Chapter 14: A New Civil Rights Agenda For American Education¹ 

This chapter develops a new vision for enforcing civil rights and creating equal opportunity for students of color in a society that has been divided and polarized by race and ethnicity from its origin. It analyzes the rise and decline of the great civil rights laws and related educational and social policies forged during the civil rights revolution, reviews the vast immigration-related transformations of the U.S. population and how opportunity is framed in our metropolitan structures which are home to four-fifths of Americans. It spells out the multiracial and linguistic challenges the country faces and presents a twenty-first century agenda for resuming and expanding a civil rights agenda which, it argues, must be part of any successful educational reform.