Civil Wrongs

This could be a good thing for the multiracial community. The Department of Education now refuses to address the civil rights of multiracial students unless they identify as only one race. They also advise schools to reassign "Hispanic" to any child who checks Hispanic and a race. We'll be watching.

 

Head of Education Dept.'s Civil Rights Office to Step Down

By Lesli A. Maxwell 

Russlynn Ali, the hard-charging head of the U.S. Department of Education's office for civil rights, is stepping down from the post. Her last day is tomorrow.

Ali shared news of her departure during a conference call yesterday with folks in the civil rights community, the same day the Education Department released a four-year review of the work of OCR, which was nicely detailed by Nirvi Shah over at the Rules for Engagement blog.

Nothing official on her departure—or her replacement—has come from the Ed. Dept. yet.
The big question now is whether the very aggressive stance of OCR will stay intact or wane some after Ali is gone.

Ali, who headed Education Trust West in California where she championed causes such as requiring a college-level curriculum for all high school students in Los Angeles Unified, ramped up OCR's work on school discipline, harassment, and bullying, and opened up new areas of inquiry into students' access to charter schools and graduation rates at community colleges.

Instructional programs for English-language learners received lots of scrutiny under Ali, who partnered frequently with U.S. Department of Justice civil rights officials to bring even more pressure for change in school districts. OCR forced a number of changes for ELLs in Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, and the state of Arizona. OCR has also stepped up its reviews of practices in districts where civil rights advocates have complained that ELLs and their non-English-speaking parents are not providing adequate communications.

Over at Schooled in Sports, Bryan Toporek breaks down OCR's work on Title IX under Ali's leadership.
For folks in districts, an inquiry from OCR is a dreaded occurrence, and, in the view of some, it became even more so in the nearly four years Ali has been in charge. To counter those fears, Ali told me in a conversation late last year, she'd made providing technical assistance to districts more of a priority of OCR than it had been in previous administrations.Now it will be interesting to see who will be her successor.

Photo: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, left, and Russlynn Ali, head of the Department of Education's office for civil rights, attend a board meeting of the Los Angeles Unified School District in 2011. (Reed Saxon/AP-File)
Source: Education Week

The Multiracial View from the White House

The Multiracial View from the White House

Multiracial President Obama recently announced a White House Initiative on Educational Excellence—for African American students. These efforts are nothing new; there are similar White House Education Initiatives for Hispanics, American Indian and Alaska natives, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. How great for those groups!

Who is missing? White students, but everyone thinks all white people are rich and getting wonderful educations at pricy private schools and …let’s look again…oh yes….multiracial students, of course.  

We still have overcrowded schools, not enough funding, the drop-out problem, less-than-great test scores, and on and on. The President said that the goal is to produce “a more effective continuum” of programs for African-American students. I’m not even sure what he means by that. I bet Ben Jealous, CEO of the NAACP does. He commented, “If fully implemented, we are convinced the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans will make sure school discipline is fair, special education assignments are based on needs, not race, and all of our nation’s most motivated students have fair access to advance placement classes.”

Oh. This is about making sure, according to the NAACP that black students get treated fairly, but based on needs, not race. I’m not at all sure how that works for black students, if it’s not based on race, unless this is just to throw money at a group problem. But just how does that work for a multiracial student?

Enter the US Department of Education, which says every school district in America has been told to allow students in K-12 to check two or more races. It claims to advise each school district to separately tabulate the numbers of multiracial (or check two or more in their language) students. It also looks to us at Project RACE that they are, indeed, reassigning those numbers back into a single minority category. By the way, the African American Initiative will be housed in the U.S. Department of Education.