Funding Gaps 2006

School finance policy choices at the federal, state, and district levels systematically stack the deck against students who need the most support from their schools, according to a report by the Education Trust.The report, Funding Gaps 2006, builds on the Education Trust's annual studies of funding gaps among school districts within states. For the first time the report includes data and analysis on:How federal Title I funds widen rather than narrow the education funding gaps that separate wealthy states from poor states; and How funding choices at the school district level provide enhanced funding to schools serving higher concentrations of affluent students and white students at the expense of schools that serve low-income students and students of color

Origins, Evolution, and Progress: Reflections on a Movement

This article traces the evolution of the community service movement on college campuses over the past 10 years. The author also analyzes the development of the movement through three conceptual strands -- student leadership, institutional support, and service learning -- weaving them into a narrative of the recent decade

The Causation Fallacy: \u3cem\u3eBakke\u3c/em\u3e and the Basic Arithmetic of Selective Admissions

Last Term, the Supreme Court turned down two invitations to resolve the constitutionality of affirmative action in college and university admissions. In May 2001, the Court for the second time declined to review a Fifth Circuit decision holding that the use of racial preferences to achieve diversity in the student body serves no compelling interest. A few weeks later, the Court let stand a conflicting Ninth Circuit decision that upheld a .law school affirmative action policy on the ground that educational diversity is a compelling governmental interest that meets the demands of strict scrutiny. The legal controversy over admissions preferences intensified in August 2001 when the Eleventh Circuit invalidated the University of Georgia\u27s undergraduate affirmative action policy on the ground that it was not narrowly tailored. With the Sixth Circuit\u27s recent decision upholding the University of Michigan Law School\u27s affirmative action policy and yet another ruling expected soon, the debate will soon come to a full boil. Facing an array of divergent lower court opinions on the issue, the Supreme Court may well decide in the next few months that the time for a final resolution has come. Although the most recent legal challenges to racial preferences in university admissions vary in their details, they are unified by a common narrative - the same narrative that animated Allan Bakke\u27s lawsuit against the Davis Medical School over twenty years ago. Bakke won admission to the medical school after convincing the Supreme Court that the school\u27s practice of setting aside sixteen out of 100 seats in each incoming class for minority students was an unconstitutional racial quota. The record shows that Bakke was, in fact, a highly qualified applicant. His undergraduate grades and standardized test scores were excellent, far better than the averages for minority students admitted through the set-aside. Yet the medical school rejected Bakke\u27s application, even as it admitted minority applicants in numbers large enough to fill the sixteen-seat quota. This prompted Bakke to complain that affirmative action cost him a letter of admission, and the success of his lawsuit confirms what so many people find unfair about affirmative action: By according substantial preferences to minority applicants, affirmative action causes the displacement of deserving white applicants like Allan Bakke and the plaintiffs now following in his footsteps

A Paradigm Change in Higher Education?

In the past decade we have witnessed steady progress in the development of service-learning programs on college campuses across the nation. As the director of a federal program that supports these initiatives, I was often asked to describe the national context in which these initiatives take place. The national context can be sketched in many ways. Sometimes I used a historical perspective to explain how the service-leaming movement came to be. With other audiences, I used a policy perspective to explain how the Corporation for National Service and other national organizations are working to expand and sustain the movement

State Courts and Constitutional Structure

In a famous 1977 article, Justice William Brennan called on state courts to interpret the individual-rights provisions of their state constitutions more expansively than analogous federal guarantees. Over the years, state constitutions have served as the foundation for important individual-rights decisions, yet their provisions remain unfamiliar to and often ignored by lawyers, scholars, and judges. In an insightful new book, 51 Imperfect Solutions: The Making of American Constitutional Law, Judge Jeffrey Sutton renews Justice Brennan’s call for judicial federalism but recasts it in a number of important ways. Most significantly, he invites us to understand state constitutionalism not solely or primarily as a liberal ratchet, but instead as a structural feature of our governmental system that modulates the timing, process, and substance of individual-rights enforcement. The conventional focus on the federal judiciary as the principal locus of rights innovation, he explains, does not accord with our constitutional history and disserves both state and federal courts. Urging greater balance between state and federal courts in protecting individual rights, Judge Sutton treats state constitutionalism as a mechanism for channeling constitutional debate in a diverse democracy and mitigating the risks of winner-take-all decision-making by the U.S. Supreme Court