penn state college of education's report on education and civil rights

Education and Civil Rights

InsIghts from the 2014 Penn state educatIon and cIvIl rIghts conference

RepoRt on

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4 dean’s message

6 educatIon and cIvIl rIghts conference

8 ConferenceOverview

9 KeynoteSpeaker:LaniGuinierIdentifiesThemestoDefineaNewMovement

10 ConferenceClosingSessionFeaturesCallforaNewMovement

12 EmergingScholarsSymposium

16 rePort on educatIon and cIvIl rIghts

18 FinancialAidProgramsandAccesstoHigherEducation

20 SchoolDistrictsStruggletoAdapttoEnglishLanguageLearnerNeeds

22 PromiseofEqualityfromCommonCoreisNotSoEasilyAchieved

26 DynamicDiversityTowardaContextualUnderstandingofCriticalMass

28 ReportIndicatesthatSchoolDistrictsPursuingDiversityFaceNumerousChallenges

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The College of Education at Penn State is deeply committed to embracing the richness of diversity as well as to reducing disparities in opportunities and performance for students of all

ages. Most recently, we declared these unequivocal commitments in our Strategic Plan for the next five years and spelled out the specific implementation steps we anticipate taking.

As we state in our plan:

“We recognize that from an early age, individ-uals can be at risk for inequitable educational opportunities because of their ethnic, racial, linguistic, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic, or disability status, as well as other factors which may result in inequitable treatment. We are committed to investigating the origins of these inequities just as we are interested in developing interventions and remedies that either reverse the adverse impacts when they exist or prevent the adverse impacts from occurring in the first place.”

These are ambitious goals that we embrace with enthusiasm. We pursue them throughout the College and note that they are consonant with our mission to deepen and extend knowledge about the formation and utilization of human capabilities. We work daily toward improving access to educational opportunity for individuals facing barriers of many kinds, and the education and civil rights conference we sponsored on the Penn State campus in the early summer of 2014 is just one example of the College’s steadfast commitment.

The conference prompted us to reflect upon the underlying scholarship taking place within the College on education and civil rights, and this report provides an opportunity to provide an in-depth assessment of the conference along with overviews of some of the relevant research taking place. We have made a series of strategic hires in this area of the field in recent years, and we welcome this oppor-tunity to call attention to the resulting scholarship.

One of the interesting features of the conference was a graduate student symposium wherein graduate students throughout the nation with interests in education and civil rights came together to present their research, to learn from each other, and to interact with the leading established scholars in the field. We see this as an important investment in future high impact research answering important questions about some of the most pressing public policy issues in the world.

We welcome your interest in education and civil rights, and we encourage you to interact with the scholars whose work we feature in this report. I would also be interested in any ideas you wish to share with me about how a college of education can do even more to help students of all ages overcome barriers that interfere with the pursuit of educational opportunities. I hope you enjoy reading our report.

david h. monkDean

DE AN’SMESSAGE

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Education is the civil rights issue of our time.

the 2014 penn State education and civil RightS confeRence

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PennStateCollegeofEducation

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The Penn State College of Education held the Education and Civil Rights Conference in June 2014. Its purpose was to address the inability of students of color to access high-quality education and to seek strategies to expand educational opportunities for students of color.

To do so, leaders in the civil rights community, educators and students gathered at the Education and Civil Rights Conference, which featured more than 50 authors and speakers from across the nation, including lani guinier, the Bennett Boskey Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. The conference also featured a graduate student symposium to foster the next generation of leaders in education and civil rights.

The conference was inspired by a recent report by Erica Frankenberg, assistant professor of education at Penn State and chair of the planning committee for the Education and Civil Rights Conference, and Gary Orfield, professor of education, law, political science and urban planning at UCLA and co-founder and director of The Civil Rights Project.

According to the report, titled Brown at 60: Great Progress, a Long Retreat and an Uncertain Future, it took a decade for desegregation to make an impact after Brown vs. the Board of Education in 1954; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided important enforcement provisions that dramatically expanded desegregation across the South, supplemented by subsequent Supreme Court decisions. Additionally, beginning with the Nixon administration, there

were fewer federal actions supporting desegregation and race relations initiatives. Since that time, many Supreme Court decisions have either limited or ended desegregation plans and forbade major forms of voluntary desegregation, according to the report.“We have seen first this retreat from court-ordered desegregation, and now it’s more difficult to voluntarily integrate because of court decisions,” said Frankenberg.

In the report, the authors wrote, “Desegregation, properly implemented, can make a very real contribution to equalizing educational opportunities and preparing young Americans for the extremely diverse society in which they will live and work and govern together. It is the only major tool our society has for this goal.”

“We are more advantaged than we were a generation or two ago because we know more about why desegregation matters and have more detailed information and software, for example, about population trends,” said Frankenberg. “In some ways desegregation can be easier to accomplish, but we need the political will in order to see it come to fruition.”

The Education and Civil Rights Conference aimed to inform and provide new evidence about existing barriers and efficacy of possible solutions, declaring that “Education is the civil rights issue of our time.”

EducationandCivilRightsConference

I’mthinkingofmeritasexcellence.Meritasthemissionofhighereducationinademocracy.—LaniGuinier

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K E y N O T E S P E A K E R

Asascholar,advocate,andprofessoroflaw,lani guinierhasviewedcivilrightsfromnumerousangles.

FromheadingthevotingrightsprojectwiththeNAACPLegalDefenseFundtoherworkwiththeCivilRightsDivisionoftheU.S.DepartmentofJusticetostintsasalawprofessorattheUniversityofPennsylvaniaandHarvardLawSchool,Guinierhasworkedtirelesslyforthecause.

Inherkeynoteaddressatthe2014PennStateEducationandCivilRightsConference,Guinieridentifiedtwothemesintheongoingstruggle:definingmeritandcollaborativeleadership.Both,shehinted,couldshapeanewmovement.

Shesuggestedthateducationalleadersneedto“criticallyreframeourideasaboutmerit,”becausethatwayofthinkingwouldbroadenaccess.

“I’mthinkingofmeritasexcellence.Meritasthemissionofhighereducationinademocracy,”Guiniersaid.“Meritasmovingawaysimplyfromidentifyingtalentasifitisanindividualandself-containedcapacityandinsteadmovingtowardmeritasanincentivesystemtorewardcreativeandcollaborativeproblemsolving.”

IdentIfIes themes to defIne a new movement

Lani Guinier

RedefiningmeritandbroadeningaccesswouldsetthetableforGuinier’ssecondtheme—collaborativeleadership.Shecitedvariousstudiesbyscholarsfromaroundthecountrythatconfirmedtheveracityofhercontentionthatcombiningintellectsofdifferentbackgrounds,experiences,anddegreesofintelligenceproducesbetterproblem-solvingresults.

“It’sreallyimportanttoworkwithotherpeople.Andtolearnhowtoworkwithotherpeoplewhoarenotonlydifferentthanyouarebuthaveadifferentperspective,haveadifferentsetofexperiencesthattheycanbringtothetabletobenefiteveryoneatthetablebyprovidingacounternarrative,”shesaid,“bysuggestingthingsthatwouldneverhaveoccurredtosomebodywhohadneverbeentoanotherstateorhadneverbeentoanothercountryorneverlearnedanotherlanguage.”

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conference closing Session features call for a new Movement

The 2014 Penn State Education and Civil Rights conference ended with a closing session focused on future strategies. Session moderator victor romero, Penn State professor of law, introduced the session panelists as well as the goal of the session, which was “to think about charting a future strategy to more fully realize civil rights, particularly through education.”

The session included two panelists: Patricia gándara, research professor of education in the Graduate School of Education and Information Sciences at UCLA and co-director of the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles, and gary orfield, professor of education, law, and political and urban planning at UCLA and co-founder and director of the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles.

Together, the panelists outlined the history of research into civil rights in the United States and identified unique challenges for today.

Orfield applauded the progress made in research as reflected by the conference papers, stating, “Now all of you have created a body of really rich fascinating research in many disciplines that really speak to each other.”

Gandara added, “I think we need to find our courage. I think we need to push the envelope. It is very exciting for me to hear some folks over the last couple days actually proposing outrageous things—radical and outrageous things—because I think that’s where we need to start.”

Ithinkweneedtofindourcourage.Ithinkweneedtopushtheenvelope.Itisveryexcitingformetohearsomefolksoverthelastcoupledaysactually

proposingoutrageousthings—radicalandoutrageousthings—becauseIthinkthat’swhereweneedtostart.—PatriciaGándara

Orfield and Gandara recalled the early history of the fight for equal civil rights that began with a group of individuals who gathered at Niagara Falls in 1905. They held up the Niagara Movement as a model that a similar movement today could follow. They then proposed that conference participants and others meet at the American Educational Research Association meetings in Chicago in April 2015 to organize themselves.

