A Year Later, UVA Law’s Education Rights Institute in Full Swing

The Education Rights Institute at the University of Virginia School of Law is barely a year old. But for Professor Kimberly Jenkins Robinson, its director, the institute’s mission has been her North Star for decades.

“This is the culmination of 25 years of work in the field,” said Robinson, one of the nation’s leading scholars on education law who has also worked at the U.S. Department of Education and as an education litigation attorney.

“It’s very exciting to have the opportunity to share some of the knowledge that I have built in a way that can actually impact the lives of students. That matters to me a lot,” she said.

In recent months, the institute published reports on racial harassment in schools and educational funding gaps — priority issues in classrooms across the country and for the institute, according to Robinson. The goal, she said, is for the institute’s findings to reach educators and school district administrators, who can then use them to make a difference for students.

“I’m super excited to have an impact on the ground, to help people understand what is the law and how can it help deliver on equal education opportunity,” Robinson said.

The Education Rights Institute launched in October 2023, supported by an anonymous gift of nearly $5 million. The institute’s aims include promoting research around the creation of a federal right to a high-quality education, shining a spotlight on scholarship that explores educational opportunity gaps and working with school districts on issues relating to Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans discrimination based on race, color or national origin in programs that receive federal funding, including schools.

The report on racial harassment — written by Robinson and GeDá Jones Herbert, director of programming for the institute — lays out how the Office of Civil Rights within the U.S. Education Department, which is charged with investigating discrimination in schools, has seen a troubling rise in Title VI complaints in recent years, noting in July that harassment remains “too pervasive in our nation’s schools.”

Since Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the resulting war in Gaza, Robinson said there has also been an increase in harassment incidents relating to national origin in American schools, giving more urgency to their report.

“We wanted to make sure to speak into that moment, to provide schools with resources to address it,” she said.

Harassment in schools, the report outlines, comes in many forms, from name-calling to racially motivated physical threats. Severe, persistent and unaddressed harassment — or sometimes just a single incident — can create what is known as a hostile environment, where affected students no longer have the full opportunity to learn.

The impact on students in all cases can be profound.

“Students that feel unsafe in school or feel a high level of anxiety that they’re about to be harmed or harassed in some way — that impairs their ability to learn,” Robinson said.

Schools are legally required to immediately investigate potential harassment cases, and the Office of Civil Rights assesses the timeliness, reasonableness and effectiveness of these responses. The report includes several case studies where the office did intervene.

Common corrective measures required of schools and districts included staff trainings, reviews and revisions of policies to ensure Title VI compliance, and surveys and focus groups to collect data that can help inform plans to combat harassment. The institute plans to release a follow-up report focused on best practices at the local level to address discrimination in school settings.

Na’ilah Suad Nasir, president of the Spencer Foundation, delivers the keynote address at the 2023 launch of the Education Rights Institute.

Just as harassment can erode opportunities for students, the institute is also highlighting in two reports how persistent funding gaps can perpetuate inequality, as well as outlining reforms that states have implemented to address such shortcomings and pointing to federal funding, research and technical assistance that can help states and districts.

Sarah Beach, an inaugural Education Rights Institute Fellow, knows firsthand the day-to-day challenges that educators face. Before pursuing a doctoral degree at UVA’s School of Education and Human Development — where she was a student of Robinson’s — she spent several years as a public school teacher. To her frustration, she found that too often her approach to teaching was being shaped by the need to ensure her students passed statewide standardized tests, often to the detriment of other important academic skills.

“I realized that a lot of people who are making decisions about education policy have never had classroom experience,” she said.

The reports, which were co-authored by Beach and Robinson, explain how the model for funding schools, which relies heavily on the collection of local property taxes, can lead to significant funding gaps that disproportionately harm students from minority groups and low-income backgrounds. Although states use funding formulas to account for funding shortfalls in neighborhoods with low property values, these gaps persist, depriving support to students who need it most.

“There’s pretty clear evidence that students who have families who come from low socioeconomic status need even more resources in order to attain the same levels of education that their peers who are from wealthier families have,” Beach said.

Compounding this challenge now and in the coming months is the fact that supplemental federal education funding that was a part of three pandemic relief laws expired at the end of September, which is more likely to affect schools and districts with low-income families.

“One of the tricky things is that school districts knew that those were not full-time funds that they were going to have forever. But there were some emergencies that school districts were facing where they couldn’t necessarily spend the money in the ways that they would want to,” Beach said. Now, schools that were already resource-deprived face the prospect of making cuts.

Despite these and other challenges, Beach and Robinson show that there are a number of reforms that states have implemented to better achieve adequate — and fair — school funding levels. For example, California uses a funding formula based on student need. Wyoming employs a system where the state determines a guaranteed level of funding for a district based on a variety of factors, then makes up for any shortfall.

“It’s really looking at the different profiles and picking and gleaning what they’re doing well, and what’s feasible within your state climate,” Beach said.

So, what’s next for the Education Rights Institute in 2025? Robinson said her priorities are to expand the institute’s staff, continue building out the research and resources they’re producing, and, importantly, work with school districts so that they can use research to make a positive impact for students.

The institute has already produced short videos on the harassment and funding reports that cover the key findings and is planning one-page summaries that educators and local officials can quickly and easily reference. Other efforts include webinars and other workshops that could be part of an educator’s professional development and include various hypothetical incidents relating to classroom harassment where teachers can learn effective ways to handle different scenarios.

For Robinson, it is an opportunity to continue producing research in an area that has defined her career and to see it used to expand opportunities for students.

“I truly believe in this bedrock legal principle of equal educational opportunity, and we have some laws that could help us get there. We’re just not implementing them, so I really want to help make that change,” she said. “This is my calling.”