U.S. public schools provide substantially different educational opportunities to students--even within school districts, where attendance zone boundaries (AZBs) shape most children's access to schools. The (re)drawing of AZBs is therefore a highly consequential policy decision. In this paper, I study how AZB changes in the Washington, D.C.…

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were developed by the United Nations in 2015 to encompass universal respect for equality and non-discrimination regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, and cultural diversity. Since 2000, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) have aligned with SDG 4.3 by developing higher education…

Regardless of race, the mission and purpose of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) is to build upon students' skills and abilities and to train students as entrepreneurs and professionals, both locally and globally, in public and private working environments (U.S. Department of Education, n.d.). However, the creation of HBCUs can…

On May 15, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division issued a fact sheet highlighting examples of the Division's recent work to protect students and combat segregation and race-based discrimination in schools. The Civil Rights Division has worked for decades to ensure equal educational opportunities for all of America's…

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…

Desegregation in the south had many goals, among them was creating equitable opportunities for students in schools. Much of the literature on desegregation efforts are focused on general education and little research has been done on the effects it had on school orchestra programs. Orchestra programs in Texas schools have had a historically strong…

Despite earning the highest grade point average (GPA) in her graduating class at the recently integrated Cleveland High School (CHS) in Cleveland, Mississippi, Ms. Jasmine Shepard, an African-American female, was named "co-valedictorian" with Ms. Heather Bouse, a White female, who had a lower GPA. Utilizing Derrick Bell's rules of racial…

The American voters have spoken, and the country will inaugurate a Biden-Harris Administration in January. In his first speech as President-Elect on November 7, 2020, Joe Biden said that, "the battle to achieve racial justice and root out systemic racism in this country" was a pillar of the Biden-Harris transition plan. This important…

This dissertation includes three chapters on industrial organization and the economics of education, centered around New York City's public high school choice procedure. In the first chapter, I document evidence of informational frictions in the usage of the public high school choice in New York City and the patterns of racial disparities. The…

The longstanding overrepresentation of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) students in United States K-12 exclusionary school discipline outcomes (i.e., suspension, expulsions, referrals to law enforcement and arrests) underscores the unrecognized concept that school discipline disparities are a purported outcome--rather than a…

This conceptual paper analyzes persistent challenges to racially diversify higher education in Texas, paying special attention to trends at this Southern state's most selective flagship--University of Texas at Austin. We apply critical race theorist Kimberlè Crenshaw's frame of race liberalism and her view of equality as either expansive or…

Whereas increased scholarly attention is focusing on contemporary school closings, noticeably absent is the placement of this scholarship within the historical context of Black people's social experiences. This paradigm shift would reveal a much longer history that has had devastating consequences for Black people. In this article, we identify…

Diversity is a ubiquitous concept in Education. Our contemporary racial discourse has been taken over by diversity talk. That is, to talk about race in the colorblind era in the contexts of school admissions or educational policy is to do so through the language of diversity. However, the hegemonic ascendancy of diversity has been dependent on the…

In "Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College ("SFFA")," the United States Supreme Court revisited an issue that had been litigated before it twenty years earlier. In two separate cases brought against the University of Michigan, the issue was whether it was a violation of the Constitution…

Mexican Americans have a long history in the struggle to end school segregation and achieve educational equality. Rubén Donato and Jarrod Hanson trace that history through a series of court cases that show how their fight for desegregation both intersects with and differs from the more well-known struggle of Black Americans. In some cases, Mexican…