashes between public, secular private, and religious institutions in education. Such clashes appear to have intensified as recently as the 2019-2020 Supreme Court term, and the confirmation of Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Court in 2020 suggests…

Background: Over the past decade, courts and administrative agencies increasingly have considered cases that involve clashes between charter school proponents and teacher unions. While these cases have focused on a range of education policy issues, some cases have focused on arguably the most important legal and policy distinction applicable to…

Background/Context: Pickering v. Board of Education, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1968, is considered the high-water mark in the constitutional protection of public employee free speech. Two significant decisions issued by that Court since Pickering have limited public employees' expressive rights: Connick v. Myers and Garcetti v.…

Using Howard Winant's racial dualism theory, this chapter explains how race was discursively operationalized in the recent U.S. Supreme Court higher education antiracial diversity case Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin.

Background/Context: "Milliken v. Bradley" (1974) ("Milliken I") is a pivotal Supreme Court case that halted a metropolitan school desegregation remedy between Detroit and 53 surrounding suburban school districts. In a 5-4 Supreme Court decision, the "Milliken" ruling was a significant retraction from the landmark…

Background/Context: Legal scholars have cited the Fifth Circuit's ruling in Dixon v. Alabama State Board of Education (1961) as the beginning of a revolution for students' rights that ended the in loco parentis relationship between colleges and their students. But little has been written about the students' activism that led to this seminal case.…

Background/Context: The institutionalization of in loco parentis in the wake of Gott v. Berea College (1913) marked a major turning point in the evolution of student management theory and practice. Focusing on the crucial decade of the 1920s, when American higher education first became a mass enterprise, this study explores the interaction of…

Background/Context: Legal scholars often contrast the litigiousness of contemporary American higher education with a bygone era characterized by near-absolute respect for academic authority. According to this account, a doctrine of "academic deference" insulated colleges until the 1960s, when campus protests and new federal regulations…

Background/Context: This article employs critical policy analysis as it examines the historical underpinnings of racialized policy discrimination in Detroit. It considers histories, discourses, and oppressive structures as it seeks to understand how policies have been and currently are implemented by Whites in predominantly Black urban areas.…