Education & Opportunity:
A forum on the Kerner Commission Forty Year Report

Overview

The Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) — an affiliate of the Center for Comparative Studies on Race and Ethnicity — and the Eisenhower Foundation co-sponsored a daylong forum at Stanford to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Kerner Commission report and to bring attention to issues of educational inequality.  

The initial report was released in March 1968, in response to the wave of civil disorders around the nation between 1963 to 1967. The report was written by the bipartisan National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, convened by President Lyndon  Johnson.

The Commission (which became known as the Kerner Commission, after then-Illinois Governor Otto Kerner) believed that it was “time to make good the promises of American democracy to all citizens – urban and rural, White and Black, Spanish-surname, American Indian, and every minority group.” Forty years later, the Eisenhower Foundation, which periodically updates the commission findings, has released a preliminary report on the status of civil disorder today. The report is titled, What Together We Can Do: A Forty Year Update of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders: Preliminary Findings.

The Stanford forum — "Education & Opportunity: A forum on the Kerner Commission Forty Year Report" — featured plenary sessions and a townhall meeting. This event focused in on education, as the foundation to create change in the much broader scope of poverty, inequality, racial injustice, and crime that the Kerner Commission addresses.

Forum panel members

• Richard Banks, Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law, Stanford University (facilitator)
  
• Prudence Carter, Associate Professor, Stanford University; Co-Director Stanford, Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (facilitator)
• Alan Curtis, President and Chief Executive Officer, Eisenhower Foundation
  
• Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommon Professor, Stanford University; Co-Director, Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education
• Kris Gutiérrez, Professor, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Los Angeles; CO-PI, UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families
  
• Goodwin Liu, Associate Dean, University of California, Berkeley School of Law; Co-Director, Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity, and Diversity
• Gary Orfield, Professor, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Los Angeles; Co-Director, The Civil Rights Project       
  
• Dorothy Steele, Executive Director, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Stanford Integrated Schools Project, Stanford University
• Amy Stuart Wells, Professor of Sociology and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
• Gregory Walton, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Stanford University
• Kevin Welner, Associate Professor of Education, University of Colorado at Boulder; Director, CU-Boulder Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC)
  

Co Sponsors

Co-sponsored by the Stanford University School of Education, the Eisenhower Foundation, the Civil Rights Project, the Warren Institute, and the Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC/EPRU).

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For more information, contact scope@stanford.edu.

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