Education Secretary Arne Duncan spoke today in Selma, AL. The occasion was the 45th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the day in 1965 when hundreds of voting rights protesters were beaten by state troopers. Sec. Duncan spoke from the bridge that the civil rights protesters had marched across on that tragic day.

His overall plan is to tighten and toughen civil rights enforcement on campuses across the country. Before his speech, Duncan told reporters that “Despite how far we’ve come as a country over the last 45 years, we know there are still ongoing barriers to equal educational opportunity in this country.”

Civil Rights in Education: Why Now?

Hardly a year passes without a major civil rights issue in one of our many schools making the news. This might lead a casual observer to think that we’re doing just fine, as many of these issues are resolved positively. It’s the thousands of unreported civil rights violations we don’t hear about that are the problem. “This is the civil rights issue of our generation,” says Duncan. Some shocking statistics highlighted in the Associated Press article on Duncan’s speech:

• A quarter of all students drop out before their graduation, and half of those come from 12 percent of the nation’s high schools. Those roughly 2,000 schools produce a majority of the dropouts among black and Latino students.
• Black students without disabilities are more than three times as likely to be expelled as white students, and those with disabilities more than twice as likely to be expelled or suspended — numbers which Duncan says testify to racial gaps that are “hard to explain away by reference to the usual suspects.”
• Students from low-income families who graduate from high school scoring in the top testing quartile are no more likely to attend college than the lowest-scoring students from wealthy families.

Clearly, we aren’t doing the best job we could. Russlynn Ali, assistant secretary for civil rights in the Education Department, said, “For us, this is very much about working to meet the president’s goal, that by 2020 we will regain our status in the world as the number one producer of college graduates.” This explains the timing of the new push, and it makes perfect sense. By keeping the disenfranchised youth in school, the Obama administration is beginning the process of stacking the educational-attainment deck in their favor. With more students making through high school, we’ll have more students applying to college–let’s just hope they stay in.

What’s Next for Education Reform?

As higher education suffers from massive budget cuts across the country, hope is springing up in K-12 schools. The Race to the Top competition is nearing its finish, and this new civil rights agenda is promising to say the least. It leaves me wondering what will be next in education reform. Hopefully, we’ll see some funding being dumped into our higher education infrastructure.