Interested in Education Law? There's Still Work to be Done.
We blogged earlier that the U.S. Department of Education is planning on ramping up its civil rights enforcement and an article in yesterday’s Washington Post indicates that this is likely a good plan. A county school district in southwestern Mississippi was just ordered by a federal judge to comply with a desegregation order that was initially put into place in 1970. The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division alleged that the county school board was taking steps to actively re-segregate the local schools, primarily by allowing white students to transfer to an identifiably white school, and clustering the remaining white students in the other school such that there were racially identifiable classrooms at all grade levels.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has called education “the civil rights issue of our generation,” and cases like this reaffirm that, all across the country, a lot of work remains to be done to ensure a quality education for all.