Emma Rebhorn, Brown University '06

I spent this summer working at the Education Law Center (ELC), a non-profit legal advocate for New Jersey’s schoolchildren based in Newark, New Jersey. Through the “Student Rights Project,” ELC provides free legal representation to plaintiffs in cases involving special education, district residency, school discipline and alternative education. ELC’s “Abbott Schools Initiative” grew out of the Center’s role as counsel for the plaintiff class of 31 poor, urban districts in a series of historic school funding cases, beginning with Abbott v. Burke in 1988. The Abbott rulings have resulted in New Jersey being the first state to ensure all its schoolchildren access to “education adequacy” through a framework of programs and services aimed at the state’s urban students. The responsibility of the Abbott Schools Initiative is to hold the state and districts broadly accountable for implementing reforms mandated under Abbott.

One of the more recent undertakings of the Abbott Schools Initiative is the Abbott Indicators Project, which consists of a series of reports to the public on the state of education in four of New Jersey’s major cities: Newark, Trenton, Camden and Union City. I arrived at ELC just as the reports were nearing their publication, and the staff, frankly, was in a tizzy. Although a previous intern had helped with most of the reports’ editing, I proofread and prepared for printing the final copies of the long, “technical” reports; those released to the community were termed “summary” reports. My role in readying the reports for public release involved a lot of double- and triple-checking of data on Microsoft Excel, learning a statistical analysis program, and preparing useful materials to distribute at community stakeholder meetings. An interest in education rights, and not necessarily the legal system, had led me to apply for a Liman Fellowship at ELC, but I was a little disappointed at how detached that work felt from my hope to learn more about the practice of public interest law.

More relevant and exciting to me were the assignments I received from the Abbott Schools Initiative preschool advocate, who was primarily fulfilling ELC’s mission to support attorneys seeking educational improvements in other states. I researched preschool legislation in Kentucky, and poured over the Wyoming Department of Education’s internal recommendations for preschool reforms. I was asked to read and summarize extensive policy papers, and identify findings relevant to the preschool cases. This work, while no less pressing than what I did for the co-directors of the Abbott Indicators Project, was the most substantive, rewarding and significant of anything I did this summer. My interest in early childhood education predated my work at ELC, but my understanding of the quality (usually poor) of that education in states other than New Jersey was enriched by my experience this summer.

I have had my doubts about whether working for education equity through the legal system is an effective or direct enough means of achieving change. Before this summer, I wondered if legal work would feel too safe and removed from the daily realities of education. Fittingly, one of my most memorable moments of the summer proved to me that work at a legal advocacy organization doesn’t necessarily mean immunity from the rigors and frustrations of public school bureaucracy. The Newark Abbott Indicators Summary Report was released at an open Newark school board meeting. The district was taken over by the state several years ago due to mismanagement, and the current board consists of both appointed and elected members, all of whom have been at odds with their constituencies at one time or another. It was in this harried, slightly hostile environment that the co-directors of the Abbott Indicators Project first made public the conclusions of their findings. As the findings were far from all positive, many of the board members and other educators present grew defensive, and the co-directors were asked to stay through the entire lengthy meeting in order to answer extensive questions at the end of the evening.

Sitting in an interminable Newark School Board meeting on a squeaky auditorium chair in a dangerous part of a troubled city, watching students line the aisles to receive awards and listening to the entertainment provided by a middle school brass band with a cacophonous rhythm section, I felt very far away from the comparatively cushy offices of ELC, and even farther from what I had previously imagined all legal work to be. That experience shaped my entire approach to my work this summer, moving me from jaded grass-roots skepticism to the hope that I might, one day, marry specialized work within an intimidating legal system to real interaction in the trenches of public education.