Q PatriciaGándaraandGaryOrfield


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Said Orfield, “What I think is necessary obviously is not just all kinds of little pieces of research, although I love them. What’s necessary is an actual movement. What’s necessary is the creation of something that goes on beyond the conference—something that creates a change in the country, an intellectual movement.”

The two panelists then opened up the floor for discussion, which yielded several ideas and possible challenges that the proposed movement may face.

Orfield and Gandara welcomed the many ideas suggested, stating that ownership of such a movement would need to be a collaboration involving the newest generation of researchers and lawyers promoting civil rights.

Orfield concluded, “I think many of us in this room might have some principles that would be really worth discussing… We have to figure out how to pick up the tools we have, how to put them together, and how to engage in the conversations among each other and with broader and broader circles in this society because this is the only way things actually begin to change in society. People have to decide to start it. And we hope that you will be interested in doing that.”

Currently plans are underway for a meeting to occur in April 2015 at the AERA meeting in Chicago.

Wehavetofigureouthowtopickupthetoolswehave,howtoputthemtogether,andhowtoengageintheconversationsamongeachotherand

withbroaderandbroadercirclesinthissocietybecausethisistheonlywaythingsactuallybegintochangeinsociety.Peoplehavetodecidetostartit.

Andwehopethatyouwillbeinterestedindoingthat.—GaryOrfield

R EricaFrankenberg

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Nearly twenty graduate students from across the nation came to the Education and Civil Rights Conference at Penn State to share their research. According to erica frankenberg, chair of the

conference’s planning committee, this portion of the conference, titled the Emerging Scholars Symposium, was very important as it aimed to develop the next generation of education and civil rights experts.

“The Emerging Scholars Symposium provided early-career scholars with feedback on their work and opportunities to network with each other and with more senior scholars in the field of education and civil rights,” said Frankenberg. “Students may not have faculty with this expertise on their campus, and this is a way to build a foundation for collabora-tion and mentoring.”

Frankenberg added that fostering early-career scholars is essential because it adds new voices and fresh perspectives to the conversation.

Leaders from the civil rights community, including gary orfield and Patricia gándara of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, offered their feedback and encouragement to the graduate students, helping them frame how they think about their work moving forward.

Faculty members from Penn State also reviewed the graduate students’ work to prepare it for possible publication.

michael foreman, director of the Civil Rights Appellate Clinic and clinical professor of law at Penn State Law, was a moderator for one of the sessions of the symposium. He said that his hope is that his reviews encouraged the emerging scholars to continue with the valuable work they had undertaken.

“I thought it was important for the students to get meaningful feedback on the work they did,” said Foreman. “I tried to provide guidance on where their research fit within the broader academic discussion and, in some cases, suggested areas where they could take the research to the next level or be refined for practical application.”

Multiple schools were represented by the students at the symposium, including Penn State, NYU, University of Miami, Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, and UCLA.

Their topics covered a wide area of education and civil rights, from historical analyses to explorations of current policy. A selection of synopses from some of the graduate student participants follows on page 14.

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W HeatherBennett

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The Desegregation of Mark Twain Intermediate School: Good Will, Democratic Equality, and the Educational Marketplaceby alexandra freidusNyU

In 1974, Mark Twain Junior High School in Coney Island became the first New York City school to desegregate under a federal district court order. Mark Twain’s desegregation plan called for its transformation from a “ghetto” school into a magnet school for the gifted and talented. By 2007, Mark Twain Intermediate School for the Gifted and Talented was so desirable that students across the city competed fiercely for seats—and in an ironic demographic twist, White students were held to lower admission standards in the name of maintaining the 1974 court-mandated racial balance. In this paper, I examined court documents and newspaper records to explore how Mark Twain’s desegregation order came to be seen as “unnecessary,” “unfair,” and “anachronistic,” claims that denied the salience of race in one of the most segregated school systems in the nation.

Education Equity and the Supreme Court: A Historical Look at the Supreme Court’s Jurisprudence in the Wake of Brown’s Shadowby heather Bennett PENNSTATE

The Supreme Court has changed its policy over the years in its assess-ment of civil rights. This essay analyzed the theories of education, deduced from the Warren, Burger, Rehnquist, and current Roberts Court’s key opinions on the issue of education equity pertaining to

the race-based classifications under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Such analysis clearly recognizes a gradual shift in ideology pertaining to the Court’s waning commitment to end segregation in schools. I argued that Brown’s goal to integrate our schools is the key to moving past a history of racial prejudice and that the minimal use of race is an important tool to integrate students and provide an equal environ-ment for all groups.

