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

Synopsis: In 2005, famed 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 passionate, and the meeting launched a movement.
 
This book—emerging directly from that effort—reports on what has happened since and calls for a new scale of organizing, legal initiatives, and public definitions of what a quality education is. Essays include
 
·  Robert Moses’s historically rooted call for citizens, especially young people, to make the demand for quality education
 
·  Ernesto Cortés’s view from decades of work organizing Latino communities in Texas 
 
·  Charles Payne’s interview with students from the Baltimore Algebra Project, who organized to make historic demands on their district 
 
·  Legal scholar Imani Perry’s nuanced analysis of the prospects of making a case for quality education as a right guaranteed by the Constitution
 
·  Perspectives from scholars Lisa Delpit and Joan T. Wynne, and by teachers Alicia Caroll and Kim Parker, who provide examples of what quality education is, describing its goal, and how to guide practice in the meantime