Patricia Marin

Theme Issue: Moving Beyond Gratz and Grutter-The Next Generation of Research Informing the Debate on Race-Conscious Education Policy

ecent events in the legal arena demonstrate the ongoing salience of race and ethnicity in our society and serve to highlight the timeliness of this special issue of Educational Researcher. In addition to the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action in Gratz u. Bollinger and Grutter u. B o l i g e in 2005 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit affirmed that race could be considered in student assignments in K-12 public schools (Comfort v. Lynn School Committee). The same year, Justice Sandra Day OConnor, the key swing vote in Grutter, announced her retirement. Moreover, the debates on issues of race and ethnicity continue unabated. This special issue deals with racelethnicity, diversity, and issues of educational opportunity now that the Gratz and Grutter rulings have been in place for some two and a half The aim of the special issue is to increase understanding and stimulate further discussion across and between disciplinary and methodological boundaries so that diverse education researchers can move beyond reactive responses to specific court challenges to affirmative action and toward a more proactive research agenda that investigates the importance of race-consciousness in education policy and practice. Because the education research community includes scholars and educators from various disciplines, we have a unique vantage point from which to analyze difficult policy controversies involving race, diversity, and educational opportunities. To that end, this special issue brings together scholars from diverse disciplines and methodological approaches to offer new directions for research and to discuss a rich and credible landscape of research to inform the continued public deliberation over race-consciousness in education.

Shaping Educational Policy Through the Courts: The Use of Social Science Research in Amicus Briefs in Fisher I

Different from more traditional policy-making avenues, the courts provide an antipolitical arena that does not require broad agreement from various constituents for policy enactment. Seeking to guide court decisions on these policy issues, individuals and organizations have filed amicus briefs that increasingly include social science to support their arguments. The Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin Supreme Court case presents an ideal example to study the use of social science evidence in amicus briefs to shape educational policy. Findings from this study identify differences in the use of social science research that suggest many ways in which our current understanding of the efforts of actors to shape educational policy via the highest court in the nation is incomplete. This study also highlights why developing this understanding could be extremely useful to both the creation of educational policy and the use of antipolitical approaches to change such policy.