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Addressing the Overrepresentation of Historically Underserved Groups in Special Education through Mandated Response to Interventionby stacey m. Kesten UNIvERSITyOFMIAMI

Despite more than forty years of recognition, research, and policy reform, minoritized students continue to be placed in special education at significantly dispro-portionate rates. Through a critical examination and analysis of the intersection of three significant trends: 1) the adoption of RTI, 2) the proliferation of alternative pathways to teaching, and 3) provisions for ‘highly qualified’ teachers, this paper argued that disproportion-ality is a symptom of larger systemic problems fueled by both state and federal policies that in effect perpetuate the maintenance of the status quo by denying certain students access to high quality educational experiences.

Charter School in New York City: A Geo-Spatial and Spatially Weighted Regression Analysisby taeko sugaCOLUMBIAUNIvERSITy

During the Bloomberg administration (2002-2013), the mayor and the mayoral appointee school chancellor took initiatives to supplement or replace traditional public schools with charter schools. The number of charter schools increased from seventeen (2003) to 183 (2014). A geo-spatial analysis revealed that charter schools were concentrated where there were most demands, such as low test scores and low attendance rates, as well as in districts within a thirty-minute commute from Wall Street. A spatially weighted regression analysis found four strong predictors of charter schools: White percent increase from 2000 to 2010, White median household income increase (2011/1999 ratio), Percent Black in 2010, and Percent White in 2010. That is, there was the spatial correlation between the White gentry increase in the highly Black populated community districts and the number of charter schools in New York City.


Heather Bennett

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How Separate Still Isn’t Equal: The Implementation of the Common Core State Standards and Equity in a Metropolitan Districtby emily m. hodgePENNSTATE

This study explored the potential of the new Common Core State Standards to create greater educational equity across urban and suburban schools. Interviews with teachers and observations of classroom instruction across a large metropolitan district

revealed that the rhetoric of the new standards, “rigor for all,” cannot be fulfilled when students attend segregated schools with highly unequal school populations. In addition, the district policy of grouping students for instruction according to their state test scores sends powerful signals to teachers that these different groups of students are not equally capable of high-level work.

A New Narrative on Rural Education: How Three High Schools Take On 21st Century Challenges by stephen Kotok, erica Kryst, and annelise hagedorn, PENNSTATE

This paper analyzed the efforts of three rural school districts in Pennsylvania as they prepared students for post-secondary options. Through this comparative case study, we aimed to answer three questions: 1) How do rural high

schools support students’ pursuit of post-secondary options? 2) Are there differences between rural fringe, rural distant, and rural remote high schools in the amount, type, and quality of post-secondary education preparation for high school students? 3) To what extent are there issues of educational inequity in rural schools in terms of post-secondary support? This comparative case study provides some model policies along side some cautionary tales.

Policy and Leadership in Changing Landscapes: A School Board’s Response in a New Immigrant Destination by Kristina Brezicha, erica sausner, and hilario lomeli PENNSTATE

In the context of shifting demographics nationwide, school boards play a critical role in estab-lishing policies that promote or hinder diversity and respond to diverse students’ needs. Our study examined how one school district’s school board members

made sense of and responded to their increasingly linguistically and racially diverse student body. Using document analysis and interviews, our analysis suggests that the school board largely did not acknowledge their changing schools’ populations. This inaction was occasionally punctuated by the school board’s patchwork efforts to address the unique needs of their newly diverse student body through part-time support services, isolated programs, and curriculum interventions. The research has implications for improving school boards’ responses to their increasingly diverse population.

Trajectories of Exposure to Racial School Segregationby siri warkentienJOHNSHOPKINSUNIvERSITy

Many policy and demographic changes have occurred in the last twenty years that suggest that students may be exposed to schools with varying racial compositions throughout their education. This paper examined whether and why students follow different trajectories of exposure to black school segregation between seventh and twelfth grade. I found evidence for four distinct exposure trajectories, which translates to students experiencing very different timing, sequencing, and duration of segregation during secondary school. School-level racial change and student school mobility significantly predict trajectory membership, but the racial change at students’ seventh grade schools is the primary predictor, net of other covariates.

