Ideas from Civil Rights Lawyers
- Ensure that education in United States is declared a fundamental right: “Education is perhaps the most important function of state and local government.”
- Call for better enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act, which may be an obscure act, but is meant to feed money into under-represented communities. The segregated housing patterns continue to feed and foment in much of the areas we have discussed about the problems that Latinos currently experienced in education.
- Ensure policies within schools do not follow segregation patterns, such as inappropriate disciplinary actions against minorities, and watch school district outcomes of alternative education models and use of non-certified teachers, to ensure that none of those issues continue to be problematic.
- Conduct research to demonstrate that “separate but equal” can never truly be equal, given that we continue to have a segregated educational system.
- Have researchers and writers talking about where we are now and how impossible it is going to be within 25 years to get to true equality of educational opportunities for everyone in light of Justice O’Connor’s disconcerting opinion in the Grutter case that we have 25 years to accomplish equality of educational opportunities for everybody.
- Reform the admissions practices in higher education by continuing to call for a de-emphasis on standardized testing and review alternative ways to admit students to higher education.
Roundtable Co-Leads: Mr. Gary Bledsoe National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Mr. Albert Kauffman Harvard Univeristy, The Civil Rights Project
