(NAME-MCE) CALL FOR PAPERS - Legal and Policy Options for Racially Integrated Education in the South

[Anselmo Villanueva]

National Call for Research Papers and Notice of Upcoming Conference:
Looking to the Future: Legal and Policy Options for Racially
Integrated Education in the South

http://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/news/news_conf_looking_to_the_future_2008.php

April 2, 2009  Chapel Hill NC

For a third of a century, from the late 1960s through the beginning of
the 21st century, the South led the nation in school desegregation. In
recent years, the South has lost that distinction and is resegregating
faster than any other region. Now the nation's most populous region,
the South is home to a substantial majority of African Americans, as
well as to 20% of the Latino population, in the United States. Whether
Southern schools will continue to resegregate – losing what was won by
a half century of legal battles and social movements – must be quickly
addressed.

The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA (Gary
Orfield & Patricia Gándara, co-directors), the University of North
Carolina Center for Civil Rights at the UNC School of Law (Julius
Chambers, director), and the University of Georgia Education Policy
and Evaluation Center (Elizabeth DeBray-Pelot, interim director) will
co-sponsor a national conference on April 2, 2009, in Chapel Hill,
North Carolina. The conference will focus on the choices likely to
shape the racial future of Southern education in the wake of the
Supreme Court's 2007 Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle
School District No. 1 (PICS) decision. The goal of the conference is
to heighten scholarly understanding about the meaning of the decision,
as well as to enhance discussion about more immediate and longer-term
policy options for the future of integration in the South.

The Civil Rights Project has commissioned more than 400 studies and
published 16 books in a little more than a decade. In 2002, the Civil
Rights Project and the Center for Civil Rights co-sponsored "The
Resegregation of Southern Schools? A Crucial Moment in the History
(and the Future) of Public Schooling in America." This national
conference gathered more than 500 scholars and advocates in Chapel
Hill to explore the causes and consequences of school resegregation.
The convening resulted in the book School Resegregation: Must the
South Turn Back?, edited by John Charles Boger and Gary Orfield
(Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

Now the Civil Rights Project, the Center for Civil Rights, and the
Education Policy and Evaluation Center, are combining efforts to
generate cutting edge scholarship on the implications of the 2007 PICS
decision particularly for the South. We seek papers from both legal
and social science perspectives and both theoretical and empirical
work are of interest. We are particularly interested in receiving
proposals – for either proposed work (that will be ready for
conference presentation in April) or studies already in progress – in
the following topical areas:

   * Viable legal strategies after PICS; policies that have passed
legal muster; long-term legal strategies for racial equity,
opportunities in state court;
   * Policymaker response, including school board response, efforts
to build community political will or educate the public, legislative
options; strategies for racial and economic equity;
   * Evidence on the importance of integration: why is striving for
racial integration necessary? What do we know and what do we need to
know to make the case for integration policies?
   * Strategic Future Policy directions -- magnets; housing-education
partnerships; Inter-district transfers; consolidation/fragmentation of
schools or districts; SES-based plans; models for rural plans and for
suburbs experiencing racial change; methods that school districts
should use in considering alternative standards;
   * Making Money Matter at the school level -- with respect to
organizational dimensions such as teacher assignment, tracking, school
climate, inclusive curriculum;
   * Changing demographics -- growing multiracial nature of schools
in the South, including papers focused on suburban racial change and
the demographics in rural areas in the South; papers on how to
conceptualize desegregation in a multiracial context; implications of
these trends for teacher preparation & in-service training; explicit
focus on how the growth in the Latino student population is affecting
schools in the South.

Preliminary proposals should be only two (2) pages in length and
should include: 1) the title of the paper; 2) the author(s) name and
affiliation(s); 3) the name of the primary contact with email and
telephone number; 4) the research questions or objective; 5) the
theoretical framework; 6) the methods employed; 7) related work
completed to date, and 8) the potential contribution of the analysis
to XX. Proposals should make clear the particular connection between
the proposed work and the PICS decision. Research proposals will be
reviewed by staff of the sponsoring organizations and by a small panel
of expert advisors.

Authors are asked to submit proposals by September 2, 2008. Submit
proposals electronically to Erica Frankenberg
(frankenberg at gseis.ucla.edu). Selection and notification will take
place by September 22, 2008, and papers will be due to discussants by
late March 2009. At least one author of any accepted paper must be
available to participate in the conference on April 2, 2009 in Chapel
Hill, NC.

Chosen authors will be commissioned to write a paper that is about
20-25 pages in length for a national conference on the subject. The
conference will bring together the authors of the draft papers for an
intensive discussion of their work with other authors, and civil
rights and policy experts in sessions aimed at strengthening the work
and sharpening the focus to reach a broader audience. The papers are
not to be written narrowly for scholarly audiences, though they should
meet high academic standards. The goal is to do the best possible
research and then to translate it for a much broader audience of
policy makers. The final paper should include data and charts
presented in the most accessible way possible so that community
groups, the press, students, and others can utilize and inject the new
information and insights into public discussion.

Authors will have full final control of their own work and will
receive full credit for it. Draft papers will be edited and prepared
for publication. All papers will be published on co-sponsor Web sites
and, pending agreement reached with a prospective publisher, select
papers will be included in an edited volume of conference papers.
Contingent upon funding, authors will be paid $1000 for the draft
paper as well as full expenses to participate in the roundtable. They
will be paid another $1000 for the revisions of the paper.

Questions? Please contact any of the following:

   * Elizabeth DeBray-Pelot (edebray at uga.edu),
   * Erica Frankenberg (frankenberg at gseis.ucla.edu), or
   * Ashley Osment (osment at email.unc.edu)