Say Something Real
Seventy Years After Brown v. Board of Education
By Michelle Bryant
Michelle Bryant
“The wheels on the bus go round and round. Round and round. Round and round.” are lyrics to a popular nursery rhyme The Wheels on the Bus. Written by Verna Hills, the song’s repetition, while catchy, was always frustrating to me. Seven verses of the same “round and round” worked my nerves, even as a child. It felt like the song was never going anywhere, kept me spinning my wheels, was a long ride back to the same staring point. I admit I might have been overthinking it, but it is what it is.
In thinking about the 70th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, which outlawed racially segregated schools, the work to honestly desegregate public education feels like those wheels on the bus. We’ve taken a long ride through policy, legislation, and court houses, around the country, to end up almost where we started prior to May 1954.
In a research report titled “Is Separate Still Unequal? New Evidence on School Segregation and Racial Academic Achievement Gaps,” the researchers assert that public schools in the United States are “racially and economically segregated.” Detailing the effects of current-day school segregation on racial achievement gaps, the report found that racial segregation was strongly associated with the extent of achievement gaps in third grade and the rate at which gaps grow from third to eighth grade.
Disparities in performance are impacted by poverty. Minority students are often concentrated in high-poverty, under-resourced school districts. More in-depth analysis can be provided, but the simple fact is that segregated and unequal educations remain a relic of our present. Graduation rates improved for both Black and Latino students after school desegregation, by 30% and 22%, respectively. However, as court-ordered desegregation stopped, we’ve begun to see a spike in the number of schools that have become exactly what we were fighting against.
According to the U.S. Department of Education’s State of School Diversity Report, three in five Black and Latino students and two in five Indigenous /Alaska Native students attend schools where at least 75% of students are students of color and 42% of white students attend schools where students of color make up less than 25% of the population.
It is with this understanding that I value the work of the Biden-Harris Administration to provide additional funding and resources to support school diversity and equitable access to a great education. They have established a new technical assistance center to help states and school districts provide more equitable and adequate approaches to school funding. Their work to preserve African American History, by providing protections, is necessary. The American Rescue Plan provided $130 billion in funding to schools, with a focus on undeserved schools. Seventy years after the historic case, we continue to be valued, heard and treated equitably. Most days though, the wheels of educational injustice, are analogous to the bus. We keep going around and around. It’s time to realize the full benefit and spirit of desegregation.