Education Rights and Classroom-Based Litigation: Shifting the Boundaries of Evidence

Abstract

researchers have identified elements of children's lives taking place before, within, and after school with disheartening potential to intensify these inequalities. Within schools, harm is inflicted by unequal distributions of key resources, including teachers and buildings, as well as curricular and pedagogical approaches that are often ill suited for low-income students of color (Darling-Hammond, 2000; Delpit, 1996). Earlier in childhood, even before the onset of formal education, these children suffer from unequal distributions of resources, such as health care, nutrition, safe environment, preschool, and within-home learning resources (Barton & Coley, 2009; Berliner, 2009; Rothstein, 2004). All along, social capital particularly family efficacy in the manipulation of the educational system to gain access to better resources is unequally distributed for children (Fine, 1993; Lareau, 1989; Wells & Serna, 1996). Even this short list illustrates that many key sources of inequality are not directly attributable to schools. Yet school policies can either amplify or minimize the inequalities that arise outside of school. Consider the epigraph from Anatole France and imagine a hypothetical policy that allocates a school's best teachers to only those students who are able to document the highest number of volumes in their parents' home libraries. Such a policy would tend to discriminate against students from lesswealthy families even if such a policy could be described as facially neutral and nondiscriminatory.

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