Today, we mark the 56th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case that many believe ended educational inequality in America. The Brown case combined several lawsuits complaining that schools for African-American children offered substandard facilities with out-of-date textbooks, insufficient supplies and inadequate curricula. Although Brown was intended to right these inequities, lawsuits have been brought in more than 40 states in recent years to protest the inadequate educational conditions experienced by low-income students of color. These issues are so ubiquitous that, as civil rights leader John Jackson notes, almost every state now has its state flag, its state bird and its school finance lawsuit. W.E.B. DuBois's warning that the great issue of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line has spilled over into the 21st.
In South Carolina, where one of the first cases consolidated into Brown was brought, African-American parents and children returned to court exactly 50 years later, in the same courthouse in Clarendon County, to continue to litigate the lack of educational opportunity. The complaint brought by black parents in 1949 noted that "facilities, physical condition and sanitation ... the only three schools which Negro pupils are permitted to attend, are inadequate and unhealthy, the buildings and schools are old, over-crowded, and in a dilapidated condition ... [with] an insufficient number of teachers and insufficient classroom space."
Fifty years later, the testimony was eerily similar: Plaintiffs described crumbling and overcrowded facilities, lack of equipment, uncertified teachers, and teacher turnover caused by low salaries. Graduation rates ranged between 33 and 56% across the districts, and 75% of the still-segregated Clarendon County schools were rated "unsatisfactory" or below on the state rating system. A film made about these schools, entitled Corridor of Shame, showed unheated, inadequately equipped classrooms, ceiling collapses, raw sewage backing up into school hallways on rainy days and a cafeteria in which poisonous snakes had recently crawled inside from a nearby swamp.
With students of color increasingly segregated in under-resourced schools, inequalities like these have grown nationwide. From California to the Carolinas, from Massachusetts to Mississippi, schools serving large numbers of students of color have been found to receive fewer resources, less qualified teachers, larger class sizes, less rigorous curricula, and lower quality facilities, equipment and materials than those serving their white and wealthier peers. In his historic campaign for president, Barack Obama described the large race- and class-based achievement gaps we experience as "morally unacceptable and economically untenable."
America can no longer afford this divide. At a time when education is ever more critical to individual and societal success, and when other nations are galloping ahead, the U.S. is falling rapidly behind on every measure: international test scores (we now rank #35th out of 40 nations in math and 29th in science on the PISA exams); high school graduation rates (our long-stagnant graduation rate has recently slipped below 70% while nations like Finland and Korea now graduate over 90%); and even college-going, where the U.S. has long been #1. (We are now 17th on this measure and dropping every year.) Inequality is implicated in all of these rankings: In every case, students of color receive lower investments and do significantly less well, even as they comprise a growing share of the public school population, soon to be a majority.
The costs are enormous. Dropouts cost the nation over $200 billion a year in lost wages, taxes, and social costs — and the growing prison sector, populated by dropouts and the functionally illiterate — costs an additional $50 billion. The U.S. is #1 in this category — incarcerating more people than any other nation in the world, including China. Many states will pay more than $30,000 a year to imprison young people on whom they would not spend $10,000 a decade earlier to ensure that they would learn to read.
This is not inevitable. It is easy to forget that during the years following Brown v. Board of Education, substantial gains were made in equalizing both educational inputs and outcomes as desegregation and school finance reform efforts were launched, and as the Great Society's War on Poverty increased investments in poor communities. Childhood poverty was reduced to nearly half of what it is today. Investments were made in desegregation, magnet schools, community schools, pipelines of well-qualified teachers, school funding reforms and higher education assistance. For a brief period in the mid-1970s, black and Hispanic students were attending college at rates comparable to whites, the only time this happened before or since. Large gains in Black students' performance cut the literacy achievement gap by nearly half in just 15 years, before the push backs of the Reagan years reduced most of these programs. Ironically, had this rate of progress been continued, the achievement gap would have been fully closed by the beginning of the 21st century.
Some states have resumed the battle. After 30 years of school finance litigation seeking resources for the impoverished minority districts of Camden, Trenton, Newark and others, the state of New Jersey finally provided parity funding for the so-called Abbott districts in 1998, adding high-quality preschool, literacy and mathematics programs, school reform investments and investments in teacher quality. A decade later, the state has become the nation's highest-performing state serving a significant number of students of color (45% of its public school population) — ranking, along with much less diverse states, in the top five on every measure of achievement and #1 in writing. The achievement gap has been reduced by nearly half, and African-American and Hispanic students in New Jersey now outscore the average student in California.
These gains show that rapid progress is possible. History also shows that regress generally follows, often because Americans fail to understand that everyone gains when all children are well-educated, productive members of the society. The question we should ask ourselves this week, on the anniversary of Brown in the year 2010, is whether America is finally able to recognize its own moral and economic self interest and roll up its sleeves to at last solve the problem of the color line.
This blog draws from Linda Darling-Hammond's most recent book: The Flat World in Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine our Future (Teachers College Press, 2010).
