Brown v. Board sixty years later.
Author | Conniff, Ruth |
Position | Comment |
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court struck down the "separate but equal" doctrine, fundamentally changing the life of our nation.
The Brown v. Board of Education decision "ignited the spark of courage among the nation's forces fighting for equality of opportunity for all," The Progressive editorialized at the time.
Striking down segregation in America's public schools galvanized the civil-rights movement. But the decision itself was the result of years of struggle, hundreds of lawsuits, and savvy legal strategizing by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP.
In the end, ordinary citizens created "a contagious courage out in the country which penetrated the solemn portals of the nation's highest court," The Progressive wrote.
Despite that historic decision, and the huge impact it had on the country, more than 200 school desegregation cases remain open today, and segregation, on the whole, is getting worse. Black and brown children are more racially isolated than at any time in the last four decades, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund notes.
The new threat to public education is not just resegregation, but also an insidious movement to undermine public schools and abandon the children in them, especially the historically disadvantaged.
School closings, a "test-and-punish" model of education reform that invites the takeover of high-poverty districts by private companies, and the replacement of democratically elected school boards with "CEOs" are among the threats to the democratic institution of public education.
"We are, through charter schools, rolling back the Brown decision," says public education advocate and former assistant secretary of education Diane Ravitch. "That's wrong."
"The corporate elite plan a wonderful, creative education system for their own children, and militaristic, stripped-down schools for other people's children." says Karen Lewis, the dynamic leader of the Chicago teachers' union. "And then they have the temerity to call this system 'the civil rights issue of our time,'" Lewis adds, incredulously.
Cloaking the attack on public schools in civil rights rhetoric is a devious strategy.
The rightwing American Federation for Children, for example, pours money into state elections all over the country to elect Tea Party legislators and Republican governors with the aim of busting teachers' unions and promoting privatization schemes. In a 2012 report on its electoral successes to its membership, the group used the faces of...
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