In this article Matthew B. Kautz theorizes schools as unique carceral institutions with the capacities to criminalize, surveil, discipline, and punish and demonstrates how they have mobilized these unique abilities to establish social control. By tracing the development of school disciplinary policy and practice following "Brown v. Board of…

This dissertation outlines a comprehensive research endeavor focused on the history of elementary literacy instruction in the Kansas City Kansas Public Schools (KCKPS) from 1990 until 2022. The research methodology combines historical analysis of artifacts, archives, and oral histories to answer the overarching research question, "What is the…

"Brown v. Board of Education" held that the educational systems of seventeen states that mandated segregated schools violated the Constitutional guarantee of equal protection. The decision helped set off the civil rights revolution. However, after so many years of backlash, schools of the South are dramatically less segregated than what…

May 17, 2024 marks the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that ruled segregated schools were "inherently unequal." At the time, North Carolina was one of 17 states that enforced de jure segregation, that is, segregation by law. The state of North Carolina and the school districts within…

The purpose of this paper was to initiate a conversation among scholars, educators, citizens, and policymakers over the vital question of what happened to Black teachers outside of the South as a result of the "Brown v. Board of Education" ruling and subsequent desegregation efforts. As a history of Black teachers before and after Brown…

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…

May 2020 was the 66th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka." In this case, perhaps the most important ruling of the 20th century, the Supreme Court ruled that the racial segregation of Black children in public schools was unconstitutional. In addition, the ruling in "Brown v.…

The Kansas City, Missouri School District (KCMSD) avoided federal oversight to comply with the desegregation ruling for nearly 30 years after "Brown v. Board of Education" by establishing a neighborhood concept for school attendance boundaries. "Jenkins v. Missouri" ended in 1995 with a U.S. Supreme Court decision to…

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education overturned the "separate but equal" principle promulgated in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson. Yet, almost 70 years after Brown, schools continue to be segregated, and the structure of the public education system has fostered inequities across the nation. Although…

It has been over 12 years since the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in "Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1" (2007), which forced school districts to begin thinking of new ways to integrate their schools without relying on race as the sole factor in their assignment plans. While some school…

Oregon needs Black educators in the K-12 public school system. In 35 school districts throughout the state, the number of students of color has risen by over 40% in recent years (Oregon Chief Education Office, 2019). The number of educators of color in the state is under 10%. The number of Black educators is even lower. Research has shown that…

The decades-long resistance to federally imposed school desegregation entered a new phase at the turn of the new century, when federal courts stopped pushing racial balance as a remedy for past segregation, adopting in its place a color-blind approach in judging local school districts' assignment plans. Using data that span 1998 to 2016 from North…

Recent efforts to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory in U.S. public schools have been criticized for fundamentally misunderstanding both CRT and K-12 teaching and teacher education. This paper argues that Anti-CRT fear-mongering in the U.S. is a new face on an old practice, the racist use of public education to sustain White supremacy. Using…

When the South Carolina legislature created the anti-NAACP oath in 1956, teachers across the state lost their positions. But it was the dismissal of twenty-one teachers at the Elloree Training School that captured the attention of the NAACP and Black media outlets. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, South Carolina's Black and…

This brief examines school integration and school choice through the lens of school transportation. It first provides a brief history of the role transportation has played in integration and choice policies. It then dives into three examples of initiatives that combine choice and integration, and the challenges they pose for transportation,…