Part of the Center for Education Equity's "Exploring Equity Issues" series, this paper gives a background on religious discrimination in schools and provides strategies on what schools can do to address and resolve these problems. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution establishes the right to the free exercise of…

In the early 1990s, the Supreme Court established standards to facilitate the release of school districts from racial desegregation orders. Over the next two decades, federal courts declared almost half of all districts under court order in 1991 to be "unitary"--that is, to have met their obligations to eliminate dual systems of…

Policy making can be viewed as a large-scale attempt at social justice leadership intended to address vast inequities that persist and are perpetuated in the U.S. K-12 education system. The study examines the text of the Minnesota Desegregation Rule to discern its underlying discourses as they relate to race, racism, and social justice. The…

This article reviews the literature evaluating the impact of school choice programs on racial integration. Evidence on the impacts of magnet schools, voluntary busing programs, open enrollment practices, charter schools, and voucher programs is reviewed. The literature is mixed on this question, finding that the impacts of choice on racial…

The desegregation of American public school systems in the wake of "Brown v. Board of Education" (1954) was a vast, protracted, and, in many cases, frustrated historical project that impacted individual communities in a multitude of ways. Drawing upon official school board records, court documents, oral histories, newspaper accounts,…

Discourses that supported de jure segregated schools often invoked White innocence in the form of altruistic motivations. These same invocations are found in more contemporary school policy discourses. The authors of this article argue, based on the concept of intertextuality of discourse, the existence of contemporary schooling policies as…

Contemporary models of operationalizing diversity on college campuses focus on the integration of diversity goals with the overall educational mission in ways that maximize the benefits of diversity for all. A growing number of institutions have created chief diversity officer (CDO) positions to procedurally and symbolically centralize diversity…

Schools do not receive much recognition within urban sociological research for the role they perform in shaping the demographic, structural, and social features of neighborhoods, cities, and metropolitan areas. In contrast, this article links schools, and the racial avoidance that operates through educational policy, to the extreme economic…

The demise of apartheid in 1994 introduced many changes to the social, political, and economic sectors of South Africa with similar changes in the higher education sector. This article offers an integrative review and analysis of higher education policies implemented and legislation passed that significantly impacted the nature of the South…

Summarizing my prior work, the only book length treatment of the "acting White" phenomenon (Buck, 2010), I argue that while desegregation was both a moral necessity and a social good, the manner in which desegregation was implemented by White authorities led indirectly to today's achievement gaps. In the course of desegregation…

"The Integration Anomaly" explores a "puzzling divergence" between changes in metropolitan residential and school segregation. Based on a review of existing literature, it argues that the best way to address rising school segregation is to decouple school assignment from neighborhoods through universal school choice. The report…

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has a relatively long history in the United States, from where it originated, dating back to the 1980s. Its presence in UK academic literature, however, is more recent, having surfaced in the first decade of the twenty-first century. I focus in this paper on developments in CRT in the UK from January 2012 to January…

In 1956, southern Congressmen signed the Southern Manifesto, rejecting the Supreme Court's "Brown v. Board of Education" ruling. This moment, in the general American consciousness, marked the rise of White massive resistance to Black advancement, a racist foray doomed to be swept aside by civil rights forces and a determined federal…

The widespread assumption in the United States today is that traditional urban public schools are failing. Market-based solutions, particularly charter schools, are seen as the way to improve urban education. How then can we understand a large urban district where educational actors have furthered a locally popular alternative vision? This article…

This comparative study examines the historical development of race equality efforts during the 1970s and 1980s in two global cities--Toronto and London--and the role of African Canadian and Black British educators in longstanding school-community partnerships. I characterize the leadership stance of Black educators as boundary spanners and…