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When I was in college, one of my professors was Hank Klibanoff, who wrote a book called The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of the Nation. One thing I will distinctly remember about the book was its commentary on Brown vs. Board of Education, our legendary Supreme Court ruling in 1954 on school desegregation. Brown was a unanimous vote by a very split Supreme Court, but one thing the Brown decision ruled was that schools would desegregate with “all deliberate speed”.
I don’t know if this is news to anybody: our schools are still very segregated. “Intense levels of segregation…are on the rise once again,” writes the UCLA Civil Rights Project. Especially for black and Latino students, the system has abandoned and phased out older problems to foster integration. Students across America are attending increasingly racially isolated schools.
Today, residential segregation plays the biggest factor in the fact that our schools are still very segregated. Drive through parts of inner-city Baltimore on the east and west side and you will see that these factors are no secret — but I am a teacher in East Baltimore who has seen school segregation and lived it.
