All students have a right to an equal education, but students of color — particularly Black and Brown students and students with disabilities, have historically been marginalized and criminalized by the public school system. The ACLU has been working to challenge unconstitutional disciplinary policies in schools, combat classroom censorship efforts that disproportionately impact marginalized students, and support race conscious admission policies to increase access to higher education.

Let’s break down why education equity is critical to the fight for systemic equality.

Education equity means all students have equal access to a high quality education, safe learning environment, and a diverse student body that enriches the educational experiences of all students.

As the Supreme Court said in Brown v. Board of Education, education “is the very foundation of good citizenship.” Through education, young people learn important values about our culture and democratic society, and about their own values and relationships to others in this society. In addition to being an important foundation for kids’ and young adults’ future professional success, education allows individuals to be informed voters and participants in democratic processes, and public education is the first experience most people will have with the government.

For all of these reasons, equity in education is a critical foundation for a democratic society in which people of all backgrounds are equally included. Without equal opportunities to obtain an education, they will not be able to participate equally in jobs, in voting, and in other crucial areas of life. And when students are not able to learn together, this harms their ability to work together and live and engage with one another later in life.

Modern understandings of educational equity have their roots in Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 landmark Supreme Court decision that ordered an end to school segregation and held racial segregation in education violates the Equal Protection Clause of the constitution. The ACLU played an important role in the Brown litigation, and has continued to fight for education equity on many fronts in the decades since.

The school-to-prison pipeline refers to school discipline practices, such as suspensions and referrals to law enforcement, that funnel youth out of the classroom and into the juvenile and criminal legal systems.

This trend reflects our country’s prioritization of incarceration over education, and it’s made worse as resources for public schools are cut. From inadequate resources for counseling to an overreliance on school-based police officers to enforce harsh zero-tolerance policies, many students — overwhelmingly students of color and students with disabilities — are isolated, punished, and pushed out of our education system for typical childish behavior and behaviors associated with disabilities.

Cops and No Counselors

How the lack of school mental health staff is harming students.

Source: American Civil Liberties Union

Even a single suspension or disciplinary infraction can have enormous consequences for a child’s education. As a student is pushed further down the school-to-prison pipeline, those consequences escalate quickly. In some jurisdictions, students who have been suspended or expelled have no right to an education at all. In others, they are sent to disciplinary alternative schools.Youth who become involved in the juvenile system are often denied procedural protections in the courts, and students pushed along the pipeline find themselves in juvenile detention facilities, many of which provide few, if any, educational services.

Black and Brown students and students with disabilities are disproportionately subjected to discipline and referrals to law enforcement that remove them from the classroom and subject them to additional punitive consequences and even physical injury. For example, over the 2017-2018 school year, Black students accounted for 28.7 percent of all students referred to law enforcement and 31.6 percent of all students arrested at school or during a school-related activity — despite representing just 15.1 percent of the total enrolled student population.

Our country’s schools are increasingly diverse, but also increasingly segregated. Students of all races are harmed by the inability to learn with one another in diverse school settings. Black and Latine students are also more likely to attend schools that are intensely segregated both by race and by socioeconomic status. Students of color are also less likely to have access to advanced courses, and are frequently tracked away from college preparatory courses when they do exist.

Moving Beyond the Supreme Court’s Affirmative Action Rulings

The work to ensure educational opportunities for people of color continues, despite the court’s decision.

Source: American Civil Liberties Union

Inequities in K-12 education can be replicated in college and university admissions criteria. As with elementary and secondary schools, colleges and universities are required to ensure that educational opportunities are open to all students from the application stage and through student’s experiences during their college education. There are a wide range of things that colleges and universities can do to ensure that educational opportunities are open to people of all backgrounds.

There are a range of evidence-based methods schools can use to respond to the behavioral needs of students. These range from strategies that teachers and schools can use to foster a positive learning culture and model, to interventions addressing particular disciplinary issues, such as conflict de-escalation or restorative justice, to using functional behavioral assessments and wraparound support for those students with higher levels of need.

Additionally, schools that employed more mental health providers saw improved student engagement and graduation rates. Schools that used other types of support, including restorative and trauma-informed practices, saw beneficial results, including reduced disciplinary incidents, suspensions, dropouts, and expulsions. Investing in mental health resources, support personnel, and interventions that promote positive student interactions can make schools safer and healthier learning environments, while also helping to combat the discriminatory school-to-prison pipeline that targets students of color and students with disabilities.

Instruction about racism and sexism belongs in schools because it equips students to process the world around them and to live in a multicultural society.

Attacks on education have morphed from demands to exclude critical race theory from classrooms to ever-increasingly devious and dangerous demands to erase entire concepts from American history. Book bans, so-called transparency laws designed to intimidate educators into compliance, and attacks on individual expression have left our education system at the mercy of a hostile and discriminatory minority. Students can’t learn in that type of environment. Our future depends on educational institutions that value instruction about systemic racism and sexism. We need to expand culturally relevant instruction and increase funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion in schools, not attack it for its role in uplifting the systematically oppressed.

