Reverberations for American Indians, Native Hawai’ians, and Group Rights

Usually left out of discussions of school desegregation, the historic treatments of American Indians and Native Hawai’ians in the development of schooling in the United States was a corollary of conquest and colonialism. As late as the 1950s, forced assimilation and eradication of indigenous cultures pervaded what was considered the “education” of students in these groups. The social, political, and legal civil rights initiatives surrounding Brown helped to inspire a rights consciousness among Indian and Native Hawai’ian reformers and activists, who embraced the ideal of equal opportunity while reclaiming cultural traditions. Between the 1960s and 2007, complex fights over ethnic classification, separation, integration, and self-determination emerged for both American Indians and Native Hawai’ians. Their struggles, crucial in themselves, also bring to the fore a challenging underlying problem: are distinct individuals or groups the proper unit of analysis and protection in the pursuit of equality? The centrality of the individual to law and culture in the United States tends to mute this question. Yet in this country as well as elsewhere, equal treatment or equal opportunity has two faces: promoting individual development and liberty, regardless of race, culture, religion, gender, or other group-based characteristic, and protection for groups that afford their members meaning and identity. Nowhere is the tension between these two alternatives more apparent than in schooling, which involves socialization of each new generation in the values and expectations of their elders. Will that socialization direct each individual to a common world focused on the academic and social mobility of distinct individuals or will it inculcate traditions and values associated with particular groups? Even in the United States, devoted to inclusive individualism, the Supreme Court rejected a statute requiring students to attend schools run by the government and created exemptions from compulsory school fines when they burdened a group’s practices and hopes for their children. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the Court respected the rights of parents to select private schooling in order to inculcate a religious identity or other “additional obligations.”

What Brown Awakened

Brown v. Board of Education established equality as a central commitment of American schools but launched more than a half century of debate over whether students from different racial, religious, gender, and ethnic backgrounds, and other lines of difference must be taught in the same classrooms. Brown explicitly rejected state-ordered racial segregation, yet neither law nor practice has produced a norm of racially integrated classrooms. Courts restrict modest voluntary efforts to achieve racially mixed schools. Schools in fact are now more racially segregated than they were at the height of the desegregation effort. Talk of this disappointing development dominated the events commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown decision. Instead of looking at the composition of schools and classrooms, policy-makers measure racial equality in American schooling by efforts to reduce racial differentials in student performance on achievement tests, and those efforts have yielded minimal success. Historians question whether the lawyers litigating Brown undermined social changes already in the works or so narrowed reforms to the focus on schools that they turned away from the pursuit of economic justice. Commentators have even questioned whether the Court’s decision itself ever produced real civil rights reform. Although Brown focused on racial equality, it also inspired social movements to pursue equal schooling beyond racial differences, and it yielded successful legal and policy changes addressing the treatment of students’ language, gender, disability, immigration status, socioeconomic status, religion, and sexual orientation. These developments are themselves still news, inadequately acknowledged and appreciated as another key legacy of Brown. Yet here, too, judges, legislators, school officials, experts, and parents disagree over whether and when equality calls for teaching together, in the same classrooms, students who are or who are perceived to be different from one another. Parents and educators have at times pushed for separate instruction and at times for instructing different students side by side. As the twenty-first century proceeds, equality in law and policy in the United States increasingly calls for mixing English-language learners with English-speaking students and disabled with non-disabled students, but students’ residential segregation and school assignments often produce schools and classrooms divided along lines of race, ethnicity, and socio-economic class.

On Other Shores: When is Separate Inherently Unequal?,

Even before it was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Education had a global profile. Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal in a work that the Carnegie Corporation commissioned in 1944 in search of an unbiased view of American race relations, supplied a searing indictment of America’s treatment of the “Negro,” and his work, An American Dilemma, became a key citation in the Court’s famous footnote eleven. Initially, President Dwight D. Eisenhower showed no sympathy for the school integration project and expressed suspicion that the United Nations and international economic and social rights activists were betraying socialist or even communist leanings in supporting the brief. But as the United States tried to position itself as a leader in human rights and supporter of the United Nations, the Cold War orientation of President Eisenhower’s Republican administration gave rise to interest in ending official segregation, lynchings, and cross burnings in order to elevate the American image internationally. The Department of Justice consulted with the State Department on the drafting of an amicus brief in Brown that argued that ending racially segregated schools would halt the Soviet critique of racial abuses tolerated by the U.S. system of government and thereby help combat global communism. Ending segregation emerged as part of a strategy to win more influence than the Soviet Union in the “Third World.” African-American civil rights leader and journalist Roger Wilkins later recalled that ending official segregation became urgent as black ambassadors started to visit Washington, D.C., and the United Nations in New York City. Tracking the influence of Brown in other countries is thornier than tracking its influence inside the United States where the topic has motivated a cottage industry in academic scholarship. As this book has considered, the litigation has by now a well-known and complicated relationship to actual racial integration within American schools. Some argue that the case exacerbated tensions and slowed gradual reform that was already under way.

