Our Mission
The Center for Law and Education (CLE) strives to make the right of all students to quality education a reality and to enable communities to address their own education problems effectively, with an emphasis on assistance to low-income students.
Our Work
CLE engages in federal and state legislative and administrative advocacy and targeted litigation to protect and expand students’ rights to high-quality education and make schools accountable to students and their families through enforcement and implementation of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, and the civil rights statutes — Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (race, color, national origin), Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (disability), Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Equal Educational Opportunity Act (multilingual learners/emergent bilinguals).
CLE provides backup support and assistance to attorneys in Massachusetts representing students from low-income families in education matters, which includes but is not limited to: reviewing student records in individual cases and assisting counsel in identifying potential legal claims; drafting demand letters, pleadings and research memoranda; providing legal counsel and ongoing case consultation; assisting in framing/developing a negotiation strategy; assisting in drafting state and federal administrative complaints; discussing strategies for litigation and appeal in specific cases; identifying expert witnesses; filing amicus briefs; updating legal memoranda and providing targeted legal and educational research related to ‘new’ matters of policy and education.
CLE conducts trainings for a wide range of audiences (attorneys, advocates, educators, parents, students) and publishes legal manuals, tools, and other materials integrating educational research and practice with law and policy to foster key quality elements of schools.
CLE also works with educators as well as communities on collaborative school reform to implement key elements of educational policy and practice that foster the right to a high-quality education.
Our Results
Over the past 55 years, CLE has played a major role at the state and federal level in shaping the key education statutes (Title I, Perkins Act, IDEA, among others) and in leading efforts to promote the high-quality education provisions found in each statute. Thanks directly to CLE’s advocacy, all students are entitled to learn to the same challenging and rigorous academic content standards (Title I), students participating in career and technical education must receive integrated academic and technical instruction and be provided with strong experience in and a comprehensive understanding of all aspects of an industry (Perkins), and students with disabilities must be taught and assessed on the same standards expected for students without disabilities (IDEA).
CLE has also litigated landmark cases during the past five decades that, for example, articulated the right of African-American students from elementary through higher education to equal educational opportunities (Morgan v. Hennigan; United States v. Fordice); ensured students facing disciplinary exclusion their due process rights (Goss v. Lopez); established the right of students with disabilities, including incarcerated/detained youth, to receive meaningful, specially designed instruction (Smith v. Wheaton; James O. v. Marston); established the rights of students before being given ‘high-stakes’ graduation tests to receive adequate instruction of the knowledge and skills being tested and adequate validation of the tests (Debra P. v. Turlington); and successfully challenged Massachusetts’ ‘zero tolerance’ school discipline law (L.B. v. O’Connell) as well as discriminatory practices that targeted immigrant students, unlawfully disclosed their school records to the police and denied them access to learning opportunities (CLE et al v. City of Boston Public Schools).
Throughout state and federal administrative complaints, CLE has also challenged, among other things, the failure to provide special education to multilingual learners with disabilities in their native language so they may access the general education curriculum, discrimination by a school district refusing to recognize sickle cell disease as a disability requiring accommodations, and discrimination by the State and regional career technical education school via the use of exclusionary admission criteria having a disproportionate impact based on race, language, disability and low-income status.
