Seventy years ago this month, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, rejecting legal racial segregation of public schools. The decision appeared to pave the way for equal educational opportunities for every child and integrated classrooms where students from all backgrounds could prepare to thrive in their communities, careers and lives.
Yet our progress toward integration stalled and is now backsliding, even as our communities and workforce grow evermore diverse. And we’ve failed to achieve equity on just about every metric of access to educational opportunity.
In the 1954 decision, the justices declared that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” They also called education “the most important function of state and local governments,” the “very foundation of good citizenship” and “a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values [and] in preparing him for later professional training.”
Seven decades later, those words ring truer than ever. The link between education and economic opportunity has only increased. And our democracy is desperately in need of shared knowledge and understanding across cultural, racial, economic and geographic lines.
But the tragic reality is that our schools are still segregated, and separate is still unequal. Educational resources remain correlated to the whiteness of a school or district’s student body. I spent nearly two decades of my career working to change that equation: to shift funding and other crucial resources toward schools that disproportionately serve Black and Latino students, students from lower-income communities and other groups of students who have historically been denied equal opportunity.
Now I’ve come to believe that in a country shaped by centuries of systemic racism and structural inequality, we will never find the political will to achieve true funding equity at scale so long as schools remain highly segregated.
Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.
It’s a hard truth that, in America, green still follows white. So, until our children all sit together, the odds are long that we’ll fairly fund allour schools.
One thing we have seen work at scale? Integration. In the wake of Brown, court-ordered desegregation increased high school graduation rates for Black students by 30 percent and decreased poverty rates by 22 percent. Integration works for Latino students too. Due to desegregation after Mendez v. Westminster, a different lawsuit in California, Mexican American students’ graduation rates rose by over 19 percent.
These were big, life-changing results with intergenerational effects for families.
None of this is to say that the early attempts at integration were perfect; far from it. Too often, the brunt of those efforts was borne by Black communities in the form of long commutes, isolation, discrimination, educator job losses and outright racist intimidation.
The political backlash against desegregation left a lasting impression on a generation of leaders and advocates; that backlash at least partially explains why so many in the education field have turned their backs on integration as an equity strategy.
But while we must not repeat the mistakes of past desegregation efforts, we cannot afford to turn our backs on integration.
Our understanding of what makes for successful and inclusive integration has evolved tremendously since the early days of desegregation. We know now, to take just one example, that a truly integrated school must include both diverse students and diverse educators.
The political landscape is shifting. In a recent nationwide poll, our nonprofit, Brown’s Promise, found that 71 percent of American adults — including strong majorities across racial groups — favor “re-organizing school districts to have more racially and economically diverse student bodies and providing more resources to the school districts that serve students who need the most help.”
Just 12 percent oppose.
The overwhelming and, for some, surprising support reflects a growing realization that diverse classrooms benefit all children by preparing them for the real world and the workplaces they will face as adults.
And it reflects what we are hearing at Brown’s Promise when we revisit this 70-year-old conversation with community-based partners in states across the country: curiosity about the way invisible district lines segregate children and lead to unfair school funding practices and interest in what we can do differently.
Revisiting Brown, 70 years later
The Hechinger Report takes a look at the decision that was intended to end segregation in public schools in an exploration of what has, and hasn’t, changed since school segregation was declared illegal.
As we approach this milestone anniversary, I am feeling inspired by these conversations with families and community leaders.
Our task now is to harness that support and recommit to real action toward realizing Brown’s promise by rethinking school and district lines that have separated children from each other for far too long.
The specifics of that action will vary from community to community based on local context, but some examples include: creating interdistrict transfer programs; investing in magnet schools to attract students of all racial, ethnic, linguistic and socioeconomic backgrounds; fostering school pairings, in which two highly segregated neighborhood elementary schools unite to create a single, integrated school; and consolidating small, gerrymandered school districts into larger, more diverse, countywide districts.
Related: PROOF POINTS: 5 takeaways about segregation 70 years after the Brown decision
Any of these actions must be paired with additional measures to fully and fairly fund public schools and to ensure positive student experiences for all students — especially for students of color in primarily white environments.
None of this will be easy; it never has been. But there are clear paths forward that we can forge together. And if we don’t try, we’ll still be sitting here in another 70 years reflecting on the lack of progress since Brown.
Ary Amerikaner is co-founder and executive director of Brown’s Promise, an organization housed at the Southern Education Foundation and dedicated to achieving educational equity. She served as deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education from 2015 to 2017
This story about Brown v. Board of Education and school segregation was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.
At The Hechinger Report, we publish thoughtful letters from readers that contribute to the ongoing discussion about the education topics we cover. Please read our guidelines for more information. We will not consider letters that do not contain a full name and valid email address. You may submit news tips or ideas here without a full name, but not letters.
By submitting your name, you grant us permission to publish it with your letter. We will never publish your email address. You must fill out all fields to submit a letter.