Gary Orfield

Last updated

Gary Orfield
Born(1941-09-05)September 5, 1941
SpousePatricia Gándara
Academic background
Education University of Minnesota (BA)
University of Chicago (MA), University of Chicago, Ph.D. [1]

Gary Orfield (born September 5, 1941) [2] is an American professor of education, law, political science and urban planning at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. [3] He worked previously at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. A native Minnesotan, Orfield received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and travels annually to Latin America.

Contents

Early life and education

Orfield was born in Minnesota, the son of Myron and Lindy Orfield. [4] He graduated from the University of Minnesota, [5] was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where he received both an MA and a Ph.D. [1]

Career

Orfield is interested in the study of civil rights, education policy, urban policy, and minority opportunity. [6] In 1996, he co-founded, with Chris Edley, the Harvard Civil Rights Project, [7] now called The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA. [8] He founded the project to provide needed intellectual capital to academics, policy makers and civil rights advocates on multiracial civil rights issues. He was professor of education and social policy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for 16 years. [8]

In addition to many studies of desegregation, Orfield is an author or editor of many books and reports including: Dropouts in America, Lessons in Integration, Higher Education and the Color Line, and spoken out for affirmative action and against standardized testing, and particularly the use of test scores to deny high school graduation in the book, Raising Standards or Raising Barriers. [9]

Orfield's central interest is the development and implementation of social policy, with a focus on the impact of policy on equal opportunity for success in American society. Recent works include studies of changing patterns of school desegregation and the impact of diversity on the educational experiences of law students. [10]

In addition to his scholarly work, Orfield has been involved with development of governmental policy. He participated as a court-appointed expert in several dozen civil rights cases, including Grutter v. Bollinger , the University of Michigan Supreme Court case that upheld the policy of affirmative action in 2003. [11] He has been called to give testimony in civil rights suits by the U.S. Department of Justice and many civil rights, legal services, and educational organizations. [12]

Personal life

Orfield has three daughters with his first wife, Antonia Orfield. [13] [14] Since 2006 he has been married to Patricia Gándara, co-director of the Civil Rights Project. [5] He is the older brother of Myron Orfield, [4] a legal scholar at the University of Minnesota Law School.

Awards

In 1997, Orfield was awarded the American Political Science Association's Charles Merriam Award for his "contribution to the art of government through the application of social science research." In 2007, he was also awarded the Social Justice in Education Award by the American Educational Research Association for "work which has had a profound impact on demonstrating the critical role of education research in supporting social justice." [1]

Selected Bibliography

Related Research Articles

Desegregation is the process of ending the separation of two groups, usually referring to races. Desegregation is typically measured by the index of dissimilarity, allowing researchers to determine whether desegregation efforts are having impact on the settlement patterns of various groups. This is most commonly used in reference to the United States. Desegregation was long a focus of the American civil rights movement, both before and after the US Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, particularly desegregation of the school systems and the military. Racial integration of society was a closely related goal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Desegregation busing</span> Failed attempt to racially diversify American public schools

Desegregation busing was a failed attempt to diversify the racial make-up of schools in the United States by sending students to school districts other than their own. While the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, many American schools continued to remain largely racially homogeneous. In an effort to address the ongoing de facto segregation in schools, the 1971 Supreme Court decision, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, ruled that the federal courts could use busing as a further integration tool to achieve racial balance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Magnet school</span> Public schools with specialized courses or curricula

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Christopher Fairfield Edley Jr. was an American lawyer and the Dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law from 2004 to 2013. He served as President of The Opportunity Institute, an organization he co-founded with Ann O'Leary in 2016.

The Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, Inc. is the largest and second-longest continuously running voluntary school desegregation program in the country and a national model for the few other voluntary desegregation busing programs currently in existence. The program enrolls Boston resident students in Kindergarten through 12th grade into available seats in suburban public schools. Conceived by Boston activists Ruth Batson and Betty Johnson, and Brookline School Committee Chair Dr. Leon Trilling, METCO launched in 1966 as a coalition of seven school districts placing 220 students. The Massachusetts Racial Imbalance Act (RIA) of 1966, and amended in 1974, is the legal basis for voluntary interdistrict transfers for the purpose of desegregation, and funding is almost entirely provided by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Over the years, the academic and social outcomes of the program have been praised, while the increasing gap between cost and funding and the negative experiences of students of color have been the subject of criticism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert L. Carter</span> American judge (1917–2012)

Robert Lee Carter was an American lawyer, civil rights activist and a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Second Redemption is a term that has been used regarding politics of the United States for the period following the election of 1968 characterized by more conservatism, and a retreat from governmental and judicial activism on issues of civil rights.

Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 551 U.S. 701 (2007), also known as the PICS case, is a United States Supreme Court case which found it unconstitutional for a school district to use race as a factor in assigning students to schools in order to bring its racial composition in line with the composition of the district as a whole, unless it was remedying a prior history of de jure segregation. Chief Justice Roberts wrote in his plurality opinion that "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

<i>The Shame of the Nation</i> Book by Jonathan Kozol

The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America is a 2005 book by educator and author Jonathan Kozol. It describes how, in the United States, black and Hispanic students tend to be concentrated in schools where they make up almost the entire student body.

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The Civil Rights Project/ El Proyecto de CRP, originally named The Civil Rights Project, is a renowned multidisciplinary research and policy think tank focused on issues of racial justice. In January 2007, The Civil Rights Project moved from Harvard University to the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Myron Orfield</span> American politician

Myron Willard Orfield, Jr. is an American law professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, director of its Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity, and a former non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He has been called "the most influential social demographer in America's burgeoning regional movement." Orfield teaches and writes in the fields of civil rights, state and local government, state and local finance, land use, questions of regional governance, and the legislative process. He is known for developing a classification scheme for U.S. suburbs, documenting suburban racial change and resegregation, and for developing innovative regional land use, public finance, and governmental reforms. He is a former member of the Minnesota Legislature, having served in both the state house (1991-2001) and senate (2001-2003) and is the younger brother of Gary Orfield, a political scientist at UCLA.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">School segregation in the United States</span> Racial separation in schools

School segregation in the United States was the segregation of students based on their ethnicity. While not prohibited from having schools, various minorities were barred from most schools, schools for whites. Segregation was enforced by formal legal systems in U.S. states primarily in the Southern United States, although elsewhere segregation could be informal or customary. Segregation laws were dismantled in 1954 by the U.S. Supreme Court because of the successes being attained during the Civil Rights Movement. Segregation continued longstanding exclusionary policies in much of the Southern United States after the Civil War. Jim Crow laws codified segregation. These laws were influenced by the history of slavery and discrimination in the US. Secondary schools for African Americans in the South were called training schools instead of high schools in order to appease racist whites and focused on vocational education. School integration in the United States took place at different times in different areas and often met resistance. After the ruling of Brown v. Board of Education, which banned segregated school laws, school segregation took de facto form. School segregation declined rapidly during the late 1960s and early 1970s as the government became strict on schools' plans to combat segregation more effectively as a result of Green v. County School Board of New Kent County. Voluntary segregation by income appears to have increased since 1990. Racial segregation has either increased or stayed constant since 1990, depending on which definition of segregation is used. In general, definitions based on the amount of interaction between black and white students show increased racial segregation, while definitions based on the proportion of black and white students in different schools show racial segregation remaining approximately constant.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">School integration in the United States</span> Racial desegregation process

In the United States, school integration is the process of ending race-based segregation within American public and private schools. Racial segregation in schools existed throughout most of American history and remains an issue in contemporary education. During the Civil Rights Movement school integration became a priority, but since then de facto segregation has again become prevalent.

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New Jersey has some of the most segregated schools in the United States. Despite laws promoting school integration since 1881, a 2017 study by the UCLA Civil Rights Project found that New Jersey has the sixth-most segregated classrooms in the United States.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 "Gary Orfield". UCLA Law. Retrieved November 30, 2023.
  2. ↑ Raffel, Jeffrey A (1998). Historical Dictionary of School Segregation and Desegregation: The American Experience. Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN   9780313295027.
  3. ↑ "Gary Orfield, Ph.D. Professor". The Civil Rights Project at UCLA. UCLA Graduate School of Education Co-Director.
  4. 1 2 "Myron W. Orfield". Obituary. StarTribune. October 30, 2007.
  5. 1 2 Singh, Ajay (April 2009). "Civil Union: Gary Orfield and Patricia Gándara". UCLA Magazine.
  6. ↑ Altschuler, Glenn (June 11, 2022). "'The Walls around Opportunity' examines higher education barriers". The Florida Courier.
  7. ↑ "Christopher Edley Jr". The Opportunity Institute. Retrieved March 4, 2016.
  8. 1 2 Wyer, Kathy (November 29, 2006). "Civil Rights Project Moves to UCLA". Newsroon. UCLA. Archived from the original on March 5, 2007.
  9. ↑ Orfield, Gary (2001). Kornhaber, Mindy L. (ed.). Raising Standards Or Raising Barriers. Century Foundation Press. ISBN   978-0-87078-451-4.
  10. ↑ Wihbey, John (May 5, 2014). "School resegregation, race and America's future: Recent research". The Journalist’s Resource.
  11. ↑ "Grutter v. Bollinger". casetext. March 27, 2001. 137 F. Supp. 2d 821 (E.D. Mich. 2001)
  12. ↑ "Gary Orfield". New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Retrieved September 18, 2020.
  13. ↑ "Weddings; Sonia Orfield, Adam Shah". New York Times. May 6, 2002.
  14. ↑ "Dr. Antonia Marie (Stoll) Orfield". Obituary. StarTribune. May 16, 2009.
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