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EmergingScholarsSymposium

Kristina Brezicha

Stephen Kotok

Emily Hodge

Werecognizethatfromanearlyage,individualscanbeatriskforinequitableeducationalopportunities

becauseoftheirethnic,racial,linguistic,gender,sexualorientation,socio-economic,ordisabilitystatus,aswellasotherfactorswhichmayresult

ininequitabletreatment.Wearecommittedtoinvestigatingtheoriginsoftheseinequitiesjustasweareinterestedindevelopinginterventionsandremedies

thateitherreversetheadverseimpactswhentheyexistorpreventtheadverseimpactsfromoccurringinthefirstplace.—DeanDavidH.Monk

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financial aid programs and access to higher education

I n the early part of the twentieth century, most Americans thought higher education was reserved for the wealthy elite. That all changed when the GI Bill of Rights was passed in 1944,

and almost eight million veterans took advantage to attend college.

The law created access for a whole group of people who never thought they could afford to attend college. The same thing happened twenty years later with the passage of the Higher Education Act of 1965 and its reauthorization in 1972.

Since 1980, however, tuition rates have steadily climbed while financial aid programs have not kept pace. Need-based financial aid programs, which concentrate their dollars on students from low-in-come families, have often fared especially poorly.

The result has been a shrinking of the opportunity gap for low-income students to attend college. Studies have shown that the No. 1 concern for low-income students is the price, specifically how to pay for the rising costs of higher education.

Two professors in Penn State’s Center for the Study of Higher Education (CSHE) have conducted research on the subject. John cheslock, associate professor of education and director of the CSHE, and liang Zhang, associate professor of education and senior research associate, have each written on the subject.

In his working paper “Filling the Gap: The Use of Intentional and Incidental Financial Aid to Meet Need in Higher Education,” Cheslock, and co-authors Rodney Hughes, Rachel Frick-Cardelle, and

Donald Heller, examine the grant awards provided to students by colleges and universities and develop a new typology for describing these awards.

Their research highlights how incidental-need-meeting aid (which is not designed to offset a student’s need but regularly does so in practice) helps meet a substan-tial share of the need that students face, but is much less effective than intentional-need-meeting aid (which is designed with need in mind) at targeting funds on those students who have the highest levels of need.

Anunderstandingofhowwell-targetedfinancialaidprograms,aswellasless-well-targeted,butmorepoliticallypopularprograms,influencethepricesandenrollmentdecisionsoflow-in-comestudentswillhelpusidentifytheimpactofanyfuturecuts.

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“The financial aid provided by colleges and universities is extraordinarily complex as a range of motives drive these awards. Some grants are designed to promote access for low-income families. Other grants are designed to attract students with specific skills (e.g. strong academic preparation) to campus, and a final set of grants are designed to increase revenue in the same way that coupons and early-bird prices do,” noted Cheslock. “Trying to sort out how these range of awards affect the prices that low-income students pay is a difficult task, and our new classification system seeks to make that task simpler.”

In a separate 2013 study, “The Effect of Florida’s Bright Futures Program on College Enrollment and Degree Production,” Zhang and co-authors Shouping Hu and Victor Sensenig examined the effects of Florida’s program that rewards high school graduates for high academic achievement.

Although the awards from these programs are not targeted on low-income students, they could still reduce the cost for some as the award criteria are relatively broad: Students with a 3.0 grade-point average and who score a 970 on the SAT qualify.

Approximately sixty percent of all high school graduates within Florida who took the SAT meet those criteria.

Zhang and his co-authors find that the program did alter the number of Floridians who remained in-state, as it encouraged some to attend college and others to choose an in-state, rather than out-of-state institutions. The enrollment of students from lower-income families appeared to be affected similarly as the enrollment of other students.

“The federal government, state governments, and colleges and universities are facing difficult financial futures, which could lead to less spending on financial aid,” Cheslock said. “An understanding of how well-targeted financial aid programs, as well as less-well-targeted, but more politically popular programs, influence the prices and enrollment decisions of low-income students will help us identify the impact of any future cuts.”


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School districts Struggle to adapt to english language learner needs

A College of Education faculty member presented a research report that explores the relationship between school district infrastructure in new-immigrant destina-

tions and the marginalization of English language learners (ELLs) in those districts. megan hopkins, assistant professor of education, and her colleague, Rebecca Lowenhaupt of Boston College, reported that in many schools, the teaching of English as a second language (ESL) and the teaching of academic subjects are separated and disconnected, which can cause ELLs to fall behind academically.

“This does not represent current thinking in the field,” said Hopkins. “While a separate ESL instruc-tional block can be beneficial, ELL educators also advocate for content-based language learning that

requires all teachers to have training related to ELL instruction, and that necessitates mean-ingful, ongoing collaboration between ESL and general-education teachers.”

Hopkins added that school districts that separate ESL and content require ELLs to become proficient in English before learning content. This often places them far behind in their learning of content and of content-based academic language.


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“Districts and schools are left on their own to figure out how to design supports for ELLs, often without the necessary expertise or capacity,” said Hopkins. “National reform in this area is needed.”

Hopkins said she believes that ELLs in these models will not be supported in achieving at the levels necessary to succeed in school and beyond, which ultimately will only exacerbate inequalities for immigrant groups who are learning English.

On a positive note, some school districts that have a gap in their ELL programs are aware of their shortcomings. Additionally, there have been efforts made to incorporate ESL into English-language arts instruction and to facilitate collaboration between ESL and general education teachers related to English language arts. However, the gap remains, especially in subjects like mathematics.

“Thinking of ELL instruction as ‘just good teaching’ is problematic because it ignores the language- and culture-related issues at play,” said Hopkins.

“In addition, ELLs who are kept separate do not have access to English-proficient models, which research shows is essential for their language development,” said Hopkins. “Moreover, all students are afforded fewer opportunities to develop cross-cultural friendships that can facilitate positive intergroup relations.”

According to Hopkins, school districts are the primary administrative unit for delivering education in the U.S., and most states offer little guidance related to curriculum and instruction efforts. “These decisions are typically left up to local school districts,” said Hopkins. “Thus, to understand how instructional policy is being formed in new-immi-grant destinations, it’s important to unpack how districts are designing instructional supports for their new populations.”

Hopkins added that many districts have virtually no infrastructure in place to support ELLs in new-im-migrant destinations.

Teachers’instructionmustbeadaptedtothesignificantdifferencesinknowledge,

background,learningstyleandfirst-languagecharacteristicsofeveryELL.

“Teachers’ instruction must be adapted to the significant differences in knowledge, background, learning style and first-language characteristics of every ELL.”

Hopkins said she believes the root of the issue stems from misunderstandings about language development and the sociocultural factors that affect ELL learning.

“These misunderstandings stem largely from a lack of teacher and leader preparation related to ELLs,” said Hopkins.

The research report is titled “Organizing Language Instruction in New Immigrant Destinations: Structural Marginalization and Integration.” It was presented at the Segregation, Immigration, and Educational Inequality Conference, cosponsored by the Civil Rights Project, Ghent University, Université Libre de Bruxelles, and the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, Ghent, Belgium.


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Promise of Equality from Common Core is Not So Easily Achieved

Theteam’sresearchandinterviewsrevealedthatmostCommonCorepolicyentrepreneursholdprimarilyan“equal”viewofequity…thisviewis

aproblematicbasisforgeneratingmoreequalschooloutcomesbecausestudents’andschools’initialresourcesarehighlyvariable.

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In 2012, the United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) released a report titled “Helping to Ensure

Equal Access to Education.” Part of the report described how the OCR transformed its enforcement approach to better promote and advance educational equity for all students.

Part of the argument in favor of the Common Core State Standards Initiative is that it would advance educational equity. The reform seeks to anchor primary and secondary education, across the more than forty states and District of Columbia that have agreed to participate, in one set of demanding, internationally benchmarked standards. Supporters of the reform have maintained that standards will no longer vary across states or by zip code.

Equity is playing a central role in the national educa-tion discourse now, partly due to the introduction of common standards and because the Common Core seeks to enable all students to enter postsecondary education or training without need of remediation.

“States’ education clauses don’t address preparing all students for college and career,” said mindy Kornhaber, associate professor of education. “They more typically speak to efficient, effective, or basic education. However, it is possible to see the intro-duction of equal standards for students in disparate schools as a civil rights issue.”

Kornhaber, and graduate student co-authors Kelly griffith and alison tyler, explore various conceptions of educational equity in their paper, “It’s Not Education by Zip Code Anymore— But What is It? Conceptions of Equity under the Common Core.”

Using data from interviews with Common Core policy entrepreneurs and qualitative analysis of interview data, the article examines the role and meaning of equity within the Common Core at a level beyond zip code. Findings are considered against a conceptual framework of equal, equalizing, and expansive views of equity.

“I thought it was important to explicate views of equity because the word is bandied about. People generally agree educational equity is important. However, they don’t necessarily understand how the meanings of equity may differ. These differences have policy implications,” Kornhaber explained.

“With a clearer conceptualization, it may be possible to have clearer goals and clearer means of achieving them. Although many others over the years have sought to explain the concept (e.g., James Coleman and Christopher Jencks), I thought it might be useful to have a newer, and ideally clearer conceptual framework.”


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In the article, Kornhaber used “educational equity” for concerns about disparities in educational resources and achievement that are linked to demo-graphic variables, particularly those emphasized under No Child Left Behind: socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, language, or disability. Through a review of the literature, she and her co-authors clustered conceptions of educational equity in the following three ways:

1. under the “equal” conception of educational equity, policies and programs are designed to provide equal educational resources for all students. Given equal resources, differences in achievement across different student populations represent influences beyond the purview of the education system.

2. under the “equalizing” conception, policies and programs are meant to afford compensatory educational resources to address different popu-lations of learners. The equalizing conception seeks to foster more equal school outcomes.

3. the “expansive” conception of educational equity also seeks to create more equal school outcomes. However, it emphasizes the need for comprehen-sive resources both within and beyond schools to attain such outcomes.

The team’s research and interviews revealed that most Common Core policy entrepreneurs hold primarily an “equal” view of equity. Kornhaber and her co-authors noted that this view is a problematic basis for generating more equal school outcomes because students’ and schools’ initial resources are highly variable.

“Given its equal conception, the Common Core cannot close achievement gaps, any more than the same icing will transform different cakes,” the authors wrote. “Policies and resources aligned to an expansive view of equity are needed to foster more equal chances of school and life success for children from disparate circumstances.”

Policiesandresourcesalignedtoanexpansiveviewofequityareneededtofostermoreequalchancesofschoolandlifesuccessforchildrenfromdisparatecircumstances.

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toward a contextual understanding of critical Mass

C olleges and universities find themselves in a quandary. Administrators know that engendering a robust learning environment requires diversity in an increasingly

multiracial and multiethnic society. However, legal decisions and state laws increasingly restrict the tools institutions of higher learning use to help assemble a diverse student body.

One of the legal roadblocks that has become central in litigation efforts related to affirmative action admissions policies that seek to further the educational benefits of diversity is the term “critical mass.”

Chief Justice John Roberts said during the oral arguments of Fisher v. University of Texas, “I understand my job under our precedents [is] to determine if your use of race is narrowly tailored to a compelling interest. The compelling interest you identify is attaining a critical mass of minority students at the University of Texas, but you won’t tell me what the critical mass is. How am I supposed to do the job that our precedents say I should do?”

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liliana m. garces, assistant professor of education and research associate in the Center for the Study of Higher Education, and co-author Uma M. Jayakumar, assistant professor of organization and leadership at the University of San Francisco, advocate a more nuanced replacement for critical mass in their paper, “Dynamic Diversity: Toward a Contextual Understanding of Critical Mass.”

“When we talk about diversity in postsecondary education, we talk about it primarily in terms of the number, or percentage, of students of color on a college campus. Diversity, however, is a more dynamic concept,” Garces said. “Achieving the educational benefits of diversity depends on a symbiotic relationship between the environment and students. While the number of students of color plays a significant role in shaping a campus climate and culture, the campus climate and culture, in turn, influence whether students feel welcome to attend the institution and their experiences while on campus.”

The call to replace the term critical mass is not without precedent. Justice Antonin Scalia during oral arguments in Fisher said, “You should call it a cloud or something like that. Mass … assumes numbers, either in size or certain weight.”

Garces and Jayakumar engage Scalia’s suggestion for the use of a new term and advance the term “dynamic diversity.”

“The term dynamic diversity seeks to refocus our attention on this symbiotic relationship between the environment and students. That is, the interactions among students, the particular context in which these interactions take place, and the environmental condi-tions that are necessary for the educational benefits of diversity to take place,” Garces said.

“This more nuanced understanding of diversity can help us answer the question in the legal debate as to when an institution has achieved a “critical mass” of students of color and to move away from discussions of critical mass as a one-size-fits-all concept.”

The courts have affirmed the importance of diversity on college campuses. Research has shown that perceptions, attributions, and generalizations that promote stereotypes and bias can also be reduced through repeated interactions with peers from different groups and requires more than token numbers in classroom discussions. And the frequency of positive cross-racial interactions is more strongly related to student outcomes than is the overall frequency of cross-racial interactions.

“Our analysis is intended to help advance a more contextualized understanding of critical mass,” Garces said. “I’m hopeful that with increased communication and collaborations among researchers, administrators, and legal counsel, this more contextualized under-standing will help institutions generate the evidence necessary to assess whether the conditions that foster dynamic diversity are present at an institution; this evidence, in turn, should help better justify race-con-scious policies in the legal arena and beyond.”

