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Beyond Brown v. Board: The Final Battle for Excellence in American Education
Non-white segregation in our nation's schools is still an issue 50 years after the lawsuit ![]()
May 19, 2004
Civil and Human Rights A half century after the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision, undoing segregation in America's schools remains a challenge. According to Beyond Brown v. Board: The Final Battle for Excellence in American Education (90 pages, PDF), since the early 1990s African American and Latino children have been increasingly likely to find themselves in classes with few, if any, non-minority faces. The report, which was written for the Rockefeller Foundation by Newsweek contributor Ellis Cose, finds that, by virtually any measure of academic achievement, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexican Americans, on average, lag behind their white peers. Although the report offers a range of causes, from poor prenatal care to destructive neighborhood and/or home environments, for the widening gap, one of the most important is the fact that African Americans and Hispanics do not, for the most part, attend the same schools, or even the same types of schools, as the majority of non-Hispanic whites. As it was fifty years ago, the report concludes, the issue remains one of equality of opportunity. See the National Report Card on Education and Equal Opportunity and the more than 180 civil rights organizations listed on civilrightsnetwork.org. |