Court Cases Education

MALDEF Urges Supreme Court To Permit Communities To Create Diverse Schools

Dec 5, 2008 | ,

Washington, DC – Today, school districts, civil rights organizations and educators urged the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold local school districts’ voluntary integration authority. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) filed an amicus curiae (friend-of-the-court) brief in the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of 16 national and local Latino organizations. At issue in the two consolidated cases, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education is the continued authority of local school districts to take voluntary action to reduce racial segregation and isolation in their schools.

Morales v. Shannon

Sep 16, 2008 |

This class action lawsuit was filed in 1970 by Ms. Genoveva Morales on behalf of her children against the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District at the height of the Latino civil rights movement. In 1975, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit found that Uvalde C.I.S.D. in Texas had failed to desegregate its school system in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The court ruled that the District had violated the rights of the Latino plaintiff class, and the District was placed under a desegregation order. MALDEF has continued to monitor the District and evaluate whether it has acted appropriately to remedy the pernicious effects of discrimination on its Latino students.

United States v. Chicago Public Schools (Amicus Counsel)

Sep 16, 2008 | , ,

MALDEF is committed to ensuring that public schools do not ignore the needs of students with limited English proficiency and creating opportunities for all students to succeed academically. In its landmark 1974 decision in Lau v. Nichols, the United States Supreme Court held that public schools cannot fail to provide for the needs of their non-English speaking students, reasoning that “students who do not understand English are effectively foreclosed from any meaningful education,” and that “[b]asic English skills are at the very core of what these public schools teach.”