NEPC Resources on Equity and Social Justice
NEPC Review: Youth Engagement in Collective Impact Initiatives: Lessons from Promise Neighborhoods (Urban Institute, December 2020)
Youth engagement allows young people to participate in decision-making processes about programs and policies that affect them. Drawing on data from the federal Promise Neighborhood initiative, the Urban Institute has published the report, Youth Engagement in Collective Impact Initiatives: Lessons from Promise Neighborhoods. The strengths and challenges presented in the report do align with previous research regarding the contexts that enable and constrain youth engagement, but the report fails to make these connections explicit. Overall, while championing youth engagement, the report misses an opportunity to influence future policy and practice.
NEPC Review: Capitalism in the 1619 Project (The Heritage Foundation, January 2021)
The 1619 Project of the New York Times re-examines United States history with the experiences of Black Americans at the center. The 1619 Project has elicited a significant backlash, culminating recently in the efforts of multiple state legislatures to ban the use of its curricular materials. Consistent with those efforts, this Heritage Foundation report seeks to disqualify the 1619 Project curricular materials as insufficiently celebratory of American capitalism. The report asserts that the 1619 Project overstates slavery’s importance to U.S. economic history. However, the report is less concerned with potential students’ content knowledge about slavery than with their receptivity to the libertarian policy preferences of the Heritage Foundation. Disconnected from the current scholarly literature on both American slavery and history pedagogy, the report commits the exact sin with which it besmirches the 1619 Project: substituting ideology and political motives for an accurate engagement with the past.
NEPC Review: Toward Equitable School Choice (Hoover Institution, November 2020)
A report from the Hoover Institution seeks to offer evidence-based guidance for policymakers in shaping more equitable outcomes from school choice programs. This review examines the report's claims, its representation of the research, and its use of research in forming those recommendations. The review finds that although the report is useful as a snapshot of the current status of choice programs in the United States, its use of research is often problematic. Some of the research is misrepresented, many claims are made without citations to evidence, and some of the recommendations bear no connection to the evidence provided in the report. As such, the report is, as intended, a political guidebook for conservative policymakers that fails to offer evidence-based guidance on making choice more equitable.
NEPC Review: Religious Charter Schools: Legally Permissible? Constitutionally Required? (Manhattan Institute, December 2020)
The Manhattan Institute’s recent report concludes that the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue requires states to grant charters to religious organizations, including those that intend to deliver an explicitly religious curriculum that teaches religion as truth. While Espinoza involved a publicly financed private school tuition (voucher-like) program, the report reasons that its logic applies in full force to charter schools as well. Although this report does raise an important question and identifies the key issues for answering it, it excludes key federal and state case law necessary to fully and fairly analyze the issues. Similarly, it fails to acknowledge extensive key expert analysis on matters left unresolved by courts. The result is a one-sided analysis of the issue that is not a reliable basis for state action.
NEPC Review: The Third Way: A Guide to Implementing Innovation Schools (Progressive Policy Institute, October 2020)
A report from The Progressive Policy Institute is a “how-to” guide for entities seeking to develop innovation schools in urban communities. The guide highlights case examples of states and localities that have “successfully” implemented innovation schools, with a focus on test score data and student demographics. It argues that equitable educational opportunity is achievable when schools have complete autonomy and strong accountability to increase academic performance, adopt diverse learning models, and expand school choice. However, many of this convoluted guide’s long list of 53 detailed recommendations are improbable and overlook potential disadvantages of innovation schools. These recommendations are highly complicated, largely unexamined, and likely infeasible, especially if a district’s goal is to serve all students and their families equitably.
The Price of Opportunity
What is TribalCrit?
RBG and Education: A Legacy of Equity
NEPC Review: Special Education and Distance Learning: Supporting Students through the Pandemic (ExcelinEd, June 2020)
A brief published by ExcelinED provides recommendations to education policy leaders for the delivery of special education services during the COVID-19 school closures. The recommendations, however, assume that current knowledge among school professionals is sufficient to make the desired special education and technological leaps. In fact, the necessary knowledge and capacity are barely emerging. Meanwhile, the recommendations do little to address the unequal distribution of resources in schools, which include access to well-prepared teachers and related services personnel qualified to teach students with disabilities, particularly using distance learning approaches. Given these concerns, coupled with the lack of research anchoring its recommendations, the brief offers little to policymakers or practitioners currently struggling to make distance learning work during the pandemic.