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"We are in the midst of a full-scale attack on our nation's commitment to public education. From funding, to vouchers, to charter schools, public education policy has become a political football, rather than a means of fulfilling the most basic obligation of government to its citizens. As Derek W. Black vividly illustrates, this assault threatens not just public education, but democracy itself. Black offers both an illuminating history of our nation's establishment of a constitutional right to education, and a trenchant analysis of how such a right is being undermined today. He looks at education history with a wide view, describing both periods when our democracy has been strengthened-when the commitment to public education has been strongest-and weakened, when such a commitment has been lacking. And today, such a commitment is sorely lacking. Schoolhouse Burning shows what is at stake: not just the right to public education as guaranteed by the constitution, but an erosion of democratic norms"--

Answers the calls of grassroots communities pressing for integration and increased education funding with a complete rethinking of school disciplineIn the era of zero tolerance, we are flooded with stories about schools issuing draconian punishments for relatively innocent behavior. One student was suspended for chewing a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun. Another was expelled for cursing on social media from home. Suspension and expulsion rates have doubled over the past three decades as zero tolerance policies have become the normal response to a host of minor infractions that extend well beyond just drugs and weapons. Students from all demographic groups have suffered, but minority and special needs students have suffered the most. On average, middle and high schools suspend one out of four African American students at least once a year. The effects of these policies are devastating. Just one suspension in the ninth grade doubles the likelihood that a student will drop out. Fifty percent of students who drop out are subsequently unemployed. Eighty percent of prisoners are high school drop outs. The risks associated with suspension and expulsion are so high that, as a practical matter, they amount to educational death penalties, not behavioral correction tools. Most important, punitive discipline policies undermine the quality of education that innocent bystanders receive as well—the exact opposite of what schools intend. Derek Black, a former attorney with the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, weaves stories about individual students, lessons from social science, and the outcomes of courts cases to unearth a shockingly irrational system of punishment. While schools and legislatures have proven unable and unwilling to amend their failing policies, Ending Zero Tolerance argues for constitutional protections to check abuses in school discipline and lays out theories by which courts should re-engage to enforce students' rights and support broader reforms

While litigation continues in an effort to establish a fundamental right to education under the U.S. Constitution, the full historical justification for this right remains missing—a fatal flaw for many jurists. This Article fills that gap, demonstrating that the central, yet entirely overlooked, justification for a federal right to education resides in America's education story during the era of slavery and Reconstruction. At that time, education was first and foremost about freedom. The South had criminalized education to maintain a racialized hierarchy that preserved slavery. Many African-Americans, seeing education as the means to both mental and physical freedom, made extraordinary efforts to secretly acquire it. After the War, their efforts morphed into a full-fledged public education movement. Congress, aiming to remedy slavery and repair democracy itself, responded by requiring Confederate states to guarantee education in their state constitutions. The rest of the nation followed shortly thereafter. This Article analyzes this history through the Thirteenth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, the Guarantee Clause, and subsequent judicial precedent. It demonstrates, first, that the Constitution has long protected a negative right to education—the freedom to pursue learning without state interference. Second, it reveals how that negative right transformed into an affirmative one in the years immediately following the Civil War. By anchoring the right to education in multiple constitutional provisions, this Article demonstrates that the right to education permeates the very fabric of our constitutional democracy.

Public schools suspend millions of students each year, but less than ten percent of suspensions are for serious misbehavior. School leaders argue that these suspensions ensure an orderly educational environment for those students who remain. Social science demonstrates the opposite. The practice of regularly suspending students negatively affects misbehaving students as well as innocent bystanders. All things being equal, schools that manage student behavior through means other than suspension produce the highest achieving students. In this respect, the quality of education a school provides is closely connected to its discipline policies. Reformers have largely overlooked the connection between discipline and educational quality. This oversight has limited theoretical and practical tools for change. On the theoretical side, reformers miss the opportunity to pit harsh discipline as the enemy of good schools. Instead, they fall victim to the narrative of bad students as the enemy of good ones. On the practical side, they miss the opportunity to demand legal reform. Instead, they relegate themselves to asking schools to voluntarily adopt less severe discipline policies. Thus far, voluntary efforts have produced some significant changes, but the changes are isolated and limited in scope. In short, reformers need new legal theories and tools to demand reform. Otherwise, harsh discipline will remain the dominant paradigm for the foreseeable future and efforts to improve educational quality and achievement—the most pressing item on the national agenda of the day—will continue to fall short. While some scholars have proposed limits on the most egregious discipline policies, this Article is the first to offer a legal theory that would substantively reform school discipline on the whole and improve educational quality. The theory is grounded in the affirmative education rights and duties found in state constitutions. These rights and duties give rise to two distinct but interrelated arguments. First, because students ...