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: To adapt to increasingly diverse classrooms, some school districts are trying to offer additional curriculum that represents the diversity of their students. California, where half of school-age children are Latinx, is at the forefront of including Latinx histories in its curriculum. The state's 2017 California History-Social…

The Honorable Judge Nathaniel Jones litigated the "Milliken v. Bradley I" case before the U.S. District Court and Supreme Court in 1971 and 1974. Nathaniel Jones was born May 12, 1926 in Youngstown, Ohio, and served as the general counsel for the NAACP from 1969-1979. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter nominated Nathaniel Jones to the U.S.…

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: In "Milliken v. Bradley" (1974), the U.S. Supreme Court deemed unconstitutional a metropolitan-wide desegregation plan in Detroit that sought to achieve racial balance in part by busing white suburban students to the city's majority black schools. In a stark departure from "Brown v. Board of Education of…

Background/Context: The 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision on Brown v. Board of Education concluded that segregated schools were inherently unequal and therefore unlawful. That decision was not based solely upon the notion that segregated black schools were inferior in terms of academic instruction, curricular rigor, resources, etc., but also on…

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.…

Background/Context: Prior research on "Milliken v. Bradley" focuses on the failure of this case to implement interdistrict busing in the highly segregated Detroit schools. Much of this work focuses explicitly on desegregation, rather than on equity and addressing individual, systemic, institutional, and organizational challenges that may…

Background: This article examines the contemporary implications of the "Milliken v. Bradley" (1974) decision for educational inequality between school districts in U.S. metropolitan areas. We focus upon four metropolitan areas that were highly segregated in the 1970s but which met different fates in court: We first examine Detroit and…

The case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka holds an esteemed position in the secondary school curriculum. Given prominent attention in virtually all social studies textbooks and included in more state standards documents than any other Supreme Court ruling, the Brown decision is often presented to secondary school students as a democratic…

Few people in the United States are aware of the central role that Mexican Americans have played in some of the most important legal struggles regarding school desegregation. The most significant such case is Mendez v. Westminster (1946) , a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of more than 5,000 Mexican American students in Orange County,…

This article reflects upon changes in U.S. education since the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The authors reject both the naively hopeful and the bitterly cynical interpretations of the efficacy of Brown in favor of a more moderate assessment: Brown has had many positive effects, they…

Since the landmark "Brown v. Board of Education" ruling, most of the literature on school desegregation has focused on the experiences of African American students or school districts in which remedies were fashioned for African American students. However, little is known about the efforts of other ethnic and racial groups who have…

This article reports on the extensive qualitative and quantitative findings of a multi-method participatory study designed to assess urban and suburban youths' experiences of racial class justice or injustice in their schools and throughout the nation. Constructed as a letter to Zora Neale Hurston, who was immediately critical of the Brown…