Education

• Pages: 519-553
• Author: Khiara M. Bridges

519

Chapter 21

EDUCATION

For many, a book about racial justice in the U.S. is incomplete

without a discussion of education. Education, many believe, is the

key to racial equality. The idea is that if we achieve racial equity in

education, then we can hope to achieve racial equity along other

lines—like income, housing, wealth, and health. The converse might

also be true: If there is no justice in education, then racial justice will

never be realized. In this vein, Professor Daniel Kiel describes the

“[e]ducation of children [as] a crucial tool for shaping a society.”

1

Education can engender inequality, and it can eliminate it. It can

justify a group’s marginalization, and it can empower that same

group to dismantle the systems that marginalize it.

2

Progressive scholars contend that in the U.S., denying education

to people of color has been a means to ensure their inferiority. In their

view, this was the reason for the criminalization of teaching enslaved

people how to read during the days of chattel slavery. And this was

the reason that segregationists in the Jim Crow South compelled

black children to receive whatever educations they could in

ramshackle buildings with dated books, underpaid teachers, and few,

if any, of the educational resources that were at white children’s

disposal.

Critical theorists of race have analyzed what they believe to be

education’s function in producing, maintaining, and naturalizing

racial hierarchy in this country, examining “the role of education

policy in the active structuring of racial inequity.”

3

These theorists

insist upon the centrality of race and racism in explanations of why

our educational system looks the way that it does and why it is doing

such a poor job of educating large numbers of children. They assert

that without directly confronting race and racism, we cannot hope to

fashion a system that provides a quality education to all students.

1

Daniel Kiel, No Caste Here? Toward a Structural Critique of American

Education, 119 PENN. ST. L. REV. 611, 614 (2015).

2

This is the sentiment that historian Carter Woodson expresses in his tome The

Miseducation of the Negro, writing, “The same educational process which inspires and

stimulates the oppressor with the thought that he is everything and has accomplished

everything worth while, depresses and crushes at the same time the spark of genius

in the Negro by making him feel that his race does not amount to much and never will

measure up to the standards of other peoples.” CARTER G. WOODSON, THE MIS-

EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO, at xiii (AMS Press 1977) (1933).

3

David Gillborn, Education Policy as an Act of White Supremacy: Whiteness,

Critical Race Theory, and Education Reform, 20 J. EDUC. POL’Y 485, 485 (2005).

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EDUCATION

Ch. 21

Critical analyses of racial inequality in education are plentiful.

This ample literature might be divided into two genres. The first

consists of scholarship written by lawyers and legal theorists, who

have primarily concerned themselves with the laws that permit

education to be a good that is provided unequally along racial lines.

The second genre consists of scholarship written by educators, who

have interrogated policies and practices within districts, schools, and

classrooms that they believe marginalize racial minorities and leave

them without the means to succeed in society. This chapter explores

each of these genres in turn.

I. Lawyers on Education

The two issues that seem to consume legal scholars writing

about education are the persistence of racial segregation in schools

and inequality in school funding.

A. Segregation, Desegregation, and Resegregation

1. Brown v. Board of Education

4

The conviction that education is central to the organization of

society likely explains why in the 1950s, the civil rights lawyers who

fought against formal inequality decided to focus on schools. They

could have focused on any area of social life. They might have

attacked the institution of Jim Crow by seeking to integrate public

accommodations like hotels and restaurants. They might have

sought to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson, which had established the

doctrine of “separate but equal,” by challenging segregation in

trains—the same arena that had prompted Homer Plessy to file his

lawsuit at the turn of the twentieth century.

5

They might have sought

to rid the country of the “black” and “white” pools, beaches, and water

fountains that comprised the iconography of the South. Yet, they

pursued none of these routes. Instead, they trained their sights on

integrating schools.

Brown v. Board is one of a handful of cases that most people in

the U.S.—even those who have never set foot in a law school—can

name and recite the gist of the holding.

6

In 1954, a unanimous

Supreme Court declared that state-sanctioned segregation of school

children on the basis of race injured black children who were denied

the ability to learn alongside their white peers. The Court said that

forcing black children to attend separate schools—even when those

black schools were equal to white schools in terms of physical

facilities and other “tangible” factors—hurts black kids, generating

4

Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

5

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

6

Roe v. Wade likely is on that short list as well.

Sec. I

LAWYERS ON EDUCATION

521

“a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may

affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”

7

For this reason, the Court concluded that “in the field of public

education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.”

8

In the

Court’s assessment, “[s]eparate educational facilities are inherently

unequal”

9

and, as a consequence, states that operated segregated

school systems violated the Equal Protection Clause of the

Fourteenth Amendment.

On the day that the Court decided Brown v. Board, the decision

must have felt like a complete and utter triumph to anyone with an

interest in racial justice. More than sixty years after the decision was

handed down, however, many progressive thinkers about race

wonder whether the hullabaloo that surrounded Brown was much

ado about nothing. Well over half a century after civil rights lawyers

scored one of their most significant victories, racial segregation in

schools appears to remain the order of the day. In a 2020 study,

researchers describe the dramatic extent to which Brown has failed

to produce racially integrated schools. They found that, in 2015–16,

the average black student attended a school that was 47.4 percent

black, 19.1 percent Latine, and 26.0 percent white. During the same

period, the average Latine student attended a school that was 55.3

percent Latine, 11.3 percent black, and 25.1 percent white. On the

other hand, the average white student attended a school that was

69.8 percent white, 8.2 percent black, and 13.3 percent Latine.

10

In

essence, just as black and Latine children attend schools with high

concentrations of black and Latine students, white children attend

schools with high concentrations of white students.

Racial segregation in schools appears to be as bad as it was

before Brown was decided. Indeed, some wonder whether segregation

today is worse today than it was during the heyday of Jim Crow. This

situation led Professor Derrick Bell—who, before going on to become

one of the founding fathers of CRT, had fought in the proverbial

trenches, litigating school integration suits in federal courts across

the nation—to write that “the statistics on resegregation . . .

painfully underscore[ ] the fact that many black and Hispanic

children are enrolled in schools as separate and probably more

7

Brown, 347 U.S. at 494.

8

Id. at 495.

9

Id.

10

Ann Owens, Unequal Opportunity: School and Neighborhood Segregation in

the USA, 12 RACE & SOC. PROBS. 29 (2020).