Thetermdynamicdiversityseekstorefocusourattentiononthissymbioticrelationshipbetweentheenvironmentandstudents.


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Report indicates that School districts pursuing diversity face numerous challenges

we wanted to understand whether tasaP was making a difference and, if so, how.


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A report by erica frankenberg, assistant professor in Penn State’s College of Education, and her colleagues shared insights about a federal program that

aimed to help school districts increase diversity. The report, titled “The Changing Politics of Diversity: Lessons from a Federal Technical Assistance Grant,” revealed that a number of factors, including legal uncertainty and political pressure, affected how districts pursued that goal.

The group, which included Kathryn McDermott from the University of Massachusetts, and Elizabeth DeBray and Ann Blankenship from the University of Georgia, was researching the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) 2009 program called Technical Assistance for Student Assignment Plans (TASAP). Through TASAP, the ED distributed $2.5 million awarded through a competitive grant process to eleven school districts to help them design student assignments that were both legal and racially diverse.

TASAP came after the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District (PICS) case. This decision struck down two districts’ voluntary integration policies. This was after earlier Court decisions that relaxed what was required of districts to remedy prior segregation.

“I knew that there was a lot of misunderstanding when it came to diversity,” said Frankenberg. “And it was really encouraging that we had new federal funding, really for the first time in forty years, that tried to help districts make sense of how to pursue diversity. We wanted to understand whether TASAP was making a difference and, if so, how.”

Frankenberg said that the researchers also chose to study the TASAP schools because the districts, which varied demographically, could offer under-standing about the local responses to the decision, policymaking and also how the federal role can have an influence around diversity.

U.S. Department of Education’s 2009

program called Technical Assistance for Student

Assignment Plans

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“The Supreme Court said you can’t consider an individual student’s race to create diverse schools because such consideration would harm the student,” said Frankenberg. “You could, however, take into account the racial composition of neighborhoods.”

According to Frankenberg, officials in the eleven TASAP schools were looking to increase diversity in their districts, but many were uncertain as to how to go about it.

“There were a number of race-conscious ways that a majority of justices said that school officials could use race,” said Frankenberg. “In fact, when we looked at the proposals of what the districts in TASAP said they were going to do, a number of them said they were going to use race.”

But very few actually did use race.

According to Frankenberg, people in several districts indicated that they had been advised not to use race in their student assignment plans.

Besides legal ambiguity, political pressure was a key issue when it came to student assignments, said Frankenberg.

According to Frankenberg, it is too early to determine whether TASAP was a success or not.

“We still don’t have a lot of evidence about whether it’s working out,” said Frankenberg. “I think that’s the next logical follow-up now that there have been several years of students being assigned to schools under the new policies.”

Frankenberg added that society appears to be retreating from desegregation.

“Now it is more difficult to even voluntarily integrate,” said Frankenberg. “If we believe in local control and the locally elected school board leaders have decided this is a value of the community, then why are we not allowing them to pursue it?”

One positive to TASAP that Frankenberg said she saw is that districts were interested in diversity and that, even though this is a challenging time for integration, TASAP was an example of doing something to help diversity rather than nothing.

Frankenberg said she would like to see another round of more-focused technical-assistance funding, particularly given the federal government’s guidance in 2011 affirming how race-conscious policies could help districts pursue integration, which the govern-ment strongly endorsed as a goal for districts.

“I think education efforts for districts about what’s legal and what’s effective could be really helpful,” said Frankenberg, “not just for districts but for those working with districts like lawyers and other experts, too.”

Wesawinalotofthesedistrictsthatlocalpoliticspusheddiversitytothebackburner.


“We saw in a lot of these districts that local politics pushed diversity to the back burner.”

Frankenberg added that even though districts were redesigning student assignments that were supposed to be pursuing diversity, it was difficult to maintain that commitment when there were competing political goals. For example, during TASAP, districts were experiencing budget cuts due to the recession of 2008. In some districts, transportation for diversity goals was cast as an added expense at a time of austerity.

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ed.psu.edu

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david h. monk, DeanCollege of EducationThe Pennsylvania State University274 Chambers BuildingUniversity Park, PA 16802

[email protected]

For publication information of research presented here, email [email protected]

Editors: Suzanne Wayne, Andy ElderWriters: Kevin Sliman, Andy ElderPhotographers: Steve Tressler, Kevin SlimanDesigner: Heather Reese

Read this document online:issuu.com/pennstateeducation

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