Epilogue

The epilogue explains how the development of students’ rights between the 1960s and the 1980s shaped understandings of children’s rights more broadly. The epilogue discusses the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a United Nations treaty that the United States has refused to ratify, and argues that the Convention conflicts with understandings of children’s rights as expressed by American constitutional law. The epilogue then shows how a current students’ rights case from Detroit, Gary B. v. Snyder, which claims a right to literacy, shows how difficult it has become for students to make claims in relation to racial disparities. The epilogue then discusses what scholars call the “school-to-prison pipeline,” which supports the theory that the development of students’ rights has reinforced rather than challenged existing racial disparities. Finally, the epilogue briefly discusses the ideas about rights and schooling embodied by a new student movement against gun violence.

Introduction

The introductionexplains how and why student protest became common in the United States in the late 1960s and places these protests in the context of shifts in the history of education and in broader social movements, including the civil rights movement, the Chicano Movement, and black power activism. The introduction also situates students’ rights within the context of children’s rights more broadly, explaining the legal principles that justified age discrimination and excluded children and students from the basic protections of American constitutional law. The introduction identifies the two decades between the 1960s and 1980s as a constitutional moment that revolutionized the relationship of students to the state. It also connects students’ rights litigation to the issue of school desegregation and the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education.

The Right to Equal Protection

This chapter examines a school desegregation lawsuit out of Denver, Colorado:Keyes v. School District No. 1. This case was the first case in which the Supreme Court ruled on the issue of de facto segregation, which involved the separation of students by race that was not directly the result of law. This chapter places the case in its context, in which the Chicano Movement rose to challenge discrimination against Mexican American students in the city’s public schools. The chapter explores the conflicts between the ways that black and Chicano activists pursued justice in education. The chapter argues that Keyes was an important case in the court’s articulation of Fourteenth Amendment equal protection jurisprudence, as the courts limited the kinds of claims that advocates for black and Chicano students could make about the quality of education they received at school.

The Right to Free Speech

This chapter examines how two student free speech cases, Burnside v. Byars and Blackwell v. Issaquena County, emerged out of the 1964 Freedom Summer voter registration campaign in Mississippi in 1964. This chapter argues that the two cases were the result of increased student activism following Freedom Summer and that these two First Amendment cases were the result of conflict over the broader issues of racial discrimination and school segregation in Mississippi. These cases were eventually cited in the U.S. Supreme Court lawsuit Tinker v. Des Moines, which established the constitutional rights of all students and led to increased litigation. This chapter explains how the rationale in these cases focused on whether students were considered disorderly, and it argues that concepts like disorder can be racially coded and therefore affect the perception of student actions differently based on the race of students and the context of the action.

A Right to Equal Education

This chapter discusses the development of Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence in the area of students’ rights during the 1960s and 1970s. It focuses in particular on the courts’ interpretation of equal protection in regard to school desegregation, bilingual education, and students with disabilities. The chapter argues that, during the 1970s, the Supreme Court dramatically narrowed its interpretation of equal protection, and in doing so, it limited the ability of advocates for students of color to pursue racial discrimination cases in court. The chapter discusses how advocates for non-English-speaking students and students with disabilities sought to use the Fourteenth Amendment to make claims on behalf of these children, who were sometimes excluded from schools entirely. This chapter also examines the San Antonio v. Rodriguez case, in which the Supreme Court rejected the claim that the Constitution protects a right to education.

Tinker’s Troubled Legacy

This chapter examines how ideas about race and order shaped the way the courts’ articulated students’ rights in relation to school discipline in the 1970s and early 1980s, placed in context of the rise of mass incarceration. The chapter begins by discussing how advocates for students of color confronted racial disparities in school discipline and the ways that the courts limited the kinds of claims students could make about racial discrimination in suspensions and expulsions.In Ingraham v. Wright, the Supreme Court ruled that the Eighth Amendment does not prohibit school officials from using corporal punishment. In New Jersey v. T.L.O., the Court determined that students’ do have a limited right to privacy in relation to searches of their clothing and belongings at school. This chapter places these cases within the context of a longer history of a punitive turn in education and demonstrates how these rulings reinforced existing racial inequities in school discipline.

The Right to Due Process

This chapter discusses Goss v. Lopez, a Supreme Court case that established students’ rights to due process in school discipline. The case was the result of black student protests in Columbus, Ohio, that ended with mass suspensions of students.The Goss litigation challenged the ability of administrators to suspend and expel students at will. This chapter explores how the protests were rooted in broader concerns about racial discrimination at school and in response to the perceived discriminatory actions of administrators. The case reflected increased concerns about the discriminatory treatment of black students in cases of school discipline, and it discusses the efforts of organizations, including the Children’s Defense Fund and the Southern Regional Council, to publicize and combat this issue.