|
| The history of the United States reveals deep ambivalences in our attitudes toward, and perceptions about, citizenship as both a social concept and legal status. We seem to be forever engaged in a tug-of-war between our impulse to expand rights and to welcome newcomers, on one hand, and to exclude and deny privileges of citizenship to those we deem “unworthy” on the other. This fissure in the national psyche has created a pattern of “give and take” in which certain individuals are granted new rights and benefits, only to have those same opportunities subsequently revoked or diminished. As Americans we have not yet resolved several central questions that lie at the heart of this contradictory narrative: Are we an open, welcoming, expansive society or a closed, restricted one? Is government’s role to expand rights and privileges of citizenship, or is it mainly in the business of limiting such rights and privileges? Perhaps it is our nation’s unique fate to adjust perpetually our position between these two extremes. |
Go to Project |
| |
The O’Connor Project confronts the challenge issued by Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in her majority opinion affirming the constitutionality of the University of Michigan’s diversity admissions policies. Its goal is to advance research-based policies and practices that will help to improve educational outcomes for children of color during the next decade.
In particular, we will measure, raise awareness of, and help to develop strategies to address the “opportunity gap”—or the social inequalities outside of schools that prevent many children of color from academically achieving at the levels of their white peers. These exceedingly complex social conditions help determine a child’s mood, health, behavior, motivation to learn, ability to focus, self-concept and social and institutional relationships. Yet too often policies are enacted as if schools existed in a vacuum, and children were not influenced by their experiences outside the classroom. |
|
Go to Project |
| |
| The School to Prison Pipeline describes the tragic journey that begins in segregated, impoverished schools and ends in juvenile halls and adults prisons for far too many children of color. Youths traveling through this pipeline are frequently taught by unqualified teachers in overcrowded, dilapidated facilities, forced to endure sub-standard curriculum, tested on material they were never taught, removed to separate and inadequate special education programs, repeatedly suspended, expelled and even arrested for relatively minor offenses, held back in grade, banished to alternative schools, before they finally drop or are pushed out of school, thus tripling the likelihood that they will spend time in prison. |
|
Go to Project |
| |
Pathways Home works to mobilize the array of resources formerly incarcerated people need to rebuild their lives. Through partnerships with members of the business community, grassroots organizers, faith-based communities, training/employment programs and other appropriate allies, the Houston Institute has launched a multi-city initiative to facilitate stable employment, political participation and successful, long-term civic reintegration. Our goal is to create "win/win" situations in which men and women with criminal records have opportunities to develop skills that lead to sustained employment, employers benefit from a qualified work force, and communities become more socially and economically stable. |
|
Go to Project |
| |
There is a long and direct connection between racial politics in the United States and the state-sanctioned executions of African Americans. From the racial profiling that occurs before arrest, to a prosecutor’s decision about whether to seek the death penalty, to the racially-tinged selection of jurors, to the decision about whether to impose the death penalty, opportunities for prejudice to infect the system abound. |
|
Go to Project |
| |