This timely book examines issues pertaining to equal opportunity--affirmative action, challenges to it, and alternatives for improving opportunities for underrepresented groups--in higher education today. Its starting point is California's Proposition 209, which ended race-based affirmative action in public education and the workplace in 1996. The…

During the past several decades, historians have investigated various aspects of the Chicano movement. In most of these studies, the important role that moderate liberal activists have played in promoting significant social change during the same period has been slighted. By moderate liberal activists, I mean those who depended on the federal…

The purpose of this historical study was to investigate how individuals articulated the call for the South Texas/Border Initiative, a legislative mandate that funneled unprecedented amounts of funding to underserved universities along the Texas-Mexico border region between 1987 and 2003. Utilizing archival sources, we conducted an analysis of the…

In the first U.S. Supreme Court case concerning affirmative action in higher education (Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 1978), the splintered court decided that racial diversity serves a compelling state interest, allowing public institutions to count race as one of many diversity factors for admission. Due to the illusive…

The Texas Advisory Committee to the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights conducted a public forum and gathered information on the extent to which early childhood education programs have affected equal educational opportunities for minority students in Texas. The hearings were held in response to the failure of public education systems to meet the…

Raising academic standards and eliminating achievement gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students are America's prime national educational goals. Current federal and state policies, however, largely ignore the fact that the childhood poverty rate in the United States is 21%, the highest in the industrialized world, and that poverty…

State postsecondary education data systems are vital assets for policymakers, researchers, and the public. The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association's (SHEEO) Communities of Practice project builds upon SHEEO's efforts to measure the capacity and effective use of state postsecondary data systems and provides states with…

Background: Schools in K-12 have generated mission statements as ways of focusing their efforts and energies in specific areas. These mission statements vary by institutional setting as a function of the stakeholders and constituent groups who facilitate their development. To date, no studies were located in which the mission statements of…

This report, the first in the Economic Vitality and Education in the South (EVES) series, provides state-by-state information on more than 20 critical data points associated with the education-to-workforce pipeline. The report looks specifically at the 17 states in the Southern Education Foundation (SEF) region: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware,…

The "IDRA Newsletter" serves as a vehicle for communication with educators, school board members, decision-makers, parents, and the general public concerning the educational needs of all children across the United States. The focus of this issue is "Opportunity." Contents include: (1) Students Deserve to Read Diverse Books --…

Background/Context: There is a growing concern about the ways in which geography affects the educational opportunity for America's rural youth. Most research on this population has assumed that rural America is primarily White and that rural college access is stratified by an individual's ability to complete the application process. Such…

Despite being academically unqualified for admission to the University of Texas at Austin, Abigail Fisher, a White female, argued that she was not admitted due to the university's diversity policy. In addition to framing postsecondary admissions as a zero-sum phenomenon, Ms. Fisher intentionally frames students of color who are admitted to the…

Historically, Career Technical Education (CTE)--once called vocational education--was an alternative educational option for learners who were considered non-college bound. As a result, a disproportionate number of low-income learners, learners of color, learners with disabilities, female learners and other historically marginalized populations…

With a decision pending in two lawsuits challenging race-conscious admissions practices at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), many observers are predicting that the US Supreme Court will significantly limit, if not completely prohibit, the use of race in college and university admissions. However if the United…

Earning college credit in high school matters to students and parents. Students who earn college credits by taking a college-level course while in high school are more likely to enter college and succeed. Through these experiences, students become familiar with college expectations, academic behaviors, and habits of mind; get a head start on…