Limited Choices: How the School-Choice Paradigm Subverts Equal Education for Students with Disabilities

While there is no absolute right to education in the Constitution of the United States, legislation and litigation have created and elucidated specific rights of children to, at a minimum, equal opportunity in education. For students with disabilities, the right to equality in educational opportunity can be found in both federal statutes and under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Rapidly developing education policy currently promotes increasing options for parents to use federal and state funds to send their children to schools other than their neighborhood public schools (“school choice”). However, the specific rights of students with disabilities have been largely overlooked. This Article will explain the ways in which school-choice laws and the rights of students with disabilities overlap and interact, expose gaps that leave students with disabilities vulnerable, and suggest actions that legislators and litigators can take to mitigate that vulnerability and ensure equal opportunity in education

Interdistrict Choice and Teacher Beliefs: Implications for Educational Expectations, Equity, and Policymaking

Interdistrict choice, which allows families to choose between schools outside of their districts of residence, is currently serving more students than any other choice program in the United States. Yet, despite this popularity, there is a pressing need for more research on how interdistrict choice may affect educational equity within U.S. public schools. Drawing on the analytic framework of educational racial contract, this study examines the issue of teacher beliefs in the context of interdistrict choice at a large, urban high school in Arizona, where market-based school choice programs have been continually expanded for nearly three decades. Data were collected through a survey of 112 teachers, who rated their in- district and out-of-district students based on their perception of three developmental skill categories: 1) academic, 2) communication, and 3) behavior. Results speak to negative teacher beliefs about the educability of Students of Color and hold significant implications for teachers’ academic expectations, educational equity, and future policy decisions

Public Dollars, Private Discrimination: Protecting LGBT Students from School Voucher Discrimination

More than a dozen states operate school voucher programs, which allow parents to apply state tax dollars to their children’s private school tuition. Many schools that participate in voucher programs are affiliated with religions that disapprove of homosexuality. As such, voucher-accepting schools across the country have admissions policies that discriminate against LGBT students and students with LGBT parents. Little recourse exists for students who suffer discrimination at the hands of voucher-accepting schools. This Note considers two ways to provide protection from such discrimination for LGBT students and ultimately argues that the best route is for an LGBT student to bring a lawsuit under the Equal Protection Clause. Such a lawsuit would require a finding of “state action,” which U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence suggests would present a serious challenge for a plaintiff. This Note suggests that plaintiffs should urge courts to take a more relaxed approach to state action due to the unique nature of the discrimination at issue

The Power of Debt: Identity and Collective Action in the Age of Finance

The Debt Collective is organized around the possibility for radical action within and against finance capitalism. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis it was often hard to understand how finance intersected with the everyday lives of ordinary—and especially, poor—people. But in the years since, it has become increasingly clear that mass indebtedness—from the mortgage crisis to student debt, criminal “justice” fines and fees to municipal austerity—is a direct effect of the conflict between debt payments generating value as securitized investments (mortgage backed securities, municipal bond offerings) vs. their role in providing shelter, food, and the ability to merely get by. In the age of finance, debt has become an immersive, systemic problem; but it is one that, in its ubiquity, may hold the seeds of its own solutions. As oil tycoon JP Getty famously quipped: “If you owe the bank $100 that’s your problem. If you owe the bank$100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.” Student debt alone stands today at 1.5 trillion dollars. Together, arguably, we can be the banks’ problem. This is the provocation of the Debt Collective: how can we reframe debt from an issue of isolation and shame to a platform for collective action and political mobilization

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Research and Practice in Transition: Improving Support and Advocacy of Transgender Middle School Students

In this essay, our purposes are to inspire particular avenues of future research addressing Transgender students, in middle school in particular, and to inform the professional development of teachers in support of these Transgender youth. In relation to the ways in which research can more authentically represent Transgender identity, we argue for the use of Transgender theory as a guiding framework for research addressing Transgender students, issues, and needs. We also describe the particular affordances of qualitative, ethnographic, and phenomenological studies in capturing the unique and highly personal experiences and realities of Transgender individuals, and specifically, in middle school. We then discuss how schools are structured socially and politically along heteronormative and cisnormative lines, presenting a stumbling block for Transgender rights advocacy in educational contexts. Finally, we review the potential of teachers to be the necessary educational change agents to spur greater understanding of and advocacy for students’ gender inclusivity

The confirmation of Betsy DeVos: Polarization, populism, and moral foundations in U.S. political rhetoric

The political communication behaviors from both the U.S. voting public and elected representatives contribute to a political discourse that is typified by hyper partisanship and extreme polarization (Hibbing, Smith, & Alford, 2013). Existing research (e.g., Feinberg & Willer, 2015; Haidt, 2012; Westen, 2007) suggested that this is potentially because U.S. Americans tend to craft persuasive messages that they themselves would find logically and morally impactful, rather than critically analyzing the positionality and belief system of their intended audience. Research on Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) suggested that, for a contemporary rhetor, understanding the moral, ontological, and ethical precepts that support their opponent’s ideology is crucial to designing persuasive appeals on moral issues (Haidt, 2012). This thesis sought to identify why the U.S. citizenry has such a difficult time communicating across political lines and whether the polarization in U.S. politics is driven from the top-down by political elites or from the bottom-up by average citizens. Utilizing the Rhetoric of Social Intervention RSI model of rhetorical analysis (Brown, 1978) as an ideal umbrella under which to unite the insights of research on political polarization, rural consciousness, populism, framing, social intuitionism, and MFT, the case study analysis examined the rhetoric of elected political elites as they debated the qualifications of Betsy DeVos, a contentious nominee for U.S. cabinet secretary. This study found it is possible for political elites to engage in audience- centered persuasive attempts, even if those attempts fall on deaf ears. This thesis also suggests that the centrality of a rhetorically Burkean view of identification as being central to persuasive success is underemphasized in many explanations of U.S. political communication. While this thesis is critical of Republican rhetoric during the DeVos hearings, this study is more focused on the interplay between the majority and minority parties in the Senate. Until the fundamentally communicative nature of the polarization problem is explored, it is unlikely that advocates and politicians will be able to break the maladaptive, conflict-laden cycle currently typifying American political rhetoric