Bigotry Is Back, 60 Years After Brown v. Board of Education
“The Struggle Continues.” I was almost moved to tears (and I’m not really an emotional guy) after reading these words emblazoned on the wall of the Monroe Elementary School in Topeka, Kansas—the very school Linda Brown attended in the 1950s.
Linda Brown’s parents were two of the plaintiffs in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, handed down 60 years ago today. In it, the Supreme Court ruled that legally mandated racial segregation of public schools was no longer permissible under our Constitution.
I never expected to have such an emotional reaction when I recently visited the school, which is now a national landmark. Driving up to it, you would think it’s like any of the nation’s thousands of elementary schools. It’s miles from downtown Topeka, across from an empty field, in a sparsely populated area.
But it’s far from being just another school. It’s a constant reminder of the inhumanity of segregation. And the most repugnant part of that system of racial discrimination was that it was created, sanctioned, and enforced by elected officials, law-enforcement agencies, and our judiciary.
These racial-segregation laws meant that if a black child wanted to obtain an education, they would in some cases have to literally walk for miles to get to the “black schools,” passing “whites only” schools on the way. And when they reached their school, many had no cafeterias, gyms, or science labs. What they did have were out-of-date textbooks, leaky roofs, and no heat. Separate but horribly unequal.
What made me emotional were not just the words on the wall, but my reflecting upon our nation’s past challenges and contemplating our struggles now. As I stood there staring at the photos of the children in segregated schools, it brought to mind Rev. Martin Luther King’s autobiography, in which he spoke of playing with his friend when he was 5. But the next year, when it was time to attend Bigotry Is Back, 60 Years After Brown v. Board of Education - The Daily Beast:
How Charter Schools and Testing Regimes Have Helped Re-Segregate Our Schools
Sixty years ago tomorrow in Brown v. Board of Education, the United States Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public education is unconstitutional, writing that “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.”
Yet all these years later, our schools remain deeply segregated along lines of race as well as class—with charter schools and high-stakes testing making matters worse.
Schools today are as racially segregated (PDF) as they were in the 1960s. Recently, ProPublica wrote a deep and haunting exposition on the re-segregation of schools in the South, including Tuscaloosa. Post-Brown, schools in the South became the most integrated in the nation. It took a while—until the 1970s, really—but it happened.
Today? In the South and nationwide, most black and brown children attend schools where 90 percent or more of the students look like them. “In Tuscaloosa today, nearly 1 in 3 black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened.”
Across the United States, per-student spending (PDF) in public schools with 90 percent or more white students is 18 percent higher—$733 more per student on average—than spending for public schools with 90 percent or more students of color. That can’t be attributed to different geographical tax bases alone; 40 percent of the variation (PDF) in per-pupil spending occurs within school districts. A third of the schools with the highest percentage of black and Latino students don’t offer chemistry. A quarter don’t offer Algebra II. Black and Latino students account for 40 percent of enrollment at schools with gifted programs but make up only 26 percent of the students in such programs.
Meanwhile, we know that disadvantaged students of color end up being over-represented in the prison-industrial complex. Black students in America’s public schools are expelled at three times the rate of white students. This discrepancy starts at a frighteningly young age; black children make up 18 percent of pre-schoolers but almost half of all out-of-school suspensions. One in five girls of color with disabilities has received an out-of-school suspension. These statistics are http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/16/how-charter-schools-and-testing-regimes-have-helped-re-segregate-our-schools.html