Affirmative action in college admissions has been an important tool, but it is not the only avenue for ensuring that educational opportunities are open to all. In the absence of affirmative action, it is more important than ever that schools work to identify and remove inequitable barriers to higher education. At a minimum, schools must continue to comply with federal and state civil rights laws that require them to provide educational opportunities on an equal basis. They can achieve this by ensuring that policies and practices do not unnecessarily limit opportunities for people on the basis of race or ethnicity (or other protected characteristics, including disability, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity) and by ensuring that school climate enables all students to access and engage with educational opportunities.

The ACLU and our affiliates around the country are challenging disciplinary policies that disparately target students of color and students with disabilities and infringe on their right to a safe learning environment. This includes litigation, such as our recent victory resulting in the end to charging students with “disorderly conduct” or “disturbing schools” in South Carolina schools, and advocacy, such as the ACLU of Idaho’s recent report Proud to be Brown and the related civil rights complaint. The report documents how school districts in Idaho are jeopardizing Latine students’ civil rights and liberties by enforcing “gang” dress codes that target mostly Latine students in a discriminatory way, and have negative consequences on their cultural identity, discipline, and education.

CYAP v. Wilson

The ACLU Union filed a federal lawsuit challenging South Carolina’s “disturbing schools” law.

Source: American Civil Liberties Union

We are also fighting back against efforts to ban books and restrict what students can learn about race, gender, and sexual orientation. In Florida, for example, we’re challenging the state’s harmful Stop WOKE Act. We continue to press for equity in higher education following the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action, and defend against attacks on diversity in K-12 schools.

From K-12 to higher education, the ACLU is working to combat discrimination in education and ensure all people have equal access to safe, quality education.

As public-school students return to classrooms for the new school year, some could face an unexpected test: religious indoctrination.

Thanks to various state laws enacted during the 2023 legislative session, some schools could try to impose official prayer, proselytizing, or other religious messages on students. But even if state law purports to allow these activities, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does not. Public schools are not Sunday schools, and we’ll be watching to make sure it stays that way.

Among the top offenders we have our eye on is Texas. Although state lawmakers narrowly failed to enact a bill requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in public-school classrooms, they succeeded in passing a law that authorizes public school districts to employ, or accept as volunteers, chaplains who will “provide support, services, and programs for students.” In a letter sent to every school board throughout Texas, we warned officials that “permitting volunteers to act as chaplains and proselytize students in public schools — let alone employing them — would violate the First Amendment.”

Another state we’re monitoring is Idaho, where lawmakers passed a bill purporting to allow any public school employee to “pray at any time he is otherwise free to engage in personal conversations or other personal conduct.” Under this broad provision, a teacher could try to claim a right to kneel in prayer in front of students as they file in for homeroom or while they’re taking an exam, as long as the teacher would be permitted to send personal texts or read a book during that same period.

A Religious Public Charter School in Oklahoma? Not on Our Watch.

A religious school can’t be a public school, and a public school can’t be religious. These fundamental legal tenets have long protected both...

Source: American Civil Liberties Union

Unfortunately, Idaho is not alone. Kentucky enacted a similar measure in March of this year, and North Dakota lawmakers considered a comparable law. While the North Dakota legislation did not pass, it could be re-introduced in the next legislative session. These and other recent measures aiming to inject officially sponsored religion into public schools are no doubt inspired by the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Kennedy v. Bremerton, which upheld the right of a public school football coach to pray at the 50-yard-line after games. Idaho even dubbed its teacher-prayer statute “Coach Kennedy’s Law.”

But despite state lawmakers’ wishes to the contrary, Kennedy did not authorize the broad promotion of prayer or religion by public school staff. The Supreme Court was clear about the limits of the ruling. Coach Kennedy’s prayers were quiet and private and not endorsed by the school. They fell outside his official responsibilities, did not involve or coerce students, and were not conducted in the presence of a captive audience. All of these factors were essential to the court’s ruling in Kennedy, and employee prayers that do not share these features remain unconstitutional.

As frustrating as the Kennedy decision was, it did not give public school officials free rein to promote their religious beliefs and practices to students. To the extent that lawmakers or public school officials in Texas, Idaho, Kentucky, or North Dakota — or any other state — mistakenly believe otherwise, we’re putting them on notice: Students still have the constitutional right to a public education free from religious indoctrination and discrimination. It’s that basic.

In the past year, Mary Wood has gone through an ordeal that’s increasingly familiar to teachers, librarians, and school administrators across the country: She is being targeted by activists who want to censor what books are in libraries and what discussions happen in classrooms.

