Ideas from the nation’s leading academic and legal minds
One of the leading attributes of greater economic and social mobility is educational attainment. Yet, as the income gap grows nationwide, collateral forces of educational inequality, racial segregation and concentrated poverty continue to impede economic opportunity and undermine the ideals of democracy upon which the nation was founded.
Below are downloads and links to cases and reports from leading minds around the nation on the forces that are shaping access to education.
The Civil Rights Project At UCLA
The Civil Rights Project has assembled a vast database of reports and research related to K-12 education and topics as varied as the effectiveness of Title I reforms, to the impacts and benefits of racial and ethnic diversity in education to resegregation trends and remedies in our nation’s public schools.
The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at The Harvard Law School
The Institute consistently updates its substantial database of articles, reports and publications around topics such as religious pluralism and case studies on how certain communities are pushing back against re-segregation.
HAAS Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at The University of California, Berkeley
With its vision of advancing a more inclusive, fair and just world, The Haas Institute works in a range of areas that include Race, Diversity and Educational Policy; Diversity and Democracy; Diversity and Health Disparities; Economic Disparities; Disability Studies; LGBTQ Citizenship and Religious Diversity. The site is a wealth of information in the forms of reports, presentations, videos, infographics and more.
Opportunity Nation
WCCCD’s Institute for Social Progress is one of twelve institutions on the higher education council of Opportunity Nation, a bipartisan and cross-sector national campaign working to expand economic opportunity and close the opportunity gap in America.
The Opportunity Index uses more than a dozen data points around such measuring points as jobs and the economy, education and community health and civic life to give a comprehensive view of each region, and how much opportunity exists to move up the economic ladder. The guiding principle of all participating in the campaign is that the zip code you’re born into shouldn’t determine your lifetime chances for success.
The Democracy Commitment
The Democracy Commitment is a community college-focused civic engagement initiative that is a central component to the American Democracy Project partnership. That project involves a national coalition of public state colleges and universities committed to civic and democratic work, sponsored by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) in partnership with the New York Times and the Kettering Foundation. The long-range focus of the project is to create an independent civic engagement initiative for America’s community colleges.
Articles and papers about a range of issues around civic engagement and higher education can be found here.