Current Issues in Educational Policy and the Law (Pb)

Publisher Marketing: Almost every significant educational policy issue in the United States implicates legal issues. Policy debates about testing and school choice, for example, cannot be disentangled from legal rights and mandates. The same is true for issues of funding, campus safety, special education, and English language learners. Yet no book aimed at a general audience (as opposed to an audience of lawyers or law students) presents these current policy issues from a legal perspective. The proposed book - which will consist of approximately 12 chapters, each approximately 20 pages long - will explore compelling educational policy issues through that legal lens. The chapters will build an understanding of both law and policy. The chapters will be written by a group of authors enrolled in a doctoral seminar at CU-Boulder's School of Education. The book's editors are Kevin Welner, associate professor of educational policy at CU-Boulder, and Wendy Chi, a current doctoral student at CU-Boulder. Both hold JD degrees (Welner: 1988, UCLA Law; Chi: 2003, University of Michigan Law). The students will include approximately twelve Ph. D. students and six MA students, all working under the supervision and clos an external editor for each chapter. This will help to add rigor and credibility, and it will also help to get the word out. The intended audience includes the usual audience for educational policy books, as well as two more specific audiences: educational law students and scholars, and school & society (teacher-education) students. Contributor Bio:  Welner, Kevin Grant Welner is Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder. A former practicing attorney, he consults in litigation concerning educational equity issues.