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“We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.”
—Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Grutter v. Bollinger, 2003.
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.
CHHIRJ brings together experts in a variety of disciplines and fields (i.e. psychology, economics, public health, housing, environmental equity, sociology, immigration, and criminal justice) to:
• assess how new measurements of the opportunity gap can be incorporated into federal and state legislation, with a particular focus on the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2008;
• develop new legal strategies to combat racial isolation in schools and communities; particularly in light of likely new restrictions imposed by the Supreme Court on even voluntary race-conscious measures currently used by many school districts;
• organize a series of convenings featuring research illuminating various social conditions affecting children’s school performance that may not be well-known to policy-makers, advocates, or educators, yet that could inform new policies or strategies.
• develop manuals and reports summarizing the findings from these convenings, and recommending policy, advocacy and legal directions for addressing them in local communities, at the state level, and nationally. |