Fifty-nine years ago today, in the Supreme Court of the United States, justices struck down one of their own greatest milestones—the 1896 “separate but equal” doctrine—in the school segregation case of Brown v Board of Education. The 9-0 decision was reported in the New York Times.
In that famous case, the Court found that separate schools for black and white students were not, in fact, equal. Although time was allowed for schools to comply with the law, the Court ordered the desegregation of the nation’s public schools as a remedy to the injustice of inequality.
Credit: Portland Student Union
More recently, desegregation has been found to be an inadequate solution to inequality. Busing black students to predominantly white schools and vice versa creates hardship for everyone involved. But the inequality the Court saw in 1954 isn’t very different from the kind of inequality we see today.
As we make educational opportunities unequal for students within one district, we push families out of certain neighborhoods. This causes the schools to look underutilized, but even before that happens, they are stripped of all the extras schools need to function and invigorate students with a love of learning.
Under No Child Left Behind, this has most commonly been done in order to provide extra instruction in math or reading for students who might, with enough help, one day achieve a mark of “proficient” on statewide standardized tests in these two subjects. Untested subjects, such as music, physical education, and writing, are sacrificed in the name of math and reading.
As schools are stripped down to the bare-bones, “only what is mandated” facilities the writers of No Child Left Behind never imagined they would become, as is happening now in Philadelphia with the threatened removal of nurses who can care for sick students, counselors who can care for troubled ones, athletic teams, and fine arts programs from all public schools in the city, we see the “separate but unequal” character this type of reform would likely create if it continues on its current trajectory.
To protest this inequality, Philadelphia students staged a walkout at noon today, the Nation reported, and Chicagoans are participating in a three-day march beginning Saturday, similar to those conducted during America’s Civil Rights Era.
In a report issued today entitled, “Still Separate, Still Unequal,” the Chicago Teachers Union said, “Segregation has increased, and the associated policies of disinvestment and destabilization are more acute than ever.” We have also documented the disinvestment in Chicago’s poorest, most African-American schools, here and here.
But this report is a small volley compared to those lobbed by Chicago students. Groups like Chicago Students Organizing to Save Our Schools (CSOSOS) have led the way for protests in the city, according to one article in the Huffington Post.
Students in Chicago are joining those in Denver, Providence, and several other cities, to protest school closings, the use of standardized tests to label schools as “failing,” the firing of teachers, and other “corporate reform” and “public school privatization” measures being hoisted upon them by mayors, state departments of education, the US Department of Education, and other deaf groups not affiliated with any classrooms in their cities.
The groundswell hasn’t really been noticed by journalists yet, but with this much noise, it’s becoming more and more difficult to ignore. In fact, so many people—parents, students, firefighters, hearing officers—have told Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago that closing 54 schools simultaneously is a bad idea that his persistent empty-headedness about what these strong and logical voices have to say staggers the mind. It’s as if we forget what the Supreme Court has taught us when a lot of money rides on only one dog in the fight.
