Educational leaders are bound by legal and ethical imperatives to make certain that all children have access to an education and the opportunity to learn. To better understand how law and ethics intersect, this article adopted the cultural study perspective to analyze U.S. Supreme Court opinions for language revealing the intersection of law and…

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 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…

This article explains the court decision on the "Brown v. Board of Education" lawsuit. In this case, there are findings that the Negro and white schools involved have been equalized, or are being equalized, with respect to buildings, curricula, qualifications and salaries of teachers, and other "tangible" factors. The Court…

Fifty years ago, on 17 May 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled in "Brown v. Board of Education" that the "separate but equal" doctrine that had effectively legalized "educational apartheid" some 58 years earlier deprived racially segregated children of the equal protection of laws guaranteed by the fourteenth…

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…

The nature of the interests in education that are protected by the Constitution may be ascertained by reference to certain due process and equal protection decisions of the Supreme Court reviewed in this paper. Although education is not a right granted by the Constitution, the Court has often recognized the importance of education, both to the…

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…

The first two court approved desegregation cases involving graduate and professional public schools during 1935-1940 are discussed. These cases demonstrate a shift in emphasis from segregated to desegregated public graduate and professional schools. The court invoked the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in both Maryland and…

Business partnership with public schools, while holding great promise for educational improvement, is hindered by legal questions about equity. Disagreement on how to apply this value to education has produced much litigation over school finance. Some allege that property tax financing violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth…

"Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas" (1954) ("Brown I"), is the United States Supreme Court's most significant ruling on education, if not of all time. In "Brown I", the Court unanimously held that "de jure" racial segregation in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth…

The argument of this book is that differences in educational opportunity are largely due to the wealth of the tax base in the local community, that the quality of a child's educational opportunity is related to the particular community in which his parents' economic capacity enables him to reside. It is argued that such economic differences deny…

Language minority students are legally entitled to a baseline opportunity for an adequate, affirmative, appropriate, and effective education, allowing them an "equally fair shot" at a high school diploma. Certain absolute legal standards for this baseline educational entitlement are posited to exist; this claim is supported by…