60 Years after Brown v. Board: School “Reform” Ignores Injustices of Urban America
On May 17, we’ll mark the 60th anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Richard Rothstein, research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and senior fellow at the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California, has prepared a short brief to summarize where we were in 1954, how far we’ve come, and how far we have to go in the area of racial justice in our public schools. It is a discouraging picture for a lot of reasons.
But first, a bit of the history Rothstein presents. “In fact, black children are more racially and socioeconomically isolated today than at any time since data have been collected. Of course,Brown did accomplish a great deal…. Although today, typical black students in Southern states attend schools where only 29 percent of their fellow students are white…. in 1954 the percentage was zero… Black student achievement, nationwide, and in every state, has improved at a spectacular rate since Brown… The National Assessment of Educational Progress shows, for example, that black fourth-graders now have average math scores that are better than average white math scores only a generation ago. Yet because average white achievement has also improved, the gap between black and white achievement remains…”
But, as Rothstein explains, Brown was not merely “a principled objection to the idea of ‘separate but equal.’” It was also an objection to “Southern states’ unrestrained contempt for the ‘equal part of the formula’.” In Clarendon County, South Carolina, spending for white schools was four times the spending in black schools. The value of school facilities for whites was nine times higher than the schools provided for blacks; white schools had lavatories while black schools had outhouses. The student-teacher ratio was 28-1 for whites and 47-1 for blacks. Black students walked long distances to school and they and their teachers cleaned the buildings themselves, while white schools had custodians. Significant disparities also separated the curriculum, which too often emphasized “manual skills” in home economics and agriculture at black schools.
To understand racial injustice at school sixty years after Brown, however, one must look more broadly at the history of economic and racial injustice in urban America, for much of racial 60 Years after Brown v. Board: School “Reform” Ignores Injustices of Urban America | janresseger: