Brown
v. Board of Education: 50th Anniversary Year Begins
Brown v. Board of Education's 50th-anniversary celebration is officially
underway. Organizers of the Bush-administration-sponsored effort began their work
on May 14, 2003, by bringing together those involved in the lawsuit for a nationwide
lecture tour. A presidential commission also plans essay contests, meetings, and
press conferences over the next year. ACCESS and School Funding Updates will report
periodically on the many events and advocacy efforts that will celebrate progress
since Brown and will, undoubtedly, call for a renewed national commitment
to finally realize the American ideal of equal educational opportunity embodied
in Brown. Resegregation Surfaces But
while some of the more horrific aspects that Cheryl Brown Henderson, daughter
of the original plaintiff, and others involved with the lawsuit remember-including
death threats and firings for integration advocates-seem like ancient history,
other problems that Brown was supposed to solve are making headlines again.
A number of events in the week leading up to the 49th anniversary of the May 17,
1954 decision demonstrate that the achievement gap, de facto resegregation, and
social segregation in physically integrated schools are still real problems in
American society. On May 13, 2003, the Education
Trust, a Washington, D.C., policy group, announced the release of two reports
on the subject of what it calls "The
Unfinished Business of Brown v. Board of Education." The first,
"A
New Core Curriculum for All," argues from extensive research that high
schools must raise their graduation standards in order to ensure that all students
graduate with the skills that they need for college and/or employment. Students
who are underserved in the area of advanced courses are disproportionately African-American,
Latino, and Native-American. While, according to the report, almost two-thirds
of white and Asian students nationwide are enrolled in Algebra II, only one-half
or fewer of African-American, Latino, and Native-American students are. Both college
and skilled jobs in the manufacturing sector, the study says, require the information
taught in this course. The second report, "Education
Watch: Achievement, Attainment and Opportunity from Secondary School through College,"
presents a state-by-state account of test scores and access to education resources,
such as qualified teachers and high level classes, disaggregated by race. In almost
every state, African-American and Latino students have less access to resources
and, therefore, not surprisingly, lower overall test scores. While 93% of whites
nationwide graduate from high school, 87% of African-Americans, and only 63% of
Latinos do. As students move on to college, the opportunity gap produces a wider
attainment gap: 36% of whites earn B.A.'s by age 29, while only 21% of blacks
and 15% of Latinos do. It is possible, according to the Education
Trust press release, for education that "takes place in the same building"
to be "still separate . . . [and] still unequal." In fact, however,
the education of students of color and white students often does not take place
in the same building, or even the same district. Urban districts are disproportionately
minority and disproportionately poor. Despite this demographic situation, a number
of desegregation orders have been dismissed in the past year. In
Missouri, for example, lawyers for the Kansas City, MO school district went to
court on May 12 to try to show that the 1962 order there should be dismissed because
the district had closed its achievement gap. While "Education Watch"
does not provide analysis by city, its Missouri section reports that between 1992
and 1998, "the gap in Missouri between white and African American students
on the NAEP [National Assessment of Education Progress] 4th grade reading assessment
widened by 3 points," and between 1992 and 2000, the gap "on the NAEP
8th grade mathematics assessment widened by 2 points." In fourth-grade reading,
the 1998 scaled score for whites was 223, while the scaled score for blacks was
33 points lower at 190. African-American students make up 17% of the students
enrolled in K-12 schools statewide, but in 2000-2001, African-American made up
only 2% of Missouri students who took the AB Calculus Advanced Placement (AP)
test and only 4% of those who took the English Language and Composition AP. Whites
comprise 80% of students enrolled statewide but 90% of Missouri students who took
the AB Calculus AP and 91% of those who took English. In Washington,
D.C., one of the lowest-performing school districts in the nation, there is no
meaningful way to talk about the achievement gap because, as of 1998-1999, 94%
of the students were African-American or Latino. 4,235 African-Americans and 300
Latinos entered eighth grade in the 1995-1996 school year. 2,333 African-Americans
and 206 Latinos received high-school diplomas in 2000. According
to the Harvard Civil Rights Project's 2003 report on school segregation, "A
Multiracial Society with Segregated Schools: Are We Losing the Dream?"
most of the states with the lowest percentage of African-American students in
majority-white schools-Illinois, New York, Michigan, and California-are in the
North or West. In the South, however, the average percentage of blacks in white-majority
schools has dropped from 43.5 to 32.7 in the past 14 years. Even a substantially
integrated school is not, as the Education Trust points out, a guarantor of equal
access to academic opportunity, and in the South, it is certainly not a guarantor
of social integration, as the recent spate of news articles about segregated proms
has revealed. In one of the schools profiled, Taylor County High School in Georgia,
black and white students not only have separate proms but also separate class
presidents. Considering the combined weight of these, and
no doubt other, inequalities, it is little wonder that a poll released on May
14 by the Joint Center for
Political and Economic Studies asserts that 35.2 percent of blacks and 43
percent of Latinos describe their schools as excellent or good, while 55 percent
of whites do. With many African-Americans and Latinos losing faith in the very
public school system that most of them must rely on for access to the American
dream, the nation cannot afford to wait another 50 years to provide equal educational
opportunity for all American students. Prepared May 16,
2003 |
