AdvancED Equity Hosts Conference on Civil Rights in Schools

The Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity hosted the second annual conference led by Prof. Erica Frankenberg (Penn State University) and Prof. Maithreyi Gopalan (University of Oregon) from AdvancED Equity in partnership with Prof. Alfredo J. Artiles at Stanford University. This conference built on a consensus interdisciplinary research agenda that was developed at the inaugural conference in 2024 and aligns and bridges work on civil rights protections across research, practice, and policy in educational institutions in the U.S. They received support from the American Educational Research Association (AERA), GSE, and Prof. Artiles to host the conference that had two interrelated goals. First, to mobilize knowledge related to students’ experiences of civil rights protections in K-12 public schools in the US. Second, to engage in field building at this polarized, political moment, as a pathway to deepen scholars’ impact on civil rights issues in schools. Prof. Erica Frankenberg (Penn State University), one of the co-organizers, shared: “We believe that there are both real opportunities as well as significant barriers for education scholars to be more publicly engaged with their work, especially in this moment of deep polarization. So, we wanted to help build a multidisciplinary field focusing on civil rights in education to further our collective capacity.”

Following an open call for research on “Centering Civil Rights Protections in Schools in the US”, scholars from across the country were invited to the conference to present their work and receive feedback. Strong research papers presented at this conference, which make it through a rigorous peer-review process will be published in an AERA Open special issue in 2026-27.

In addition to presenting new research, the conference also included sessions with scholars and lawyers working in this area, which were extremely generative. An early conversation with Laura Hernandez, senior researcher at the Learning Policy Institute, invited participants to set a new agenda that would reimagine the civil rights foundations that have been essential to paving a path toward greater educational opportunities for all learners. One fireside chat included Catherine Lhamon, who served most recently as Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education and is the inaugural executive director of UC Berkeley's Edley Center on Law and Democracy, and Shaheena Simons, former section chief of the Educational Opportunities Section of the Dept of Justice Civil Rights Division, and now an advisor at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. The panelists reflected on past accomplishments, the changes in federal civil rights enforcement, and how their agencies used research to advance civil rights.