64 years after Brown: How private religious schools are taking America backwards on segregation
Thursday marked the 64th anniversary of the United States Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 1954 decision, which established legal racial segregation in America as unconstitutional.
It was also a time for reflection for civil rights attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union, which played a pivotal role in fighting the Brown case. The organization continues that fight today, as many schools regress toward being nearly as separate and unequal as they were when the Supreme Court made its 1954 ruling.
“There was a long-fought period of states and school districts fighting back against desegregation,” ACLU Racial Justice Program director Dennis Parker said in a phone interview. “We’re now in a period where a lot of our schools are becoming more segregated. You no longer have the racial explicit limitations, but you have other things that challenge explicit integration.”
These newer anti-integration elements include the maneuverings of some religious private schools and voucher programs — two of the more insidious but lesser-known institutions driving school resegregation today.
School vouchers are certificates of government funding designed for low-income K-12 students that allow them to take the government money that would have gone toward them attending a public school and use it to attend a charter or private school instead. The ACLU has routinely sued states across the U.S. for implementing voucher programs that defund public schools in favor of sending students to private ones.
“One of the sad consequences of a lot of voucher programs has been the increasing of segregation,” Parker said. “Having a voucher is not always enough to get you into a private school. It ends up being a way to give tax breaks to middle-class families to have kids go to private schools. The overall effect is public education funding is used by private and religious schools.”
t’s a problem decades in the making. White communities in the South began establishing non-Catholic Christian private schools in the 1960s to keep segregation alive after Brown forced integration. And today, the fallout is not just a Southern phenomenon. Private religious schools in the Midwest and elsewhere have high tuition rates that disproportionately poor parents of color often can’t afford to pay. As a result, these schools are nearly as segregated today as public schools were in the South during Jim Crow, according to Parker.
Elder High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, was founded as an all-male Continue Reading: 64 years after Brown: How private religious schools are taking America backwards on segregation:
