Rudy Guiliani said today that colluding with the Russians is not criminal unless Trump paid for the hacking.
Moving the goal posts.
Methinks we will soon learn that Trump colluded to rig the election.
But he didn’t pay for it!
Archives for category: Education Reform
David Gamberg is an experienced educator who marches to a different drummer, not to federal mandates or the lure of Reformer money. He has a clear vision of what is best for students, teachers, staff, families, and the community. He does not worship at the shrine of test scores. He is superintendent of two small, contiguous districts on Long Island in New York. He understands the organic relation between communities and schools and knows that neither stands alone.
He wrote about his philosophy in Education Week.
Forget the title. This article is about what education should be, if only we had leaders with thoughtfulness, mindfulness, love of children, love of learning, and vision. Such people exist. Gamberg is one of them.
I am convinced that the foundation of a good education is about the concept of building—building a school, building a community, building relationships, and building a sense of self. School works for many students to provide a pathway into the future. It offers a foundation of rich experiences that inspire and form the basis of students’ life stories. Education and schools, however, can never be fully responsible for the outcomes that our students achieve. We cannot blame schools and teachers for the very complex mix of factors that result in any one person’s success in life.
I’ve been thinking recently about how we can alter the school experience for students and staff to better meet the needs of our learning communities. Some of the very structures and experiences that harken back to an earlier era in education may in fact be part of the future of teaching and learning. While it may be counterintuitive in our sophisticated high-tech world, building, manipulating, and creating inside the physical spaces of our school environment are essential in future learning….
1) Create a culture and environment that attends to the authentic learning experiences of the students.
There are many ways to engage students and teachers in authentic learning experiences. Tending a garden offers students a chance to shape their environment and participate in the natural transformation of seed to plant. Putting on a theater production shapes their experience of others, turning the audience into an integral part of learning. Students might create a gallery or museum display in a real process of honoring history and art. They might build a robot, which encompasses a wide range of design and scientific principles. The list of possibilities for school communities to come together and build something is as universal as it is unlimited.
2) Focus on building community; it matters more than raising test scores.
Our students face a growing list of pressures both real and imagined. School boards and superintendents, in particular, should take note of mental-health and substance-abuse issues and concerns. These are reaching crisis levels across the country. Students of all ages need a compelling experience that engages them in their respective learning communities. Sorting students by test scores will never answer the call for safer and healthier learning communities. Establishing deep and abiding personal relationships and building a sense of community will, and it’s urgently needed.
3) Reshape schools; don’t seek to reform them…
4) Engage stakeholders in re-envisioning the schoolhouse.
If the future is ever more unpredictable, then is keeping things basically the same still an option? Whether it is the students, teachers, policymakers, or families in any learning community, we must look at which tools we keep and which tools we should discard to help us build our schools…
Schools of the future may require a new vision for how they are structured, built, and financed. Let us not forget that no matter how schools are set up, it is the relationship between child and adult that stands at its center. From that center, we can work together to impart lessons, build understanding, and build capacity.
5) Don’t see school improvement as a technological fix.
We can have Smart Boards in every room but fail to update the pedagogy used 30 years ago. This is not a criticism of how we engaged our students in the past. In fact, I would argue that a way to engage students that is more than 2,400 years old still applies—even more so today. I am referring, of course, to the Socratic method…
Let’s make the process of learning and what takes place in school so compelling that it cannot be replaced by an algorithm. Let us ensure that our students continue to be great problem-solvers, fearless learners, courageous citizens, and creative thinkers who contribute greatly to the world around them.
If students become engaged in solving real-world problems, then wouldn’t they be better prepared to build their future? If they had permission to alter the physical space in their school, wouldn’t they alter their view of school in the process? I believe that with each passing generation, we inherit a space, with a covenant to uphold the values and principles of those who have come before us. We have an opportunity to build on their contributions while we forge our own. Is it not true that at all times we stand on the shoulders of others? Let us work together to build on the opportunity that has been given to us.
Mark Green is a fearless political leader who has strong progressive values and plenty of smarts. He was Punlic Advocate in NYC. worked with Ralph Nader, ran for Mayor Against Bloomberg, and is currently organizing against Trump. He created a Twitter group called the Shadow Cabinet, which tweets at @ShadowingTrump. I am the Shadow Secretary of Education.
