Recently I have been hearing chatter in some of my classes about the fact that schools are still not entirely desegregated! To me, at the time, this seemed like false information due to the fact that its been 59 years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against segregated schools in Brown v. Board of Education. However, my thoughts on this matter changed after I read this article from the Huffington Post about schools still not being desegregated.
According to the article, minorities constitute approximately half of the student population in the U.S. but “80 percent of Latino students and 74 percent of black students are in schools where the majority of students are not white.” Now, some would argue that this isn’t because the schools haven’t been desegregated, but because some school districts end up having more minorities in them than others. However, the article goes deeper in order to counter this theory by stating that, “…high-minority schools and resource issues like less experienced and less qualified teachers, high teacher turnover rates and lesser facilities and lesson materials.” So I must ask, what are we doing? And what is Washington doing? Apparently the Obama administration has been making strives to change this. But as of right now it would take approximately 50 years with an annual 3% increase of black males graduation rates for them to catch up with white males.
Also, if any body can recall, during the elections both Mitt Romney and President Obama never brought this issue up nor did they highlight it. All I can say is that it’s been nearly 6 decades since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Brown in Brown v. Board of Education (1954)… It is time for minorities to have equal access to comparable and diverse schools, supplies, etc. The idea of a desegregated school isn’t even the biggest issue here, it’s that we need to provide children with equal opportunities to succeed. Because if we don’t, our educational programs and success, as a nation, is going to continue to fall behind the other nations of the world. Can our nation’s next generations really afford to be poorly prepared?