Mary is an English teacher at Chapin High School in Chapin, South Carolina. As originally reported in The State, she assigned Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me,” a nonfiction book about the Black experience in the United States, as part of a lesson plan on research and argumentation in her advanced placement class. District officials ordered her to stop teaching the book. They alleged that it violated a state budget proviso that forbids a broad range of subject matter involving race and history.

“Between the World and Me” was published in 2015 as an open letter by Coates to his son, reflecting on currents of hope and despair in the struggle for racial justice in the United States. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, whose judges said, “Incorporating history and personal memoir, Coates has succeeded in creating an essential text for any thinking American today.”

Coates’ book has been the target of censorship campaigns across the country where book banners are targeting books by and about people of color. In the first half of the 2022-2023 school year, 30 percent of the titles banned were about race, racism, or featured characters of color, according to PEN America. South Carolina is one of five states where book bans have been the most prevalent, alongside Texas, Florida, Missouri, and Utah.

Mary Wood has found herself right in the middle of this nationwide attack on the right to learn and the freedom to read.

The following is an interview with Mary about her experience. It has been edited for length and clarity. For more information about how you can fight back against the wave of school censorship in South Carolina, join the Freedom to Read South Carolina coalition and visit our Students’ Rights page. You can learn more about how the ACLU is defending our right to learn nationwide here.

American Civil Liberties Union

Defending Our Right to Learn | ACLU

What you need to know about the new string of classroom censorship and book ban attacks impacting students and teachers across the country.

ACLU: You assigned “Between the World and Me” to an Advanced Placement (AP) Language Arts class. Tell me about that.

Mary Wood: So the lesson plan began with a couple of videos to provide background information about the topic. It discussed racism, redlining, and access to education, which are all topics that Ta-Nehisi Coates covers in his [book]. That was to prepare students. Then I provided a lesson on annotation of texts according to AP standards and expectations, things which should be helpful for them on their essay and in collegiate-level reading and writing. Finally, I provided them with information about different themes that the book touches on, under the umbrella of the Black experience in modern America.

The idea was for them to read the book, identify quotes from the text that covered those different themes, select a theme for themselves, and then research what Coates said about that theme on their own to determine whether or not what he was stating held water — if they agreed with it, if it was valid. The goal was for them to look at a variety of texts from a variety of sources: “Here is an argument. Is it valid?”

We were listening along with Coates’ Audible recitation of the book, and they were to be annotating as they went along. We didn’t get that far — we didn’t get to the part where they do research — because we didn’t finish the book.

ACLU: You and your teaching of this book have been a topic of discussion now at a few school board meetings. At one of the recent meetings, several people noticed that Ta-Nehisi Coates himself showed up and sat with you in the boardroom. Tell me a little bit about how that came about and what it meant to you for him to be there.

Mary Wood: I had given an interview on “The Mehdi Hasan Show,” and Ta-Nehisi’s publicist reached out and asked for my information, and he called. He wanted to talk about what had happened, and he was concerned not for his book specifically, but for censorship in general. He offered that support, and I thought it was a really special and notable thing for him to do.

ACLU: You’ve been personally the subject of all kinds of public comments, from vitriol on the one hand to deep support on the other, and it’s all happened in the town where you grew up. What have you learned about your community while going through this?

Mary Wood: It’s not as staunch as I perhaps thought. I think it’s really easy to assume that the loudest voices are the only voices, but I have seen a different side of that. I saw teachers show up. Teachers in general are afraid to speak out, but the ones who did spoke out in ways that haven’t really happened before. I think that this is important, and it was important to them, so much that they were willing to come out of their comfort zones.

ACLU: How are you feeling about the upcoming school year?

Mary Wood: I’m feeling very anxious, honestly. I don’t know what to expect. The [July 17] board meeting had a wonderful showing of support, not just for me but for educators in general and for the material that we teach. Trusting us is really helpful.

If you look at the board meeting before that, there was a lot of discussion about me deserving to be terminated. One person made a comment that they’ll be keeping their eyes on us. Despite all the kind words and support from the last school board meeting, that one really sticks with you. It stuck with me anyway.

I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know how I’m going to be received by parents and students. I think it’s unfortunate how I’m definitely considering every single thing that I do — and not that I wouldn’t before, but you’re on this heightened alert.

ACLU: This is a challenge that a lot of teachers are facing right now. Is there any advice you’d give to teachers, librarians, anybody who finds themselves in the spotlight like you’ve been?

Mary Wood: I would say it’s important to really look at the policies that are in place. Even though from my perspective I did not break a single policy, I was still said to have. I think it’s really important to not acquiesce just because somebody says something. That doesn’t mean that it’s true.

I would say be bold and don’t back down. Look for resources. Maybe I’m fortunate enough that this story did make national headlines so that it drew attention from the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates, from the National Education Association, from other people who are really valuable resources. If I could do anything, it would be to find a way to bring this all together.

This blog was originally published by the ACLU of South Carolina.