Publication Date

2025

Abstract

American K-12 public education is at a critical anti-civil rights inflection point amidst a rapidly changing landscape of federal and state education law and policy. From local anti-literacy measures to state “three strikes” exclusionary school discipline legislation to punitive federal executive orders, new legal mechanisms are conjoining to produce public school climates marked by structural violence, and the erasure of students with multiple marginalized identities. Attending to these political and legal realities is a growing cluster of legal scholarship empirically categorizing, and theoretically challenging, the rise of such anti-education civil rights obstructions. Though diverse in scope, analyses prominently center the direct effects of individual and structural mechanisms to police, punish, and exclude students from classrooms and schools. This focus has created an unattended space in the literature for interrogations centering broader collateral consequences of an expanding educational retrenchment movement. It is in this liminal gap in which this Article intervenes. Specifically, it extends prior work querying the future of school-based restorative justice under early forms of anti-woke legislation and “parental right” activism and examines new state and federal attacks on American public education that may limit the ability to advance, and in many instances, maintain restorative justice practices, policies, and programs in K-12 schools.

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Fordham Urban Law Journal

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