60 Years After Brown v. BOE, Mostly White Reformers Try To Fix 'The Civil Rights Issue Of Our Generation'
Sixty years ago, the plight of Linda Brown, a third-grader who had to travel a mile by bus to her segregated black school even though there was a neighborhood school seven blocks from her home, became the symbol of America's racist underbelly.
Now, the very language that activists called upon to right that wrong is again at the center of a national fight over the direction of public schools, as a mostly white education reform movement faces the complexities of using civil rights rhetoric to boost its agenda. Meanwhile, opponents argue that the legacy of Linda Brown should look like something else entirely.
"This is an issue with civil rights, where the one thing that would actually be revolutionary would be to actually work with the community to improve their schools," said Jitu Brown, a Chicago organizer and activist with the organization Journey for Justice (and no relation to Linda). "We have been continuously burned and destabilized by people who don't have to bear the consequences of these policies."
Back in the 1950s, Linda's father, Oliver Brown, joined the NAACP in a suit that became known as Brown v. Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court ruled that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." The case became the rallying cry of the civil rights movement, uniting people who sought racial justice in a country they saw as patently unfair.
Sixty years later, no one disputes that the vision of that movement has not been fully realized. Schools are as segregated as ever. Students of color tend to be concentrated in schools with fewer resources. Black and Latino students trail their white peers on standardized tests.
But there is tremendous disagreement on how to fix these issues. While the battle over how to improve the nation's schools is often portrayed as "school reformers" fighting teachers' unions on education policies -- such as evaluations based on test scores, closing underperforming public schools and the expansion of public charter schools -- the subtext is often missed. The fight over education reform is also a war of words, one in which two sides grapple for the legacy of Brown and the civil rights movement.
Hardly a day goes by in which U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan doesn't utter the phrase "Education is the civil rights issue of our generation." He used it as recently 60 Years After Brown v. BOE, Mostly White Reformers Try To Fix 'The Civil Rights Issue Of Our Generation':