Center for Law and Education
 As its mission, the Center for Law and Education (CLE) strives to make the right of all students to quality education a reality throughout the nation and to help enable communities to address their own public education problems effectively, with an emphasis on assistance to low-income students and communities.

Issues and Projects

CLE has helped to reshape major federal education programs to advance quality, equity, and democratic participation, and then followed through with detailed policy positions and persistence needed to pursue them through successful advocacy. We continue to focus on Title I, special education, and high school restructuring/vocational education, which together are critical to all students receiving effective instruction enabling them to have full and meaningful opportunities to learn to high academic and achievement standards.
  • Quality Education: Title I/NCLB CLE continues to focus on the largest elementary and secondary education program -- Title I -- as the a primary vehicle for broad-based school reform.  Through our work we seek to mobilize parents, community advocates, and school personnel, to use federal Title I, and state and local law and policy to bring about broad-based school and district-level reform using varied strategies including, parent education and mobilization, developing federal, state, and local policies which support standards-based school reform, and school partnerships for program improvement, which seek to improve the core quality of curriculum and instruction.
  • Education of Students with Disabilities Since its inception, CLE has worked to implement and enforce the rights of all students with disabilities to a full, meaningful, and equal public education, with a particular emphasis on issues critical to low-income students. CLE pursues this goal through federal and state legislative and administrative advocacy, litigation, as necessary, publications, and provision of technical assistance, including to the extent possible through collaboration with educators, families and their advocates.
  • High School Restructuring - Vocational Education While linked to CLE's other school reform work, such as Title I, we have placed an emphasis on vocational education reform, which, if infused with high academic content, has a great deal to offer high school restructuring. Teaching methods traditionally used in vocational education -- active learning, students' demonstration of skills through a project, and coaching relationships, for example -- are at the heart of what we now know, from educational research, is good academic instruction for students.
Center for Law and Education