My personal story serves as an illustration of just how far we still have to go as a nation in fulfilling the promise of equality in education set out by the Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court case, which was decided 60 years ago last week.
I remember the court ruling vividly. I was a young black boy attending an all-black segregated school in rural North Carolina, and later went to become an active participant in civil rights protests and demonstrations while in college.
We remember Brown v. Board in the context of racism, but the core of the case was actually about equality. And when it comes to schools, that means educational opportunities and options.
Prior to the ruling, black students pretty much had only one option: go to your segregated school. Even if that school’s facilities were inferior, even if its textbooks were out of date, even if its programs were grossly underfunded – black kids had only one option. They had no access to schools designed for whites only. After the Supreme Court put an end to the false “separate but equal” doctrine that had been the law of the land since 1896, black students finally had choices.
A few years after the Brown ruling, when integrated schools came to the area of North Carolina where I lived, I chose to complete high school in the same segregated school I’d been attending. Teachers were also segregated – even the best teachers, if they were black, had to teach at black schools. I had some great teachers. They not only taught academic curriculum but instilled values and principles we would need to successfully compete in a racially biased and segregated society. But again, staying in that school was now my choice.
In 2005 I became president of the Washington Teachers Union in D.C. The public schools were performing among the worst in the nation on standardized tests with a substantial achievement gap between black students and their white counterparts nationally. Charter schools were growing at a rapid rate, and public school enrollment was declining.
In response to dwindling enrollment, the chancellor of schools sought to close down the poorest-performing schools, all of which happened to be in neighborhoods with high poverty rates and large minority populations.
I followed the standard course of union action and fought against charter schools. I fought against school closures. Why? Because they would have meant fewer teachers, a subsequent reduction in union dues income, and therefore less financial and political clout for our union.
Charter schools aren’t unionized. And consolidating schools would mean consolidating teachers as well. We fought those things out of self-interest, not on behalf of students. Of course, I wasn’t going to tell that to the black community.
So, I was in the position of telling black kids and poor kids and Latino kids, “You have only one choice, even if that school is failing you.” That was the same thing black kids, including me, had been told nearly two generations earlier, prior to the Brown case. When adults are blinded by their own self-interest and support policies and causes that limit or deny educational opportunities to poor black kids, the effects of their actions can be identical to those of racism.
Many people in the black and Latino communities, including politicians and education advocates, have bought into this bad messaging. They call charter schools “corporate” and assert that vouchers will “privatize” education. They believe they are fighting for kids, but they’re actually supporting a racially biased type of segregation and education inequality.
Six decades after Brown, it’s time that we re-evaluate the whole point of that court case. Education is our country’s great equalizer. It provides poor kids the opportunity to lift themselves up, pull themselves out of poverty, and be successful. No kid, no matter their skin color or their parents’ socioeconomic status, should be stuck in a substandard school and denied options. That should not have been the case in 1954, and it should absolutely not be the case today.
Parker is a senior fellow at StudentsFirst, a school choice advocacy organization.
