the Supreme Court of the United States UNANIMOUSLY issued two important decisions about public schools.
The better known is Brown v. Board of Education, in which in his opinion Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote
to separate them 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. . . . Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system.Please keep reading, because this raises a current issue.
The key phrase from that opinion was this
We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.What is important is that our current educational policies have lead to an increasing segregation of schools by race, particularly in the way we have used charter schools in many jurisdictions.
It may not be by law nowadays, but it is just as pernicious.
We see that the education of children of color seems to carry less value than that of whites. In Chicago, a district that is not majority African-American in its student population, the vast majority of schools scheduled to be closed are African-American, and regardless of the rationale being offered for the closures it is clear the real intent is to replace them with charters from which some people find ways of making profits at the expense of the education of the children.
Worth noting is that there were five cases argued in Brown, but two separate unanimous decisions. The District of Columbia had to be treated separately because it was not a state. The four states were covered by the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. But there was at the time no equal protection against federal action. Warren creatively used the 5th Amendment's guarantee of liberty to find segregation in DC schools also unconstitutional, thereby effectively applying the notion of equal protection also against the Federal government.
It will be sad one year from now to see what increasingly seems likely - that we will have returned to a degree of segregation of American public education that we thought we had begun to overcome more than half a century ago.
It is no long de jure segregration, but we are still seeing the legal system being used to accomplish the same goal. How sad that the 60th anniversary, when we will see such backsliding on matters of race, occurs during the Presidency of the 1st African-American in the nation's highest office.