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