Promise Of Brown Research Articles

Corrigendum

McCarty, T. L. (2018). Twelfth Annual Brown Lecture in Education Research: So that any child may succeed: Indigenous pathways toward justice and the promise of Brown. Educational Researcher, 47(5), 271–283. (Original DOI: 10.3102/0013189X18768549 ) In this article in the June/July 2018 issue of Educational Researcher, references to Tuck and Wang (2014) should have been to Tuck and Yang (2014). The corrected reference appears below. The author sincerely apologizes for this error. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2014). R-words: Refusing research. In D. Paris & M. T. Winn (Eds.), Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities (pp. 223–247). Los Angeles, CA: SAGE.

Restoring the Promise of Brown: Using State Constitutional Law to Challenge School Segregation

Despite over six decades of litigation, both state and federal court strategies have largely failed to address inequalities and segregation in America’s schools. More than sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, our schools are still deeply unequal, and school segregation has generally been increasing over the past several decades. In both academic and social outcomes, students in these segregated schools lag far behind their peers. This article examines the viability of using state constitutional law to address school segregation. For more than forty years, state courts have played a major role and have had varied success in addressing issues of educational inequality under school finance and educational adequacy theories. A handful of cases have used state constitutional law to challenge school segregation, including a brand new case, Cruz-Guzman v. State of Minnesota, which restarts the discussion on how best to restore the original promise of Brown.Federal courts long ago departed sharply from the initial promise of the Brown decision and have spent the last few decades undermining desegregation. While hailed as one of the Supreme Court’s greatest accomplishments, the iconic Brown decision has been largely dismantled. Yet the goals of Brown remain a priority. This article discusses how state constitutional claims can bring new life to the promise of Brown and address school segregation. Educational adequacy cases targeting school segregation in some respects are a combination of the best of federal and state courts. Such potential cases represent the next logical step in addressing inequality in our schools, combining the many advantages of state court litigation with the original promise of Brown.

The second promise ofbrown

This article describes the cultural consequences of the local school closing in a predominantly black community (Centerville) as a result of desegregation policies. Based on oral accounts of community members, the author unearths the diverse functions the former all-black school used to have in the community. Furthermore, the possible reasons for the nostalgia with which the community remembers its “own” school are analyzed. It is shown why the predominantly white schools to which today's students are bused cannot possibly “pass the test” of comparison with the former community school. And finally, the article reminds us of two promises ofBrown, only one of which has been fulfilled in the case of Centerville. While racial segregation of schooling was indeed abolished in Centerville, the second promise ofBrown—providing equal educational opportunities for all children irrespective of race—remains elusive at best. And the very institution that would be central to fulfilling the second promise ofBrown—a school for which the town feels a sense of ownership—was closed for the sake of desegregation.