Still separate, still unequal

Abstract

Four decades after the civil rights revolution began with the Supreme Court's unani-mous 1954 school desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court reversed itself in the 1990s, authorizing school districts to return to segregated and unequal public schools…. The new policies refl ected the victory of the conservative movement that altered the federal courts and turned the nation from the dream of Brown toward accepting a return to segregation. The statistics on resegregation of once-nominally desegregated schools painfully under-scores the fact that many black and Hispanic children are enrolled in schools as separate and probably more unequal than those their parents and grandparents attended under the era of " separate but equal. " Bell, 2004, p. 114 It has been 50 years since the United States Supreme Court handed down its landmark deci-sion in the case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). This decision outlawed de jure racial segregation in U.S. schools and promised to change the nature and quality of education for African American children. In Brown, the U.S. Supreme Court stated that in the fi eld of pub-lic education, the doctrine of separate but equal was unconstitutional. In sum, maintaining segregated school districts violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amend-ment (Bell, 1992). As a matter of law, the Supreme Court replaced the accepted doctrine of " separate but equal " with " equal opportunity for all " with respect to public education. However, the quotes that open this chapter refl ect the ongoing erosion of desegregation in U.S. schools. For example, during the 2001–02 school year, nearly 63% of African American students in the state of Michigan attended schools that were 90–100% minority (Orfi eld & Lee, 2004). Similarly, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, a newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee reported that nearly 75% of the city's public schools were at least 90% African American, and over half were at least 99% African American (McKenzie, 2004, May 16). Latino students are also attending increasingly segregated schools. According to Orfi eld and Lee (2004), over 58% of Latino students in the state of New York attended highly segregated schools during the 2001–02 school year. In fact, Kozol (2005) has charac-terized this shift toward resegregation as a return to " American apartheid " in schools. The vision of equal opportunity represented by Brown has failed to materialize (Orfi eld & Eaton, 1996). Not only are students still attending largely separate schools but the racial