May 17 marked the 6Oth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision that struck down the separate but equal laws that kept schools segregated.
Sixty years later no public figure would dare support schools to be segregated based on race.
There is no question that the Brown decision marked a major turning point in the civil rights movement and provided the foundation for the moral underpinning for arguments to be used a decade later in the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
But segregated and unequal schools remain a problem in the United States according to a report released this week by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA.
According to the report, Blacks are now seeing more school segregation than they have in decades, and more than half of Latino students are now attending schools that are majority Latino.
The report’s author, Gary Orfield said the changes are troubling because they show some minority students receive poorer education than white students and Asian students, who tend to be in middle-class schools.
While the report recommends deeper research into housing segregation which is a “fundamental cause of separate and unequal schooling,” the most urgent concerns parents, educators and lawmakers express today is not that the schools are racially segregated but predominantly Black and Hispanic schools need more funding, quality teachers, improved safety and better academic performance.
The four Democratic candidates for Pennsylvania governor have made education a priority in their campaigns but they are not talking about ending segregated schools. They are promising more state money for public schools. In public forums, voters are also not raising school segregation as an issue for improving their schools.
When Philadelphia Schools Superintendent William Hite, Jr and schools in four other major U.S. cities—Toledo, Detroit, Milwaukee and Baltimore—talked about their successes and failures in a discussion Tuesday at the Lowest Philadelphia Hotel, segregated schools was not a topic of discussion.
Instead, educators also talked about reform.
They focused on more state funding, revised curriculum that will make students more marketable to employers, strategies to increase student attendance, and creating a school culture that engages students in lifelong learning and at least earn a two- or four-year degree.
Among Black and Hispanic parents today there is a growing conversation on how to make public schools better and how parents can increase their educational options through charter schools, homeschooling and other alternative learning methods.
Sixty years after Brown vs. Board of Education there is a new education conversation on how to close the achievement gap.
(Reprinted from the Philadelphia Tribune)
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