accountability for the resolution of claims made by minority students and/or their
parents/caregivers when the learning environment fails to respect minorities’ rights, and
specifically when the violations pertain to racial bias, the dehumanization of children,
adolescents, and parents, and the exclusion of minority parents’ right to monitor, participate, and
hold publicly-funded educational institutions accountable. For example, in regard to the
recommendation that systems of recording racist or similar incidents targeting minorities and
policies to eliminate such incidents be developed in school systems, recourse for victims must
be legitimized in the event such systems are inadequate, ineffective, ignored, or nonexistent.
And when disciplinary actions are not fair and unbiased, restorative processes must be
practiced if any mutual trust is to be maintained between minority families and school authorities.
The standard of states promoting systematic consultation and co-operation between parents of
minority children and school authorities is also fundamentally paramount if we are to eliminate
hostile, unfair, biased, and disproportionate discipline meted out to minority children of color.
When such incidents occur, not only are minority families’ experiences with school authorities
fragmented, but the disengagement worsens to the point where few institutionally-initiated
overtures will bring those families back into the public school system. We must remember that
the parents of minority children in the U.S. today very likely experienced when they were younger
the same human rights violations as their children, and that states’ relationship with the greatest
untapped resource for the improvement of education, minority parents, may have already been
eroded for multiple generations.