Excuse me, but we're a neighborhood here, and we care": School Closure and Neighborhood Place Purpose In Michigan, declining enrollment, a robust system of school choice, and a decentralized system of capital finance has made school closure an acute issue impacting communities across the state. Indeed, Stanford's CREDO center, which studied closure in 26 states, found Michigan to have the highest rate of closure for low performing school in their sample at 9% between 20069% between and 20129% between (Han et al., 2017))-732 closures in total (CEPI, 2017).
Judicial decisions focusing on equal educational opportunity involve significant issues of educational governance and often involve explicit questions about the extent to which authority to make educational decisions should be centralized or decentralized across various institutions and entities. This review aims at clarifying scholars’ understanding of court-driven reform of educational governance to leverage equal educational opportunities across the major fields of school desegregation, school finance reform, and school choice. Issues of centralization and decentralization have particularly emerged in courts’ approaches to these fields with respect to both the judicial process and the substance of the policies themselves. An examination of these issues reveals a movement toward the decentralization of authority away from the courts that, at times, has reflected a growing judicial awareness of the courts’ strengths and weaknesses. Based on this examination, a more effective role for the courts in reforms aimed at promoting equal educational opportunity is considered.
This article reviews educational initiatives of state and federal government that were designed to remedy the effects of racial segregation on Black public school students in the United States after the famous Brown v. Board of Education decisions. Several policy and legal initiatives are reviewed, including school desegregation, compensatory education, decentralization, school reform and restructuring, school finance litigation, state accountability models, school district takeovers, vouchers, charter schools, No Child Left Behind, and privatization.