In the summer of 2009, Russlynn Ali, assistant secretary for the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Education, had her sights set on Beaufort, South Carolina — an area that President Obama referred to as the “Corridor of Shame” during the campaign. There was a new charter school, Riverview, slated to open in a gated community that fall — which critics decried as a “white-flight” educational haven — that caught Ali’s attention.

“The make-up of the school was 78 percent white and about 19 percent African-American in a geographic district that was well over 40 percent African-American,” Ali said.

The OCR, concerned that this might be a case of modern-day segregation, stepped in. Using the weight of existing federal desegregation orders, Ali and her office worked with the charter authorizing board, the school district and other local bodies to diversify the student body.

The case of Beaufort was just one of many areas where Ali and the OCR division of the department of education are working to close the achievement gap in the United States. In yesterday’s talk at the Law School, Ali discussed the Obama administration’s plan to combat educational inequity, a challenge she perceived as the “civil rights issue of our generation.”

“Forty years ago, desegregation was our highest priority,” Ali said at the event. “And it was to ensure that ‘all deliberate speed’ happened after Brown [v. Board of Education]. But the truth is, that segregation looks different today than it did back then.”

“It’s a civil rights issue, but it doesn’t look like one,” she later told law students and undergrads in a question-and-answer session. “It’s not at the heart of the American consciousness. It’s about how finding that passion and knowing that makes a massive difference.”

Ali came to the helm of the Education Department’s division of the OCR, the 600-member team tasked with enforcing federal civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination in programs that receive federal funding, with a lot on her plate. The Department of Education estimated that by the end of high school, white students are about six times as likely to be ready to pursue college-level biology courses as black students. The department also gauged that the achievement gap between low-income students costs the country approximately $500 billion each year.

“So I go to bed every night and think, how can we move the dial today because our sense of urgency couldn’t be greater?” she said. “We do what we can. That means strategically choosing the right districts to launch the compliance reviews that will have the greatest impact across the country.”

Fresh out of law school at Northwestern University, Ali was anxious to prove her worth to her peers and signed on as a corporate and civil rights lawyer at the Los Angeles law firm Sheppard, Mullin, Richter and Hampton. The financial payoffs were substantial, but Ali was unsatisfied.

“I literally came home every day and wanted to purge the film off my body,” she said.

She decided to ditch the partner track at the law firm and took up pro bono civil rights cases. In 1999, she became co-director of The Advancement Project, a legal group that worked to increase educational access for minorities, and then became executive director of Education Trust-West in Oakland, a nonprofit aimed at improving educational opportunities for low-income backgrounds.

From a non-governmental standpoint, she realized that “education policy was not education policy, it was politics.” But she went into the thick of the politics-policy jungle in 2009 after receiving a call from President Obama nominating her for a spot in the Education Department. She was confirmed in March 2009.

During her 13-month tenure, Ali has given the Education Department’s division of the OCR a facelift, aggressively driving the Obama administration’s goals to close the achievement gap. In early March, she launched 38 district-specific compliance reviews that aim to provide a look at whether or not federal civil rights rules are being consistently and effectively implemented at a local level. A handful of colleges will also be subject to civil rights investigations.

“But at the end of the day, money is the thing that matters,” Ali said.

And the Department of Education has it. The department has a $46.7 billion budget for the 2010 fiscal year — and more discretionary funds, Ali pointed out, than the funds of every other education secretary combined.

Scout Sanders ’11, who worked for Ali in the Office of Civil Rights in the fall, was at the heart of the team helping prepare the compliance reviews released this March and said that Ali was on-point at the law school talk.

“It was very reminiscent of what I’d heard before,” Sanders said. “I could tell that she has all these thoughts in her head; when she gets going on anything she can just talk for hours with examples. I thought it was good.”

William Koski, a teaching professor in the Law School and director of the Youth and Education Law Project, who spends his day representing children in educational equity and reform matters, called Ali’s reforms “ambitious and inspirational.”

“She’s making important moves on info disaggregation within the OCR and nicely forming a long-term plan while balancing the day-to-day problems she’s confronted with,” he said. “By allocating the fiscal resources and brain power, she’s dealing with the most important civil rights issue.”

The talk was co-sponsored by the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy and the Youth and Education Advocates.