CWA 1180 - News

Brown v. Board of Education 50 years later: Segregation, desegregation, resegregation
By Linda Jenkins
May 2004

Fifty years ago the U.S. Supreme Court made a historic ruling that changed public education. On May 17, 1954, the Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that the "separate but equal" doctrine of racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional and deprived black students of equal educational opportunities. This was a landmark decision that paved the way for other civil rights gains. However, the half-century since the Brown decision has seen many changes from segregation to integration to a resegregation of public schools. Today, our public education system needs seroius improvements in order to provide all children with an an equal opportunity to receive a quality education.

In the early 1950s racial segregation in public schools was the norm across America. Most black schools were far inferior to their white counterparts, with a shorter school calendar, lower teacher salaries, and inadequate buildings and materials. Even with the1954 Supreme Court ruling, desegregation was not immediate or easy or complete. Throughout the South whites reacted violently to school integration and states spent millions to resist integration. A separate decision by the Supreme Court in 1955 set guidelines for dismantling segregation, but without deadlines, asking only that the states move "with all deliberate speed." The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government power to cut funding to schools that continued to segregate their students and gave the U.S. Department of Justice authority to file lawsuits seeking desegregation of schools. Still schools in some parts of the South did not desegregate until 1970. In1971 another court decision allowed school systems to bus students as a way of integrating schools in segregated neighborhoods, and this decision prompted the highest levels of integration.

Since the 1970s, however, there has been a resurgence of school segregation, fueled by so-called "white flight" from cities to suburbs. Today the majority of black students attend urban public schools with predominantly minority populations while most of their white counterparts attend affluent, nearly all-white schools in suburban America. The urban schools are often in poor, troubled neighborhoods, are overcrowded, have few resources and are staffed by teachers with the least experience. Rather than address these problems, officials are promoting increased standardized testing.

The New York City school system is a prime example. The emphasis seems to be more on testing and test preparation for targeted grades than on giving quality instruction throughout all grades. Recently Mayor Bloomberg ordered that third graders who do poorly on an upcoming city test have to repeat that grade. So those students will not go into the fourth grade and will not be in the pool of students taking next year's fourth grade state test. The result, the mayor hopes, will be improved scores for the city. So at election time Bloomberg can claim that he has improved the schools-without actually having improved anything. To really improve the quality of education in our schools requires more: a concentrated effort to provide more resources, smaller class size, and improved curriculum for all grades. Unless we do that here in New York and in all of urban America black and minority students will continue, 50 years after "separate but equal" was rule unconstitutional, to receive inferior education.

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