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Building Smart Education Systems: VUE Number 26, Winter 2010
NOTE: This article was originally published in Beyond Brown v. Board: VUE 4, Summer 2004.
Three generations of children have enrolled in our nation’s schools since Brown v. Board of Education. Yet, we have fallen far short of Brown’s ideals for racial equality. The major challenge in education today – improving learning conditions for children in historically neglected and underfunded schools – requires new approaches to distributing resources and supports.
This year the nation celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, honoring the ruling as a watershed event in American history that set us on a path toward racial justice and equality. In the stroke of their pens, the nine justices obliterated America’s legalized system of racially segregated public schools.
Tempering these commemorations is the recognition that we, as a society, have fallen far short of the ideals of racial justice embodied in Brown. The stark fact is that since that day in May 1954, two generations of schoolchildren have passed through our nation’s public schools and a 
third generation has now matriculated – yet today we still see school systems that are separate and unequal. Underfunded urban districts struggle through problems endemic to communities of concentrated poverty. Meanwhile, other school systems enjoy a markedly higher quality of instruction, better facilities, safer environments, and better-prepared teachers, and they place their graduates on secure pathways to college, careers, and civic life.
Throughout this fifty-year struggle, America has pursued many avenues forsecuring equal protection for children of color. In this article, we trace the evolution of these three generations of society’s attempts to respond to the mandates of Brown v. Board – and examine the causes and consequences of their shortcomings. We then turn our attention to a contemporary approach in which the school district is a principal lever of equity as we strive toward the twin goals of results and equity at scale.
In pledging our support for these goals, we believe we are holding fast to the principles underlying the Brown decision. As Chief Justice Earl Warren noted in delivering the unanimous opinion of the court, the aim of ending segregation was not just to eliminate the disparities in resources and educational quality that characterized White and Black schools; it was also to affect the “intangible” qualities that make segregation particularly pernicious. Chief Justice Warren argued: “To separate [children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates 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.”
First Generation: A Decade of Avoidance
Charles Ogletree and others have documented the systematic resistance by states and school districts to school integration in the immediate aftermath of the Brown decision. These critics have argued that the court’s subsequent “all deliberate speed” guidance in Brown II (see Ogletree 2004) encouraged public officials to delay any action to dismantle dual school systems; in worst cases, the decision sanctioned legislative resistance that became common throughout the South. Closing public schools and replacing them with private “resistance academies” was a tactic introduced by the Virginia state legislature that later spread throughout the South (Bickel 1964). Students from closed public schools received a state voucher that covered tuition to attend these newly privatized schools, which were shielded from federal law and court jurisdiction.
At the same time, southern communities, and, later, those in the North, attempted to gerrymander student attendance zones to create firewalls between Black and White communities and protect the status quo of dual systems. All in all, these strategies in the decade before the Civil Rights Act lent credence to the popular southern manifesto “as long as we can legislate, we can segregate” (Meador 1959).
The effect of this defiant inaction in the first decade was profound: a full decade after the Brown decision, only 2 percent of Black children in the South attended integrated schools (Woodward 1974). Indeed, the Black children of Topeka, Kansas, and Clarendon County, South Carolina, and the other plaintiffs who prevailed in the original Brown v. Board of Education received no material relief at any time during their school years.
Second Generation: Affirmative Desegregation in South and North
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, several key decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court began to change this dynamic of delay and resistance. Green v. County School Board in 1968 and Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education in 1971 helped establish standards of evidence for finding school districts liable for constitutional violations and defined the scope of remedy.
These decisions and others in the early 1970s triggered the acceleration of desegregation in the South. The most common approach to desegregation taken by the courts involved reconfiguring
student attendance patterns to ensure racially integrated student bodies and, later, teaching faculties. These decisions ushered in the busing era in the South in the late 1960s and, within five years, in northern cities.
During Brown’s second generation, the federal courts assumed a more activist stance, finding scores of school boards and states in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The struggle shifted to how defendant states, school districts, and elected officials responded to their obligations to provide adequate remedy in the face of near-constant monitoring by plaintiffs and judicial supervision. The Supreme Court decisions in the 1970s clarified local and state responsibilities regarding the scope and expected pace of relief. A strengthening civil rights movement also heightened the public’s consciousness about racial equality.
With this added pressure, educators developed new strategies to promote racial integration of the schools in order to augment citywide busing plans. Magnet schools with specialized educational programs were introduced to encourage the voluntary transfer of students to enhance racial balance. The Detroit desegregation decision in the mid-1970s created a precedent for allowing some schools in a district to remain segregated on the condition that the district and state provide substantial compensatory educational services to these schools (Milliken v. Bradley 1974; Milliken II 1977). These educational measures included preschool, all-day kindergarten, lower class sizes, after-school programs, and summer instruction.
The boldest innovations were metropolitan plans that encouraged the voluntary enrollment of suburban students in city schools and city students in the suburbs for purposes of improving racial balance on both ends. Boston’s METCO program is perhaps the best known of these interdistrict plans. The St. Louis interdistrict program, at its peak, hosted 20,000 students, making it the largest program of its type (Grady & Willie 1986).
The second-generation response to Brown had a dramatic impact on racial integration. The percentage of African American children attending integrated schools increased throughout the 1970s and 1980s, cresting at 44 percent by 1988 (Orfield & Lee 2004). However, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1991 decision in Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell, which released school officials there from further court supervision, we saw a reversal in these patterns, beginning in the 1990s. This was followed quickly by other courts’ declaring school districts “unitary” – that is, no longer operating two segregated school systems.
Today the percentage of Black students in integrated schools in the South has slipped to a pre-1970 level of 30 percent (Orfield & Lee 2004). Thus, by the late 1980s, American public schools began a pattern of “resegregation.” This time, segregation was not due to the pre-Brown legally enforced and statesponsored system of separate school systems for Black and White children, with an explicitly racist rationale. Rather, it was due to a combination of demographic trends, residential housing patterns, and federal court decisions releasing school districts and states from further desegregation obligations. During this same period, efforts to close the achievement gap between White children and children of color stalled, after two decades of marked progress. These simultaneous trends throughout the 1990s toward resegregation and flat achievement have caused some scholars and policy leaders to call for bold action (Orfield 2004).
