Private School Vouchers and the Failed Promise of Osmosis

Over the years, advocates for education reform have championed a range of strategies including accountability through high-stakes testing, incentives for students, teachers, small class sizes, parental involvement, school uniforms, technology in classrooms, extending the school year, curricular change, and so on. One recurring and consistent argument for school improvement and student achievement has been that students of lesser means do better in mixed settings or when grouped with students of higher means. This idea, that the rising tide lifts all boats, has been at the core, or at least figured as a central argument, in several social movements in education reform: racial integration during the civil rights movement, mainstreaming efforts for children with disabilities, efforts to counteract social economic segregation, and in blended-ability learning and anti-tracking classrooms. This Article will explore the osmosis theory of student performance by examining vouchers in private schools. It will consider this question by examining two different accounts of the impact of private school immersion on underprivileged children. I will take into account the historical and often anecdotal accounts of underprivileged, often minority, students who achieve significant successes after desegregating elite private schools, and contrast those accounts with underprivileged students who have fewer successes after transferring to private schools using vouchers. I proceed in four Parts. In Part I, I consider the allure of private school education and explain why ultimately private schools cannot provide a solution to ailing public school systems. In Part II, I acknowledge the popularity of vouchers and consider the studies that show their questionable merit. I conclude that given the political need to take vouchers seriously despite the weak evidence to date on their success, it is imperative to begin a dialogue about “what works” for underprivileged students in the private school context. Part III considers the differences among private schools and begins to provide cautious advice to parents armed with vouchers who seek a better solution for their children. In Part IV, I conclude that when no suitable options exist that will make a real difference for their children, parents would be better served in rejecting a voucher. This Article is a modest attempt to begin the conversation that will assist underprivileged families in being better consumers in this new educational marketplace

The Ethics of Cause Lawyering: An Examination of Criminal Defense Lawyers as Cause Lawyers

Criminal defense attorneys are often motivated by an intricate set of moral and ideological principles that belie their reputations as amoral (if not immoral) “hired guns” who would do anything to get their guilty clients off. Using empirical data from interviews with forty criminal defense attorneys I explore the motivations that inform their decisions to enter the field of criminal defense and the values that influence the manner in which they do their jobs. I conclude that many criminal defense attorneys are in fact cause lawyers who are committed to individual clients but also the “cause” of legal reform in criminal law. These dual commitment-- essentially to individual clients versus the collective group of criminal defendants-- occasionally raise ethical conflicts that have largely gone under-examined and that the rules of ethics and professionalism are not well-equipped to resolve. Although examined here through the lens of criminal defending, the ethical dilemma of cause lawyering is a noteworthy problem generally for activist lawyers because they continue to play an important role in socio-legal movements in this country

The Future of American Sentencing: A National Roundtable on Blakely

In the wake of the dramatic Supreme Court decision in Blakely v. Washington, Stanford Law School convened an assembly of the most eminent academic and professional sentencing experts in the country to jointly assess the meaning of the decision and its implications for federal and state sentencing reform. The event took place on October 8 and 9, just a few months after Blakely came down and the very week that the Supreme Court heard the arguments in United States v. Booker and United States v. Fanfan, the cases that will test Blakely\u27s application to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. Thus the Roundtable offered these experts an intellectual breathing space at a crucial point in American criminal law. The event was built around six sessions, with shifting panels of participants doing brief presentations on the subject of the session, and with others then joining in the discussion. We are pleased that FSR is able to publish this version of the proceedings of the event-a condensed and edited transcript of the sessions