Perfecting Our Union: Human Rights Success Stories from Across the United States

A National Spotlight on How South LA Parents Used Human Rights to Transform School Discipline

What This Report Is and Why It Matters

In 2010, the U.S. Human Rights Fund published Perfecting Our Union: Human Rights Success Stories from Across the United States, a collection of case studies profiling organizations across the country that had used human rights principles to win concrete policy change. CADRE and the Dignity in Schools Campaign were featured as a national model.

The chapter on CADRE documents how South LA parents, grounded in the human rights principles of dignity, participation, non-discrimination, and accountability, successfully organized for the adoption of LAUSD’s 2007 Discipline Foundation Policy. It places CADRE’s work in the broader context of the U.S. human rights movement and demonstrates how international human rights standards can be powerful tools in domestic education advocacy, even in a country that has not ratified all relevant treaties.

The report describes how CADRE parents insisted that the new LAUSD policy draw explicitly on principles from the Convention on the Rights of the Child, including the requirement that discipline respect students’ dignity, that it be administered without racial discrimination, that parents and peers participate in conflict resolution, and that schools be held responsible for teaching and modeling positive behavior. These are not abstract ideals. For South LA parents, they were demands rooted in years of witnessing their children treated as less than deserving of dignity in the schools built to serve them.

This report matters because it situates CADRE’s local victory within a national and global framework of human rights advocacy. It demonstrates that the fight for school discipline reform is not merely a policy debate. It is a human rights struggle. And it affirms that when communities use that language with intention, clarity, and organizing power, they can move even the largest institutions toward justice.

For CADRE parents and South LA families, being recognized in this report was an affirmation: their organizing model, their use of human rights frameworks, and their vision of schools as spaces of dignity and accountability were not only effective locally. They were a model worth replicating nationally.

Key Highlights

• Profiles CADRE as a national model for human rights-based education advocacy in one of nine featured case studies from across the U.S.
• Documents how CADRE used principles from the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other international human rights standards to shape LAUSD’s discipline policy
• Highlights CADRE’s insistence that the policy explicitly require discipline to be non-discriminatory, respectful of student dignity, and inclusive of parent and peer participation
• Places CADRE’s work alongside the Dignity in Schools Campaign, a national coalition using human rights frameworks to challenge zero tolerance school discipline
• Demonstrates how domestic grassroots organizing can bridge international human rights principles and local policy change
• Situates school discipline reform within the broader U.S. human rights movement for racial, economic, and educational justice

Who This Resource Is For

• Parents and community members who want to understand how human rights principles can be applied in local school advocacy
• Organizers and advocates building campaigns for education justice at the local, state, or national level
• Educators and school administrators seeking to understand the human rights foundation of positive discipline frameworks
• Researchers and students studying the intersection of human rights law, grassroots organizing, and domestic education policy
• Funders and movement partners interested in CADRE’s role as a national leader in education justice organizing

Publication Details

Title: Perfecting Our Union: Human Rights Success Stories from Across the United States (Chapter 2: School Discipline Reform, CADRE and the Dignity in Schools Campaign)
Publisher: The U.S. Human Rights Fund
Principal Author: Tanya Coke
Year: March 2010

This report is part of CADRE’s broader work to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline, outlined in our Theory of Change.