A new book examines the role of the courtroom in U.S. education in recent decades, noting that such involvement has grown exponentially over the past 60 years.
“Seemingly no aspect of education policy has been too insignificant to escape judicial oversight,” write co-editors Joshua M. Dunn, an associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, and Martin R. West, an assistant education professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. “While dogmatism would be unjustified,” they add, “we conclude that the courtroom is rarely the optimal venue for education policymaking.”
The volume, which features a range of writers covering litigation in a variety of areas, including school finance, school choice, student rights, and the No Child Left Behind Act, was jointly published by the Brookings Institution and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, two Washington think tanks.
