|
Sitemap
| Jobs
|
Contact Us
|
Building Smart Education Systems |
Voices in Urban Education
Archives
Beyond Brown v. Board
VUE Number 4, Summer 2004
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Sheff v. O'Neill: The Struggle Continues against School Segregation and Unequal Opportunity
By Elizabeth Horton Sheff
Elizabeth Horton Sheff is a member of Hartford's city council, the Court of Common Council
> Author's biography
The author recounts her role as a plaintiff in Sheff v. O'Neill, filed in 1989, which charged the state of Connecticut with perpetuating racial segregation and unequal education. After fifteen years of litigation, it is clear that the struggle to overcome educational inequalities did not end in 1954; it continues to this day.
All of the celebration over the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education seems to suggest that racial segregation and unequal opportunity in schools are a thing of the past. But this is not true. I have spent the past fifteen years engaged in a legal battle with the state of Connecticut alleging that racial segregation has produced educational disparities among schoolchildren in Hartford. My experience strongly suggests that the struggle the Supreme Court addressed in 1954 is far from over.
People often ask me what event triggered my involvement in Sheff v. O'Neill. They want to know what horrific transgression befell our family that was so egregious as to result in the filing of a civil rights lawsuit against the state of Connecticut. In other words: What happened?
The first part of the answer (which often results in a moment of disorientation in the room) is: nothing, at least in the strictly personal sense. True, my son Milo and I had engaged in a few skirmishes in the school system over the years, but nothing on the order of catastrophe. Just the usual stuff — Milo chatted a little too much in class, a teacher chose to yell instead of speak — all problems easily addressed and easily resolved. On the whole, I was pleased. Milo was doing well with his studies, and Milo, his teachers, and the principal of his school had adjusted to my frequent, unannounced visits.
What did occur was that a friend asked me to attend a meeting in her stead. At the time, I was vice president of the tenants' association for Westbrook Village, a public housing development in the far northwest corner of the city. My friend Barbara (then the president of the association) had received an invitation to attend a community meeting about the status of education in Hartford. Barbara did not want to attend. She was cautious. So I went, because of my support for public education. What I learned at that meeting changed my life.
The meeting was hosted at a local church, convened by public interest legal groups and individual attorneys: the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. (“the Ink Fund”), the American Civil Liberties Union, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, Greater Hartford Legal Aid,Wesley Horton (the originator of the Connecticut equal-school-financing case, Horton v. Meskill), and John Brittain, then a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law.
The lawyers highlighted the growing racial and economic isolation, and resulting disparities in educational outcomes, faced by children in the Hartford public school system. They reviewed the Connecticut Mastery Test scores that gave statistical proof of those disparities, including the one that still burns in my mind: in 1989, 74 percent of students in the eighth grade in Hartford public schools needed remedial reading services. For me, this meant not that 74 percent of the students were failing, but rather that the system was failing 74 percent of our children. Being an avid reader, a mom who always read with her children, I was dumbstruck by the reality that these children could reach the eighth grade without being able to read. I went home to speak with Milo.
Archives
Beyond Brown v. Board
VUE Number 4, Summer 2004
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Sheff v. O'Neill: The Struggle Continues against School Segregation and Unequal Opportunity
By Elizabeth Horton Sheff
Elizabeth Horton Sheff is a member of Hartford's city council, the Court of Common Council
> Author's biography
The author recounts her role as a plaintiff in Sheff v. O'Neill, filed in 1989, which charged the state of Connecticut with perpetuating racial segregation and unequal education. After fifteen years of litigation, it is clear that the struggle to overcome educational inequalities did not end in 1954; it continues to this day.
All of the celebration over the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education seems to suggest that racial segregation and unequal opportunity in schools are a thing of the past. But this is not true. I have spent the past fifteen years engaged in a legal battle with the state of Connecticut alleging that racial segregation has produced educational disparities among schoolchildren in Hartford. My experience strongly suggests that the struggle the Supreme Court addressed in 1954 is far from over.
People often ask me what event triggered my involvement in Sheff v. O'Neill. They want to know what horrific transgression befell our family that was so egregious as to result in the filing of a civil rights lawsuit against the state of Connecticut. In other words: What happened?
The first part of the answer (which often results in a moment of disorientation in the room) is: nothing, at least in the strictly personal sense. True, my son Milo and I had engaged in a few skirmishes in the school system over the years, but nothing on the order of catastrophe. Just the usual stuff — Milo chatted a little too much in class, a teacher chose to yell instead of speak — all problems easily addressed and easily resolved. On the whole, I was pleased. Milo was doing well with his studies, and Milo, his teachers, and the principal of his school had adjusted to my frequent, unannounced visits.
What did occur was that a friend asked me to attend a meeting in her stead. At the time, I was vice president of the tenants' association for Westbrook Village, a public housing development in the far northwest corner of the city. My friend Barbara (then the president of the association) had received an invitation to attend a community meeting about the status of education in Hartford. Barbara did not want to attend. She was cautious. So I went, because of my support for public education. What I learned at that meeting changed my life.
The meeting was hosted at a local church, convened by public interest legal groups and individual attorneys: the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. (“the Ink Fund”), the American Civil Liberties Union, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, Greater Hartford Legal Aid,Wesley Horton (the originator of the Connecticut equal-school-financing case, Horton v. Meskill), and John Brittain, then a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law.
The lawyers highlighted the growing racial and economic isolation, and resulting disparities in educational outcomes, faced by children in the Hartford public school system. They reviewed the Connecticut Mastery Test scores that gave statistical proof of those disparities, including the one that still burns in my mind: in 1989, 74 percent of students in the eighth grade in Hartford public schools needed remedial reading services. For me, this meant not that 74 percent of the students were failing, but rather that the system was failing 74 percent of our children. Being an avid reader, a mom who always read with her children, I was dumbstruck by the reality that these children could reach the eighth grade without being able to read. I went home to speak with Milo.
|
Annenberg Institute for School Reform Brown University, Box 1985 Providence, RI 02912 |
Telephone: 401.863.7790 Fax: 401.863.1290 |
AISR_info@brown.edu
|
© all material AISR