LDF joined more than eighty civil rights, disability, parent, student, grassroots and education organizations from across the country to urge Congress not to turn back the clock on teacher quality gains for poor and minority students, English Learners, and students with disabilities as it considers reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), currently known as “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB).

Today, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (“LDF”) joined other civil rights and education groups in supporting introduction of the Positive Behavior for Safe and Effective Schools Act (PBSESA) – a bill to fund positive, preventative approaches to discipline in U.S. schools.

By Kenneth J. Cooper
Tennessee State University, a historically black school in Nashville, has devised a program to improve math instruction in the state’s K-8 schools that could help narrow gaps in student achievement and college completion rates.

By Sylvester Monroe
Last week, the city’s schools reopened under a lingering cloud of controversy surrounding a state report released last month by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal charging Atlanta school teachers, principals and area superintendents with cheating on the 2009 Georgia CRCT (Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests) achievement tests.

By Kenneth J. Cooper
Charter schools are moving into the suburbs, and one of the first in Illinois outside of a big city is near Chicago in a predominately black suburb, where the school’s presence has heightened class tensions and raised questions about educational equities.

Today, the Council of State Governments released a new report that helps to raise awareness about the importance of dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline.  Entitled Breaking Schools’ Rules: A Statewide Study of How School Discipline Relates to Students’ Success and Juvenile Justice Involvement, the report is the most in-depth of its kind, examining the academic, disciplinary, and juvenile court records of nearly a million Texas secondary school students.  Sadly, it confirms the national trend that LDF has observed in its Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline initiative:  educational inequity, excessive reliance upon harsh disciplinary practices, and extreme racial disparities in both.

Zero-tolerance rules, once hailed as the panacea to an explosion of serious student misbehavior in schools, are now recognized more and more as part of the problem, not the solution.

By: Jonathan Shihadeh
The “school to prison pipeline” symposium was held at the Wayne State Law School on March 25. The event focused on a process that is used by some public schools to expel minority students by reprimanding them harshly for minor offences

By TaRessa Stovall
When Kelley Williams-Bolar, a single black mother living in public housing in Akron, Ohio, was sentenced to 10 days in jail for sending her daughters to the Copley-Fairlawn school district outside of her educational jurisdiction, the issue of what parents—especially black, low-income parents—will do to get their children a better education burst into the national consciousness.

By Matt Cregor & Damon Hewitt
Our nation’s school discipline rates have reached all-time highs. As suspension, expulsion and school-based arrests rates grow, racial disparities in discipline continue to widen.