May 18, 2008

54 Years Later, Problems Remain

Posted by Aaron Tang at 6:20AM

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Saturday marked the 54th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. The decision, reached by a unanimous Supreme Court, struck down laws that segregated schools on the basis of race. No longer would children of color be forced, by virtue of the circumstances of their birth, to attend schools separate from those attended by whites.

What has been the impact of the court's ruling, now that we have the benefit of 54 years of wisdom in hindsight? There are three frameworks through which politicians, educators, and casual onlookers typically refer to the decision, and depending on which one you chose to adopt, the decision has been either completely successful, partially successful, or completely unsuccessful.

The simplest way to look at the impact of Brown v. Board is to make a purely legalistic analysis. In this lens, the Supreme Court set out to do one very simple thing: get rid of the pernicious practice--as ordained by local and state laws--of forcibly sending one group of children to school A and another group to school B based solely on skin color. Never mind whether school A is nicer, has better teachers, spends more money per child, increase student achievement more than school B; in the legalistic sense, the only goal to be sought was the realization by law of the court's finding that "separate but equal [schools] are inherently inequal".

In the legalistic sense, the Supreme Court succeeded completely. Fifty-four years after the ruling, there is not a single school district or state that affirms a policy of race-based segregation. There may be other reasons why a child cannot attend a particular K-12 school, but to public knowledge, race alone is not one of them.

Some, however, would argue that the legalistic analysis is too simple, and that the proper way to analyze Brown's impact is to measure whether black children are actually being enrolled in white schools at appropriate rates. Call this the intermediate frame of analysis; the idea that the actual goal of the Supreme Court in Brown was not just to outlaw school segregation as a policy, but rather to go one step further and actually integrate schools to some appropriate degree. In other words, in this analysis, getting rid of school segregation laws is only step one of a two-step process envisioned by the court. To determine whether the decision has been successful requires us to measure how far we have come in the second step (are our schools actually integrated), and not the first.

In this second way of looking at the decision, it's probably the case that we have experienced only mild success in the wake of Brown. Although for a while the pace of integration was fast post 1954, it has slowed and even reversed in recent years--segregation has actually been on the rise for blacks since the late 1980s. Of course, the difference is that today's segregation is not shoved upon blacks by Jim Crow laws, but rather subtly arrived upon as the complex result of demographic forces, housing markets, and school districting lines. In any case, a person adopting this framework likely looks at the past 54 years with mixed feelings: thrilled with the complete reversal of school segregation laws (which was hardly a given even in the 1960s), but concerned with rising de facto segregation in our schools.

The third way of looking at the decision is to take a much more end-oriented view, even more so than the intermediate framework. In this third lens, the purpose of the Supreme Court's ruling went far beyond the direct act of striking down a certain group of local and state school policies, and it even went beyond an end-state where schools were proportionally integrated with perfect blends of white, African-American, Latino, Native American, and other groupings of students. The goal by which to judge the Brown decision--a judgement that we can only conclude to be wholly negative--is whether African American children are receiving equal quality education as white children, as measured by a batch of sensible indicators such as high school completion rates, college going rates, and yes, performance on standardized tests. With gaps persistent along each of these metrics along racial lines, the end-oriented analysis would have to conclude that we still have much work to do in the wake of Brown.

It's interesting to note a fracture between the second and third frames of reference, since it is not necessarily the case that succeeding in one goal merely requires success in prior goals. The end-oriented analysis might suggest that the goal of perfect melting pot public schools is not necessary to reach the more important result of equality of educational opportunity. Indeed, to reformers in this camp, the recent relapse in segregation in particularly urban school settings might be perfectly acceptable if it was accompanied by strong achievement gains in the minority-dominated schools (alas, this has not been the case). Put another way, many educational reformers have admitted that spending political capital and money on integration efforts may run adverse to the more important (in their minds, at least) cause of closing the achievement gap, since simply having a black child sit next to a white child in school is a guarantee of no equality in outcome.

Conversely, proponents of the intermediate analysis reply that equal educational opportunities will never happen until children of color attend the same schools as white children, the schools that receive the most financial and political support. It is a heated discussion that takes place under the surface if at all, but one that will have implications for whether low income and minority children will ever receive the kinds of schools they deserve.