A/HRC/56/68/Add.1 article 5 of the Convention provides for the right to equality before the law in the enjoyment of several economic, social and cultural rights, including education and training. At the national level, racial segregation was seemed unconstitutional in the 1954 United States Supreme Court judgment in Brown v. Board of Education. Despite such protections, ongoing racially discriminatory educational segregation and stratification, as a legacy of legalized discrimination, segregation and stratification, persists. Many children attend educational facilities from kindergarten to grade 12 (K–12) that are highly racially and ethnically homogenous. During the 2020/21 school year, more than a third of K–12 students, constituting about 18.5 million minors, attended schools where 75 per cent or more students were of a single race or ethnicity. 11 Due to economic inequality, poverty, and significant inequities in the investment of public resources between areas, many children of African descent or from Indigenous and/or Latino/Hispanic communities tend to experience overcrowded classrooms, a lack of qualified teachers and of schoolbooks and instructional materials, and insufficient extracurricular activities. In relation to ongoing educational segregation, the Special Rapporteur welcomes the Department of Education’s Fostering Diverse Schools Demonstration Grants Program, as well as guidance provided by the Department’s Office for Civil Rights to ensure that education is equally available and accessible to all students. 16. Second-rate K–12 educational provision can lock children from marginalized racial and ethnic groups into poverty and economic exclusion by shaping their access to subsequent educational and employment opportunities. Disengagement because of poor-quality education, combined with the ways that systemic racism shapes certain childhoods, contributes to behavioural issues. Rather than addressing the root causes of such behavioural issues, some schools have implemented zero-tolerance policies that impose severe punishments for infractions of rules and have delegated discipline to police. Increased numbers of suspensions and expulsions and, in some cases, school-based arrests, have directly resulted in measurable radicalized impact. This has created a “school to prison pipeline”, in which Black and Latino children are pushed out of schools and into the juvenile or criminal justice system, with irreparable effects on the course of their lives. 12 These policies reflect racialized effects that directly burden children’s right to education and lifelong opportunity. In this respect, the Special Rapporteur welcomes the release in 2023, by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, of the Resource on Confronting Racial Discrimination in Student Discipline. 17. Disinvestment policies are furthered by policy and law seeking to whitewash the retelling of the history of racial discrimination. The Special Rapporteur is concerned by initiatives aiming to exclude critical race theory from curricula and to prevent the teaching of racial and ethnic studies, as well as by the underfunding of and historical divestment in historically Black colleges and universities. D. Affirmative action in college admissions 18. Despite the persistence of societal inequalities which powerfully shape access to higher education, including deep educational segregation and stratification at the K–12 stages, the United States Supreme Court’s decisions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina effectively eliminated the use of race as a factor in college admissions. 19. The transformative potential of higher education to help break generational cycles of poverty and social exclusion is undeniable. It can provide access to opportunities for those from marginalized racial and ethnic groups to gain economic and political power and disrupt 11 12 GE.24-08027 United States Government Accountability Office, “K-12 education: student population has significantly diversified, but many schools remain divided along racial, ethnic, and economic lines”, report to the Chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor of the House of Representatives, June 2022. American Civil Liberties Union, “School-to-prison pipeline”. 5