EDUCATION EQUITY
Access to free, quality public education is a civil right.
We advocate for a public school system that fulfills the needs of every student — no matter where they live.
The Education Equity practice area of Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights:
Works with community partners to advocate for law and policy that ensures access to high-quality educational opportunities and eliminates practices that disparately impact historically-marginalized students.
Provides direct legal services to youth at risk of losing access to education due to racial discrimination, harsh discipline, or involvement in the criminal justice system.
We promote system-wide transformational change that recognizes the experience of historically-marginalized children and works to improve their outcome.
“By staying in this fight together . . .
CHANGE WILL COME.”
Director of Education Equity
Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights
- Beatriz Diaz-Pollack
Learn how the Education Equity practice partners with grassroots organizations to demand that all Illinois children have access to a well-resourced public education.
WATCH THE VIDEO
OUR CURRENT FOCUS & OBJECTIVES
ACTION
Protect student rights and advance community perspective
Disrupt hostile and carceral laws and policies; advocate for policy and practices that are student-centered, trauma-informed, culturally-responsive, and historically accurate.
Ensure equitable funding and resourcing
Advocate for full funding for public education and address policies that leave districts under-resourced and advance all practices that improve equity.
Shift power to students, parents, and community
Advocate for governance laws, policies, and practices at the level of a school district or an individual school that reflect community needs.
STRATEGY
Transforming School Discipline Collaborative
TSDC is a collaborative of organizations working to ensure that Illinois' schools are safe and supportive for all students.
EDUCATION EQUITY - Case Highlights
Advocate against school district decision-making practices that lead to disruptive school closures with significant community impacts.
2024
In June 2024, we submitted a letter to encourage the Evanston/Skokie School District 65 Board of Education to reconsider the consequential vote regarding the proposed closure of Bessie Rhodes School for Global Studies until a full assessment of the impacts and implications had been completed, including through an independent racial equity impact analysis. Parents from Bessie Rhodes adamantly opposed the closure of their unique and vibrant school community given strong concerns for the impacts to all their students, and particularly the many ethnically, racially, and linguistically diverse students served in this school.
Read the full letter we submitted to the Board here.
Continued advocacy for full and fair funding of Illinois public schools as co-convenor of the PEER Illinois coalition.
2023
In 2023, Chicago Lawyers’ Committee as co-lead of the Partnership for Equity and Education Rights Illinois (PEER Illinois), continued to elevate the impacts of persistent underfunding of the Evidence-Based Funding formula (EBF) in the consciousness of IL state lawmakers during the Spring legislative session. Despite the 2017 passage of the EBF Student Success Act, a landmark piece of legislation intended to adequately and equitably fund K-12 education, Illinois school districts face some of the most unequal funding in the nation, with data available in 2023 indicating that over 83% of school districts, attended by 1.7 million students, inadequately funded based on the targets set forth in the law. Illinois’ persistent underfunding of EBF means that at the current rate, EBF won’t reach full funding until the 2040s, depriving nearly two more generations of public school students of their right to adequately and equitably funded public education. The PEER Illinois coalition continues to lead efforts to advocate for full and fair funding of Illinois public schools and advance the goal that every student in Illinois, no matter their race, family income or zip code, should receive an excellent public school education.
Filed suit to prevent closure of National Teachers Academy, a public school serving the South Loop community.
2018
Filed litigation against Chicago Public Schools (CPS) on behalf of parents and community groups alleging that CPS violated the Illinois Civil Rights Act and the Illinois School Code in its plan to close National Teachers Academy, a top-performing elementary school serving predominantly low-income and Black students in the South Loop neighborhood. In December 2018, the Court granted our request for a preliminary injunction, and CPS later announced it would not appeal and abandoned its plans to close the school. The case represented the first successful race-based challenge to a school closing in Illinois history.
Advocate for youth at risk of losing access to education due to racial discrimination, harsh discipline, or involvement in the criminal justice system.
2024
Ernesto*, a 15-year-old Chicago Public School freshman, despite having no prior disciplinary history, was unfairly expelled and assigned to an alternative school setting. Ernesto has a medical condition that impacts his physical well-being and his social connections in school. Unfortunately, because of this, Ernesto became the target of frequent harassment and one day this led to him getting into a physical altercation with another classmate. The school accused him of gang affiliation based on Ernesto wearing a hoodie that day. Ernesto was unable to attend the alternative school he was assigned to due to the distance from his home and his medical condition and he stopped attending school altogether. b Our education equity team acted quickly and demonstrated that expelling Ernesto was legally inappropriate and unnecessary to maintain a safe learning environment and that it would be extremely harmful to his education and well-being. We won the case at the administrative level and Ernesto was allowed to return to his neighborhood school in the fall, avoiding the devastating consequences of being expelled and unable to return to school for up to two years.
