A New Paradigm of Education Reform Litigation

Shavar Jeffries:

I believe it is time, once again, to consider a new approach to using the law to facilitate meaningful educational opportunities for minority children. I suggest that civil-rights lawyers initiate a new wave of litigation premised on reshaping the governance of public schools and, in so doing, empowering minority parents to assume meaningful decision-making roles concerning the kind of education available to children of color. Litigation efforts to this point have been focused fundamentally on widescale, largely uniform government decision-making about the educational needs of minority children; the voice and needs of individual children and parents have largely been unheeded. And it is usually the case that policymaking focused on across-the-board remedies inevitably ignores the particular needs of minority children. The approach I suggest does not imply, however, an atomistic preoccupation with individual needs in opposition to the civic and social purposes motivating public subsidy of educational services; rather, I suggest a public-private form of governance fundamentally different from the almost exclusively government-centered litigation model used today.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 13, 2006 7:38 AM
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