Trump rules the airwaves with unabashed lies and demonizing.
“Yet Democrats have some clear advantages too. On most major issues — guns, choice, Dreamers, immigration, the tax code, climate, “privatization” of Social Security — polling indicates that the party in exile does represent a progressive majority, indeed at times a super-majority, which is why Trump is at a record low in modern polling for a President at this point — with his approval rating underwater by 20 points, according to Quinnipiac.
“Still, are Democrats properly exploiting his weaknesses and their advantages? Not nearly enough. Where, for example, are those voices that understand the power of metaphor and narrative to keep Trump in the hole he dug for himself?
“Words, images and concepts are what shape and win political debates: like William Jennings Bryan saying “Americans won’t be crucified on a cross of gold” (well, he lost on that one), Teddy Roosevelt’s “malefactors of great wealth,” Barack Obama’s “Yes we can,” Ronald Reagan’s (albeit composite) “welfare queen”; Occupy’s “We are the 99%.”
“The Democratic Party, however, continues to fight the war with deeply outmoded rhetorical weaponry.
“Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, for example, are obviously skillful legislators. But their slogan “A Better Way” was a well-researched dud that no one remembers. Their new version for the fall — “For the People” — is better, yet still so vague as to be largely meh.
“And it’s undermined by their apologies after Rep. Maxine Waters suggested confronting 45’s cabinet members in public spaces about the administration’s family separation policy. In this skins-shirts moment, it’s pathetic to spend any time on defense, certainly not when the issue is incivility versus inhumanity.
“The proper way to respond to GOP scandals, failures and “twistifications” (Jefferson’s coinage) is not with boring, overthought Beltway taglines, or mealymouthed words like “concerning,” “problematic” and “inappropriate.”
“Major Democrats and progressive advocates must re-educate themselves in order to vividly, unapologetically expose the most reactionary, dishonest, incompetent, erratic, corrupt, nasty narcissist ever to be President. And then, they must champion policies, aligned with their rhetoric, that relentlessly remind voters what Democrats stand for.
“After public revulsion over the kidnapping of 3,000 children and the betrayal in Helsinki — plus a Supreme Court nominee who would likely be the vote overturning Roe v. Wade and the Affordable Care Act — can Democrats finally rhetorically rise to this historic challenge?”
Blogger Michael Deshotels (Louisiana Educator) compares state test scores to NAEP scores. The state scores are up, the NAEP scores are flat. What’s going on?
He writes:
School reform in Louisiana was supposed to eliminate social promotion and the awarding of worthless high school diplomas.
Superintendent John White has staked his entire career as an education reformer on improving state standardized test scores of Louisiana students. To reformers like White, test scores are everything. In their philosophy of education, you can’t trust teachers to tell us and parents whether students are learning and progressing and are going to be ready for college or careers when they graduate. Reformers believe that Louisiana needs an objective way of finding out if our students are getting diplomas that indicate that they are ready to compete with students from other countries for the best jobs in the world economy.
John White was selected by former Governor Jindal to be our State Superintendent at the beginning of 2012 with the mission of implementing new laws that would evaluate, reward and fire teachers based on student test scores and to implement the replacement of many public schools with independent charter schools. The charter schools would live and die based on the attainment of high student test scores.
From the very beginning of our Louisiana education reforms, the reformers announced that they wanted to eliminate diploma mills that turned out graduates that had no real education and were not going to be fit for the job market or college. Corporate education reform was no longer going to allow diplomas to be awarded to functionally illiterate young people. Reformers believed that it was time to eliminate social promotion, whereby children were automatically promoted to the next grade even though they had not achieved satisfactory results on their math and ELA courses. The gate keepers would be cut scores on state tests that would indicate proficiency or failure.
Well, that didn’t work.
Everything in the White administration revolves around increasing student test scores. The school rating system installed by White and his TFA cronies applies maximum pressure on school administrators and teachers to do almost nothing but attempt to raise student test scores.
Louisiana state law requires that our state tests be compatible with the National NAEP test so that our student performance can be compared to other states.
The education reform laws also required that the new Louisiana standardized state tests must be compatible to nationally recognized tests including the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). In other words, a student rating of proficient on the state tests should be the same as proficient on the NAEP test. It was decided that a rating of Mastery on the state tests should be equivalent to a rating of Proficient on the NAEP.
