60 years after 'Brown v. Board of Education' it looks as if 'Brown v. Board of Education" never happened

In Tuscaloosa today, nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened.

According to a new report just released by the Civil Rights Project called "Brown at 60," "Black and Latino students tend to be in schools with a substantial majority of poor children, but white and Asian students are typically in middle-class schools."
This double segregation doesn't just condemn these precious children to an often inferior education, it also strips them of their humanity and their dignity. Race and poverty shouldn't matter more than shared humanity.

 Today, however, the very states whose segregated schools, poll taxes, and Jim Crow laws necessitated federal intervention in Brown are once again limiting the educational opportunities for people of color. Rather than explicitly refusing to admit students of color into school, these states have found new, more clandestine ways to marginalize people of color. In this new segregated system, states disadvantage students of color by providing fewer resources to schools serving the highest concentrations of students who need them the most. By perpetuating this inequitable system and rejecting powerful and effective education reforms such as the Common Core State Standards, these states effectively reclaim their legacy of systematic racial discrimination.

 This residential isolation of the most disadvantaged children – a product of migration patterns and economic trends that have occurred since Brown -- points to one set of strategies that’s been given little attention over the last 60 years. What if we made a more concerted effort to integrate schools by integrating neighborhoods? What if we tried to improve the educational prospects of low-income minority students by breaking down barriers to affordable housing in the communities where good schools exist? What if we wielded zoning laws and housing vouchers as levers of education policy?

A new secessionist movement, anchored in the South, provides yet another reminder that “separate” still means “unequal” when it comes to the racial dynamics of the nation’s public schools.
The small middle-class town of Gardendale, Alabama, outside Birmingham, voted on November 12 to secede from the Jefferson County school district and then to raise taxes on themselves to finance the solo venture. Then, in March, Gardendale’s 14,000 residents finally got their own Board of Education. Soon after his appointment, one new board member, Clayton “Dick” Lee III, a banker and father of two, said he aspires to build a “best in class” school system “which exceeds the capabilities of the system which we are exiting.”

 Freed from court oversight, Tuscaloosa’s schools have seemed to move backwards in time. The citywide integrated high school is gone, replaced by three smaller schools. Central retains the name of the old powerhouse, but nothing more. A struggling school serving the city’s poorest part of town, it is 99 percent black. D’Leisha, an honors student since middle school, has only marginal college prospects. Predominantly white neighborhoods adjacent to Central have been gerrymandered into the attendance zones of other, whiter schools.

 “We know that today in America, too many folks are still stopped on the street because of the color of their skin, or they’re made to feel unwelcome because of where they’re from, or they’re bullied because of who they love,” she said. “So graduates, the truth is that Brown vs. Board of Education isn’t just about our history, it’s about our future.”

We Shall Overcome One Day.