Quality Education as a Constitutional Right: Creating a Grassroots Movement to Transform Public Schools »

Robert Moses is the author of Radical Equations (Beacon / 3127-8 / $16.00 pb). Ernésto Cortes Jr. is director of the Southwest Regional Industrial Areas Foundation. Theresa Perry is professor of Africana studies and education at Simmons College and author of Young, Gifted, and Black (Beacon / 3105-6 / $16.00 pb). Lisa Delpit is director of the Center for Urban Educational Excellence at Georgia State University and author of Other People’s Children.

A passionately argued case for a new civil rights movement—centered on schools

Legendary civil rights leader and education activist Robert Moses invited one hundred prominent African American and Latino intellectuals and activists to meet to discuss a proposal for a campaign to guarantee a quality education for all children as a constitutional right—a movement that would “transform current approaches to educational inequity, all of which have failed miserably to yield results for our children.” The response was overwhelming, and people literally started organizing on the spot.

This book—emerging directly from that effort—includes a fierce, eloquent call by Moses for a new approach to school reform. He argues that the crisis in public education for children of color won’t be solved by bureaucratic fixes but—like the crisis in political citizenship in the 1950s and ’60s—only by a grassroots, popular movement modeled after the civil rights movement.

Latino organizer Ernesto Cortés tells us about the realities of organizing based on the success stories of grassroots change in Texas. Lisa Delpit shows us the key features of culturally grounded quality education. Other eminent educators, historians, and legal experts lend their voices to this groundbreaking book.
 

Introductions The Historical and Contemporary Foundations for Robert Moses's Call to Make Quality Education a Constitutionally Guaranteed Right Theresa Perry vii

"The Holy Cause of Education": Lessons from the History of a Freedom-Loving People Linda Mizell xvi

Part I Organizing: The Youth Shall Lead the Way

1 Miss Baker's Grandchildren: An Interview with the Baltimore Algebra Project Charles M. Payne 3

Part II Can the Constitution Guarantee Quality Education?

2 Reading, Writing, and Rights: Ruminations on Getting the Law in Line with Educational Justice Imani Perry 33

3 Schools That Shock the Conscience: What Williams v. California Reveals about the Struggle for an Education on Equal Terms Fifty Years after Brown Jeannie Oakes 49

4 Constitutional Property v. Constitutional People Robert P. Moses 70

5 Quality Education as a Civil Right: Reflections Ernesto Cortés Jr. 93

Part III Pursuing Excellence in a Context of Inequities

6 Stepping Stories: Creating an African American Community of Readers Kimberly N. Parker 109

7 Is This School? Alicia Carroll 132

8 Stories of Collaboration and Research within an Algebra Project Context: Offering Quality Education to Students Pushed to the Bottom of Academic Achievement Joan T. Wynne Janice Giles 146

9 Culturally Responsive Pedagogies: Lessons from Teachers Lisa Delpit 167

Contributors 189