So how reliable are our state LEAP and End-of-Course tests, compared to the NAEP? Does the progress of our students from year to year on LEAP match the progress measured by NAEP? Are we finally moving our students to proficiency and awarding them diplomas that future employers can trust are indications of real academic skills? Since the legislature had decided at the beginning of the reforms that we couldn’t trust the teachers to tell us whether a student was worthy of getting a diploma, did they also insist on a check-up system to see if we could trust the State Department of Education and their standardized tests to certify that a student was worthy of a diploma?
Oops, it looks like the legislature forgot to set up an independent check on our Department of Education to see if they were faithfully holding up their end of the bargain to end social promotion and grant real diplomas. There is no one officially checking to see if the LDOE tests are really measuring proficiency as comparable to the NAEP tests. But there is a way of checking the validity of our state tests compared to NAEP. There just is no law requiring anyone to make the comparison. So here is my effort to provide a legitimate comparison of the two testing systems.
On the state tests, students made dramatic improvements. On NAEP, no dice. No gains, some decline.
According to state testing, John White is a big success. Louisiana’s public school students are improving dramatically, and are well on their way to achieving Mastery or Proficiency by 2025. But according to national testing, achievement scores have barely improved in three areas and have dropped in 8thgrade math. Louisiana is near the bottom of the NAEP rankings. Most independent agencies now rate Louisiana as the lowest performer out of all the states in the measures of school performance.
Common core standards may be not be teachable for at least half of our students.
My opinion, which I can’t prove, is that the lack of progress in student proficiency is really a result of implementing the common cores standards which are basically unteachable for at least half of our students.
Louisiana is allowing the same abuses that have resulted in charges of fraud in the reported graduation rate of the Washington D.C. school system.
Now, not only are Louisiana students being promoted who demonstrated unsatisfactory test performance, but schools are allowed to waive the attendance requirement for promotion and graduation. Now students in high school who missed much more than the allowed absences and who failed their state tests, often still get a diploma by just taking a few hours of credit recovery courses. For example, students can now pass their Algebra I EOC test by scoring only 23.5% correct answers. This is exactly the same situation that caused the graduation rate in the Washington DC schools to be declared fraudulent. But here in Louisiana, no one in an official position is blowing the whistle.
So if you think there were illiterate students getting diplomas in the old days, that’s nothing compared to the rampant awarding of diplomas to anyone with a pulse today. I certainly do not believe that the state tests are valid enough to be used as the promotion standard. I have much more faith in the judgement of teachers. Unfortunately the law that is supposed to prevent the pressuring of teachers on promotion decisions is also being ignored in the push to boost the graduation rate at all costs.
As Arne Duncan used to say, again and again, they are lying to our children.
Jeff Bryant has paid close attention to the ongoing torrent of scandals surrounding charter schools, so of course he was astonished to see New York Times’ writer David Leonhardt acclaiming the “miracle” in New Orleans.
Bryant suspects this is but another example of Democratic centrists selling out those to their left, arguing for a DeVos’ style market-driven reform that disempowers ordinary people whose only power is their vote.
Leonhardt disdains elected school boards, like his fellow Reformers. He likes the market. But he claims that he is fact-based, when he ignores the facts that don’t fit his narrative. Leonhardt, he suggests, is a garden-variety neoliberal, willing to see a community robbed of its votes so that white kids can get the best schools and black kids get the D- and F-rated schools.
Bryant writes:
Ironically, the very next day after Leonhardt’s piece ran, an enormous charter school scandal came crashing to the ground on the opposite coast.
As the Los Angeles Times reports, an operator of a charter school chain in the city, who also served on the district’s school board, had to resign after pleading guilty to using his publicly funded charter school, including its employees (even the low-wage custodians), as a source of funding for his school board campaign, and then lying about it.
The day after, in Pennsylvania, a former head of an online charter school in the state was sentenced to serve 20 months in prison for conspiring to defraud the IRS, siphoning $8 million from the charter school he created to spend on houses, a plane, and other luxuries.
Revelations of these legal and ethical violations on the part of charter school operators are a near daily occurrence.
Yet proponents of charter schools refuse to acknowledge any problems posed by having publicly funded school operations left completely unregulated, bereft of transparency, and accountable only to the very narrow range of test scores they can mangage to produce by using intensive test prep and selective enrollment and pushing out of low performers.
