National Call for Research Papers and Notice of Upcoming Conference:

"Looking to the Future: Legal and Policy Options for
Racially Integrated Education in the South"

Deadline for Proposals: September 2, 2008

Conference date: April 2, 2009 at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

For a third of a century, from the late 1960s through the beginning of the 21st century, the South led the nation in school desegregation. In recent years, the South has lost that distinction and is resegregating faster than any other region. Now the nation's most populous region, the South is home to a substantial majority of African Americans, as well as to 20% of the Latino population, in the United States. Whether Southern schools will continue to resegregate - losing what was won by a half century of legal battles and social movements - must be quickly addressed.

The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA (Gary Orfield & Patricia Gándara, co-directors), the University of North Carolina Center for Civil Rights at the UNC School of Law (Julius Chambers, director), and the University of Georgia Education Policy and Evaluation Center (Elizabeth DeBray-Pelot, interim director) will co-sponsor a national conference on April 2, 2009, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The conference will focus on the choices likely to shape the racial future of Southern education in the wake of the Supreme Court's 2007 Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (PICS) decision. The goal of the conference is to heighten scholarly understanding about the meaning of the decision, as well as to enhance discussion about more immediate and longer-term policy options for the future of integration in the South.

The Civil Rights Project has commissioned more than 400 studies and published 16 books in a little more than a decade. In 2002, the Civil Rights Project and the Center for Civil Rights co-sponsored "The Resegregation of Southern Schools? A Crucial Moment in the History (and the Future) of Public Schooling in America." This national conference gathered more than 500 scholars and advocates in Chapel Hill to explore the causes and consequences of school resegregation. The convening resulted in the book School Resegregation: Must the South Turn Back?, edited by John Charles Boger and Gary Orfield (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

Now the Civil Rights Project, the Center for Civil Rights, and the Education Policy and Evaluation Center, are combining efforts to generate cutting edge scholarship on the implications of the 2007 PICS decision particularly for the South. We seek papers from both legal and social science perspectives and both theoretical and empirical work are of interest. We are particularly interested in receiving proposals - for either proposed work (that will be ready for conference presentation in April) or studies already in progress - in the following topical areas:

* Viable legal strategies after PICS; policies that have passed legal muster; long-term legal strategies for racial equity, opportunities in state court;

* Policymaker response, including school board response, efforts to build community political will or educate the public, legislative options; strategies for racial and economic equity;

* Evidence on the importance of integration: why is striving for racial integration necessary? What do we know and what do we need to know to make the case for integration policies?

* Strategic Future Policy directions -- magnets; housing-education partnerships; Inter-district transfers; consolidation/fragmentation of schools or districts; SES-based plans; models for rural plans and for suburbs experiencing racial change; methods that school districts should use in considering alternative standards;

* Making Money Matter at the school level -- with respect to organizational dimensions such as teacher assignment, tracking, school climate, inclusive curriculum;

* Changing demographics -- growing multiracial nature of schools in the South, including papers focused on suburban racial change and the demographics in rural areas in the South; papers on how to conceptualize desegregation in a multiracial context; implications of these trends for teacher preparation & in-service training; explicit focus on how the growth in the Latino student population is affecting schools in the South.

Preliminary proposals should be only two (2) pages in length and should include: 1) the title of the paper; 2) the author(s) name and affiliation(s); 3) the name of the primary contact with email and telephone number; 4) the research questions or objective; 5) the theoretical framework; 6) the methods employed; 7) related work completed to date, and 8) the potential contribution of the analysis to XX. Proposals should make clear the particular connection between the proposed work and the PICS decision. Research proposals will be reviewed by staff of the sponsoring organizations and by a small panel of expert advisors.

Authors are asked to submit proposals by September 2, 2008. Submit proposals electronically to Erica Frankenberg (Frankenberg@gseis.ucla.edu). Selection and notification will take place by September 22, 2008, and papers will be due to discussants by late March 2009. At least one author of any accepted paper must be available to participate in the conference on April 2, 2009 in Chapel Hill, NC.

Chosen authors will be commissioned to write a paper that is about 20-25 pages in length for a national conference on the subject. The conference will bring together the authors of the draft papers for an intensive discussion of their work with other authors, and civil rights and policy experts in sessions aimed at strengthening the work and sharpening the focus to reach a broader audience. The papers are not to be written narrowly for scholarly audiences, though they should meet high academic standards. The goal is to do the best possible research and then to translate it for a much broader audience of policy makers. The final paper should include data and charts presented in the most accessible way possible so that community groups, the press, students, and others can utilize and inject the new information and insights into public discussion.

Authors will have full final control of their own work and will receive full credit for it. Draft papers will be edited and prepared for publication. All papers will be published on co-sponsor websites and, pending agreement reached with a prospective publisher, select papers will be included in an edited volume of conference papers. Contingent upon funding, authors will be paid $1000 for the draft paper as well as full expenses to participate in the roundtable. They will be paid another $1000 for the revisions of the paper.

Questions? Please contact any of the following:

* Elizabeth DeBray-Pelot (edebray@uga.edu),
* Erica Frankenberg (Frankenberg@gseis.ucla.edu), or
* Ashley Osment (osment@email.unc.edu)