In 1954, the United States Supreme Court made a decision that would have a profound impact on American public school education.
In a culmination of years of legal groundwork laid by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to end segregation, the high court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, handed down on May 17, 1954, a unanimous (9-0) decision which stated that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
Considered one of the most pivotal opinions ever rendered by the nation’s highest legal body, it highlighted the U.S. Supreme Court’s role in affecting changes in national and social policy.
But rather than a single case, Brown was actually five cases combined into one—Brown; Briggs v. Elliott (filed in South Carolina); Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (filed in Virginia); Gebhart v. Belton (filed in Delaware); and Bolling v. Sharpe (filed in Washington D.C.)
The goal by the NAACP was to overturn an earlier 1896 decision called Plessy v. Ferguson that allowed states to create “so-called” separate but equal (segregated) public educational facilities for Black and White children.
The Brown decision was supposed to herald the end of segregation and spark great hope [particularly in African Americans] that things would be better.
Sixty-one years later, the promise of Brown, much like many key pieces of legislation and law passed during the civil rights era has been a mixed bag.
On one hand, some of the numbers look very good for African Americans. For example, 80 percent of African Americans over age 25 have high school diplomas.
At the same time, the number of Black high school dropouts has dropped to 8 percent in 2010 from 21.3 in 1972. In fact, according to data released earlier this year by the National Center for Education Statistics, graduation rates for Black and Hispanic students increased by nearly 4 percentage points for 2011 to 2013.
The number of Blacks enrolled in undergraduate college in 2013 hit 3.0 million compared to 2.6 million, a 17.5 percent increase over 2008.
On the flip side, the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans found a number of challenges nationwide.
According to a July 26 report, African Americans lack equal access to highly effective teachers and principals, safe schools and challenging college-prep classes. Black students are disproportionally subjected to school discipline and referrals to special education.
Black students also lag behind the national average by two grade levels, and behind students in almost every other developed nation.
The report also found that more than a third of African American pupils do not graduate from high school on time with a regular high school diploma, and only four percent of Black students interested in college are college ready across a range of subjects.
Data from the U.S. Department of Education pins the reasons for some of the challenges on educational inequities in areas such as teacher pay and experience.
Research also notes that although racial minorities have made a number of educational advancements since Brown v. Board of Education was put into place, the decision did not succeed in a wholesale dismantling of school segregation.
In New York City, for instance, more than half of public schools are reportedly at least 90 percent Black and Hispanic, and in Alabama, nearly a quarter of African American students attend a school with White enrollment of 1 percent or less. Many civil rights advocates even point to what they believe is a “resegregation” trend. According to a report issued in April 2014 by the Economic Policy Institute, low-income Black children are currently more racially and socioeconomically isolated than at any time since the 1980s.
In California, researchers at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project found similar trends. Rather than getting better, the state’s schools show little sign of movement toward integration of the diverse population of pupils in the state. In fact, a report by the project published in May of last year found “major court orders long abandoned the idea of state leadership and support for integration was essentially forgotten in favor of a new system of highly segregated charter schools, and the spread of Latino and African American segregation into major sectors of what not too long ago were White suburbs.”
Latino students, now the majority, are locked into schools that are vastly more segregated today than during the civil rights era, and are also facing concentrated poverty.
Blacks, write the researchers, are now deeply segregated from Whites and middle-class students, and also are typically a small minority within schools dominated by Latinos.
More experienced teachers for the most part are now concentrated in middle-class White and Asian schools. And this has contributed to the increased inequities for students attending these facilities.
In essence new challenges, particularly demographics, have created new versions of old problems.