Bryant adds:
In a ten-year retrospective on the New Orleans school reform model, Emma Brown wrote for The Washington Post, “Many community members feel that the city schools are worse off in ways that can’t be captured in data or graphs, arguing that parents have less voice than they once did and that the new system puts some of the neediest children at a disadvantage, especially those with disabilities or who are learning English as a second language.”
Today, over 20,000 children in New Orleans remain in D- and F-rated schools, based on state rankings, and schools are on a three-year slide, dropping 65 percent from 2014 to 2017. Most of the top-ranked schools are more than 50 percent white, and black students are far less likely to be taught by credentialed teachers, to attend schools ranked A or B, and to have access to advanced courses.
So evidence that charter schools have yielded academic gains in New Orleans or anywhere else are muddled at best. Nevertheless, establishment Democrats like Leonhardt argue charter school skeptics are the ones driven by ideology and twisting of facts.
There’s a reason for the desperate arguments promoted by Leonhardt and other charter school proponents.
Just as the general public supports progressive proposals for universal health care and minimum wage, surveys find that Americans have increased confidence in public schools while support for charter schools has dropped by double digit percentages among Democrats and Republicans.
Now there’s some facts for you.
If charters were as beneficent as Leonhardt says, we would expect to see dramatic charter gains in cities like Detroit and Milwaukee. But that hasn’t happened.
Tom Ultican reviews here how school choice has devastated (DeVos-tated?) the public schools of Milwaukee.
Milwaukee is the city with public schools, charter schools, and voucher schools. It is also one of the lowest performing urban districts tested by NAEP.
He begins:
This past school year, Wisconsin taxpayers sent $250,000,000 to religious schools. Catholics received the largest slice, but protestants, evangelicals and Jews got their cuts. Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) reveals that private Islamic schools took in $6,350,000. Of the 212 schools collecting voucher money, 197 were religious schools.
The Wisconsin voucher program was expanded before the 2014-2015 school year. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, “Seventy-five percent of eligible students who applied for taxpayer-funded subsidies to attend private and religious schools this fall in the statewide voucher program already attend private schools, ….”
Money taken from the public schools attended by the vast majority of Milwaukee’s students is sent to private religious schools. Public schools must adjust for stranded costs while paying to serve a higher percentage of special education students because private schools won’t take them. Forcing public schools to increase class sizes, reduce offerings such as music and lay off staff.
The public schools have a disproportionate number of students with disabilities, because the charter schools and voucher schools don’t want them.
Ultican recounts the history of charters and vouchers in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. He reminds us that charter schools are NOT public schools. They are privately managed organizations draining money from public schools.
And he concludes:
In the Zelman v. Simmons-Harris case, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that vouchers to religious school did not violate the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. This decision re-wrote more than a century worth of precedence and further eroded the separation of church and state. No matter how this case was decided, it is patently un-American to force citizens to send money to religious organizations that they do not support.
Privatizing public education is a horrible idea. Public-schools are the bedrock upon which America’s democracy is built. Now strange conservatives and their fellow traveler in the Democratic party, the neoliberals, are claiming that democratically elected school boards are an anachronism. Know this; if someone is opposing democratic governance, they are proposing totalitarian rule by the wealthy.
Having been part of TFA, Gary Rubinstein understands that Teach for America is conflicted about unions. They are both for and against them.
He tried to get TFA to take a position on the Janus decision, but that was fruitless.
So he reviews the responses of leading Reformers and finds that they are either happy, silent, or conflicted.
Nonetheless, he thinks that new members of TFA should join the union, and he explains why.
Comsewogue is a small district on Long Island in New York. Its superintendent, Joseph Rella, is an outspoken critic of standardized testing and “one-size-fits-all” education.
His district developed and applied a problem-based curriculum to prepare students in high school.
“Teaching to the test” is a concept that no longer computes in Comsewogue School District.
Administration and faculty in Comsewogue, for the last two school years, have experimented with a problem-based learning curriculum for small groups of interested ninth- and 10th-graders, an alternative to the traditional educational strategy of focusing assignments and assessments toward the goal of performing well on state-mandated standardized tests at the end of the year. Now, Superintendent Joe Rella has data to back up his notorious aversion to one-size-fits-all education and assessment.
