Op-Ed: Why School Desegregation Needs to Be Back on the Education Reform Agenda
On the 60th anniversary of the 'Brown v. Board' decision, our schools are still separate and unequal. But they don’t have to be.
Sabrina Joy Stevens is a former teacher and the executive director of Integrity in Education.
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On May 17, 1954, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren handed down a unanimous decision in the case of Oliver Brown, et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, et al., ruling that because separate public facilities for different races were inherently unequal, segregation in public schools constituted a violation of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee to all citizens of equal protection before the law.
Sixty years later, most (though not all) American schools are as segregated as they have ever been. The word integration is virtually unheard from most of the loudest voices on both sides of the education reform debate. It has been largely replaced by a 21st-century version of separate but equal: the notion that our first priority should be to make sure kids are in “high-performing” schools—so defined by tests that have been shown to have racial and class biases—without regard to race or anything else.
As if we hadn’t already established that separate is never equal, and therefore this would be an impossible goal.
As if “equity” in funding or anything else can ever be achieved as long as those kids remain concentrated in schools in the neighborhoods public officials often “forget.”
What happened?
A few generations beyond “Whites Only” signs, many of us seem not to recognize that segregation is still a matter of public policy. Storm clouds didn’t rain racial and economic separation on American communities. Gerrymandered school districts don’t create themselves, and education dollars don’t allocate themselves. We, the American public—and the public officials we endorse through our votes (or our inaction)—have moved, voted, and legislated this problem into perpetual existence.
That means we can make different choices to eradicate it.
For starters, we have to confront racial and economic segregation. The few people who dare to speak about segregation often fall back on residential segregation as an excuse for school segregation. They conveniently forget that, as Ta-Nehisi Coates put it, “the ghetto is public Op-Ed: Why School Desegregation Needs to Be Back on the Education Reform Agenda | TakePart:
