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

On Friday, October 3, 2008, 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 will co-sponsor 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" - will feature plenary sessions and a townhall meeting. The event is free but registration is required. Invited participants include:

Karen Bass, California State Assembly
Prudence Carter, Stanford University
Alan Curtis, Eisenhower Foundation
Linda Darling-Hammond, Stanford University
Christopher Edley, University of California, Berkeley
Kris Gutierrez, UCLA Gloria Ladson-Billings, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Gary Orfield, UCLA
Dorothy Steele, Stanford University
Amy Stewart Wells, Teachers College
Guadalupe Valdes, Stanford University

For more information, contact bmckenna@stanford.edu.