In all subjects, Comsewogue students in PBL classes passed 2018 Regents exams, scoring 65 or better, at a higher rate than those in traditional classrooms, according to data released by the district. On chemistry, geometry, algebra II, global history and English 11 exams, PBL students achieved mastery level, scoring 85 or better, at significantly higher rates than their non-PBL classmates.
“We played in your ballpark — we scored runs,” Rella said of how he interpreted the data, meaning students taught by alternative methods still displayed an aptitude on the state’s required tests.
Though Rella and the district have taken steps to try to have PBL assessments replace Regents exams, no avenue to do so has been greenlighted by the New York State Department of Education to this point for Comsewogue. Emails requesting comment on the significance of Comsewogue’s test results sent to the education department and Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) press office were not returned.
During the 2017-18 school year, about half of Comsewogue’s ninth- and 10th-graders, roughly 300 students, took part voluntarily in PBL classes, which emphasize hands-on learning and real-world application of concepts as assessments — similar to a master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation — as opposed to the traditional “Regents model.” The students were still required by the state to take the Regents exams as all students are, and their performance has inspired the district in year three of the pilot to expand its PBL curriculum offerings on a voluntary basis for 2018-19 to its entire student body — kindergarten through 12th grade.
The superintendent said the impetus for the district to experiment with PBL started three years ago, when he and about 20 Comsewogue teachers spent a day at the New York Performance Standards Consortium in Manhattan. The organization was founded on the belief that there was a better way to assess student learning than dependence upon standardized testing, according to its website.
Open the article to see the stunning results of the district’s problem-based curriculum.
Rella has proven that student learning is created by asking questions that stimulate curiosity, not by checking the “right” box or responding with a canned answer on a standardized test.
Last night, I woke at about 2 am, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. My head was filled with images of children torn from their mothers and fathers. Of children shipped to far-away cities. Of parents crying. Of children frightened and alone. Of babies in the care of strangers who don’t touch them. Of 6-year-olds, terrified and crying for their mothers. Children in cages.
I couldn’t fall asleep. I was tortured by the thoughts and images of the children and their weeping parents. Our government is doing this.
I was outraged by the decision of the Trump administration not to reunite children whose parents were criminals. Does the government have the right to steal the babies of criminals? When was that law passed?
I had a thought. A fantasy. Lock up the Secretary of Homeland Security until every child is reunited with their family.
Words can’t express my outrage at what our government is doing to families. What happened to family values? Maybe that’s reserved for native-born citizens. Maybe they didn’t mean it.
Some parents will never see their children again. They made the mistake of seeking refuge in our country.
Can we report the Trump administration to some international court? The Hague? Where do you go to register a complaint about human rights abuses committed by a nation?
This should be an interesting case. Minnesota has some of the most segregated charter schools in the nation. They are designed to be segregated. Seven years ago, journalist John Hechinger wrote about the charter schools of Minneapolis as a revival of “separate but equal,” with schools created for Somali students, white students, black students, Hispanic students, Hmong students. Joe Nathan, charter advocate, explained that no one is forced to go to these segregated charters. That makes segregation okay. But now this idea of voluntary segregation will go to trial.
MINNESOTA HIGH COURT ALLOWS CLAIM OF UNCONSTITUTIONAL SEGREGATION TO MOVE FORWARD
By Wendy Lecker
In a groundbreaking decision, the Minnesota Supreme Court has determined that claims of public school segregation brought under the State constitution’s education clause are justiciable, that is, they may be adjudicated by the courts. The Court, in its July 25 ruling in Cruz-Guzman v. Minnesota, concluded that a constitutionally adequate education in Minnesota includes ensuring schools are free from segregation by race and socio-economic status.
The plaintiffs in Cruz-Guzman are parents and children enrolled in public schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. They filed a class action complaint in 2015, contending that school segregation deprived children in these districts of an adequate education under Minnesota’s constitution, as well as the guarantee of Equal Protection and Due Process. The plaintiffs are represented by a team led by Daniel Schulman of the Minneapolis law firm, Gray Plant Mooty.
Education Law Center, along with over twenty of the nation’s leading education and constitutional law scholars, filed an amicus curae brief in the Minnesota Supreme Court in support of the plaintiffs in this case. Jones Day attorneys Todd Geremia and James Gross, as well as Christina Lindberg, represented ELC and the scholars pro bono.
The State moved to dismiss the case, and, in 2017, the district court denied that motion. However, the court of appeals reversed the decision, holding that claims of State violations of the Minnesota constitution’s education guarantee were non-justiciable political questions to be determined solely by the Legislature.
On July 25, the Minnesota Supreme Court forcefully disagreed and reaffirmed the judiciary’s role in ensuring the education rights of Minnesota children.
School Segregation in Minneapolis and St. Paul
In its ruling, the Court noted that the complaint set forth “copious data demonstrating a ‘high degree of segregation based on race and socioeconomic status’ in Minneapolis and Saint Paul public schools.” The Court further acknowledged that these segregated schools “have significantly worse academic outcomes in comparison with neighboring schools and suburban school districts.”
The plaintiffs identified State policies that cause this segregation, including:
*boundary decisions for school districts and school attendance areas;
*the formation of segregated charter schools;
*the decision to exempt charter schools from desegregation plans;
*the use of federal and state desegregation funds for other purposes;
*the failure to implement effective desegregation remedies; and
*the inequitable allocation of resources.
Justiciability
Minnesota’s constitution provides that “it is the duty of the legislature to establish a general and uniform system of public schools.” The State argued that because it is the legislature’s duty to provide an adequate education, it would violate the separation of powers doctrine for the judiciary to rule on matters of educational adequacy. The State also argued that ruling on these claims would improperly embroil the judiciary in complex educational policy matters. The Supreme Court disagreed.
The Court noted that specific educational policy matters are the province of the legislature, but that fact does not bar courts from determining whether the legislature has fulfilled its obligation under the constitution.
To the contrary, the Court ruled, it would be an abdication of the judiciary’s duty if the Court “unquestioningly accep that whatever the Legislature has chosen to do fulfills the Legislature’s duty to provide an adequate education.” As the Court noted, the education clause is a mandate to the Legislature, not a grant of power.
The Court further held that to rule that these claims are non-justiciable would be to leave claims under the education clause without a remedy, violating the long-held principle that where there is a right, there is a remedy.
The Court also rejected the notion that the judiciary cannot manage complex education claims. It noted the judicial branch role is to interpret the language of the constitution-and “[w]e will not shy away from our proper role to provide remedies for violations of fundamental rights merely because education is a complex area.” The Court pointed out that the plaintiffs are merely asking the Court to declare that the State violated the constitution-they did not ask the Court to dictate to the State how to remedy this violation. Thus, thus the Court need not engage in any improper policy-making.
Definition of Adequacy
The State contended that judicial interpretation of the education article would involve an improper qualitative assessment by the Court of what constitutes an adequate education. The Court agreed that a qualitative assessment is required, but rejected the claim that a judicial definition of adequacy is improper, holding instead that this task is intrinsic to the court’s role.
The Court pointed out that, in a previous case, it had ruled that education is a fundamental right under Minnesota’s constitution. In this case, the Court elaborated, ruling that “an education that does not equip Minnesotans to discharge their duties as citizens intelligently cannot fulfill the Legislature’s duty to provide an adequate education under the Education Clause.”
Importantly, the Court emphasized that “[i]t is self-evident that a segregated system of public schools is not ‘general,’ ‘uniform,’ ‘thorough,’ or ‘efficient'” under Minnesota’s Education Clause.
Districts and Charters Not “Necessary Parties”
The State argued that the case must be dismissed because the districts and charter schools were not joined as “necessary parties.” The Court ruled that the mere fact that the districts and charters may be affected by any ruling in this case does not require their joinder. The plaintiffs are seeking relief solely from the State. The Court noted that “many non-parties are bound to be affected by a judicial ruling in an action regarding the constitutionality of state statutes or state action, but they cannot all be required to be a part of the suit.”
Next Steps
This Supreme Court decision allows the Cruz-Guzman plaintiffs’ claim to proceed to trial. It also provides guidance for the trial court to set qualitative standards against which to assess the evidence of student segregation in the Minneapolis and St. Paul schools. Finally, the Court makes abundantly clear that the courts are available for school children across Minnesota to seek redress of violations of their rights to a constitutionally adequate education which, according to this Court, includes an education that is free from segregation.
Wendy Lecker is a Senior Attorney at Education Law Center
Education Law Center Press Contact:
Sharon Krengel
Policy and Outreach Director
skrengel@edlawcenter.org
973-624-1815, x 24