Social Science in Brown’s Path: Social Contact and Integration Revisited,

The architects of Brown v. Board of Education soldiered through long struggles and many obstacles, but even they would probably be surprised by the state of affairs emerging half a century following the decision. Brown influenced expanding use of social sciences by lawyers pursuing social change and especially educational reforms. The state of racial integration in education might be stunningly disappointing, but Brown has also produced unexpected dividends addressing historic educational disadvantages based on gender, disability, language, immigrant status, poverty, sexual orientation, and religion. This dual legacy of disappointment and promise raises profound questions about the priority the nation gives not just to equal opportunity but also to social integration, the movement of individuals from previously excluded or subordinated groups into the social mainstream where they can join others in pursuing opportunities and enriching society. Because this aspiration gained support from social science evidence in the Brown litigation itself, this chapter considers the strengths and limitations of social science research on social integration, including research launched in the wake of the Brown litigation. The boost Brown gave to the field of social psychology to advance racial equality has some irony, given the reliance by defenders of racial segregation on eugenics and other “scientific” theories of their day. The contribution of social psychology to the cause of racial justice is particularly contested, as many critics have contended that its use contributed to narrowing policy debates to a focus on psychological damage rather than structures of racial oppression and the role of community supports in academic success. It might even be fair to conclude that when it comes to racial relations in the United States, there is more success in the growth of the research field studying social integration than there is success in actual social integration. Hence, paying attention to contemporary social science in assessing how social integration affects academic achievement, social cohesion, individual development, economic and social opportunities, and civic engagement and democracy means remaining mindful of the limitations of research and continuing to subject its assumptions to scrutiny.

Making Waves: Schooling and Disability, Sexual Orientation, Religion, and Economic Class

The historic treatment of students with disabilities in many ways resembles racial segregation in schools. Brown’s influence in this field is clear but complicated. Also complicated are debates over equal treatment of students who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered. Religious students—and religious schools—elicit further variations on the educational equality debate with consequences for social integration and intergroup relations. Compulsory education laws in the United States for many years exempted students with mental and physical disabilities, and many school systems excluded such students or assigned them to separate institutions well into the 1970s. Before Brown, court challenges to this treatment of students with disabilities failed either on the assumption that the child’s impairments made schooling inappropriate or that the presence of the child with disabilities would harm the best interests of other children and the school. Even schools set up for students with disabilities could exclude a student by asserting that the child’s limitations would prevent educational progress. During the 1920s, communities established separate schools for students who were blind, deaf, or severely retarded, and many schools established separate classrooms for students who were considered to be slow learners. Misclassifications assigning students to separate classrooms or schools was not uncommon, and especially affected students who were immigrants or members of minority groups. This process of segregating persons with disabilities often relegated such persons to squalid residential institutions and imposed forced sterilization, justified in terms set by the eugenics movement. Those children with disabilities who did receive services did so largely in classrooms or schools removed from their peers. Parent advocacy organizations and civil rights activists challenged these practices, often with explicit references to Brown v. Board of Education. Parents and educators pressed for both more funding and experiments placing students with disabilities in regular educational settings. Integration, also called “mainstreaming” and “inclusion,” became a central goal through litigation, legislation, and advocacy for individual students, but for some children, advocates also pursued specialized instruction in separate settings. Intertwined with failures in the treatment of students with disabilities was the problem of racially discriminatory treatment.

Expanding Promise, Debating Means: Separate and Integrated Schooling for Immigrants, English-language Learners, Girls, and Boys,

Spurred by the social and legal struggles surrounding Brown, parents and advocates during the twentieth century and into the present have pursued equal schooling along other dimensions of exclusion and inequality by working through court challenges, legislation, and other initiatives. Brown enshrined equality as the entitlement for all students, even as the work leading to and following Brown identified avenues for advocates concerned for students learning English, immigrants, girls, boys, and others left out or mistreated by public schooling. American public schools have grown preoccupied with the aspiration of equality and the language of inclusion. Yet no less pervasive is the struggle over whether equality is to be realized through integrated or separate settings. The debates involve politics, prejudices, and social science studies. Shifting political tides and cultural attitudes, as well as legal debates, reflect and also aggravate uncertainties about what kinds of instruction actually promote equal opportunities for all children. Often called “a nation of immigrants” (with the elision, then, of Native Americans and slaves), the United States has offered opportunities but also presided over mistreatment of newcomers on the basis of language, accent, derogatory ideas about their country of origin, or general negative attitudes toward foreigners. Such attitudes include the conflation of “foreign” with “illegal,” the confusion of immigrant with noncitizen, and the equation of being a speaker of Spanish (and other native tongues) with being “non-American.” The tradition of forced assimilation starts first not with immigrants but with the Native Americans, beginning with the Civilization Act of 1819, under which the government removed Indian children from their family cultures and placed them in federally funded missionary schools, not to further integrate them with other students but to “civilize” them. In addition, as the United States displaced Mexico in parts of the Southwest, families who never moved gradually found themselves dealing with a contest over language, race, and culture.

Introduction

Making sense of Brown v. Board of Education, decided the same year I was born, and understanding what it did and did not achieve have occupied me since I can remember. When the fiftieth anniversary of the ruling arrived, scholars and media pundits debated whether the case deserved its landmark status and whether it had delivered in any meaningful way on the promise of racial equality for African Americans—or if it instead was ineffectual or counterproductive. Those are important questions, and this book grapples with them. Yet largely missing from the public discussions was the enormous influence of Brown in schools beyond race. The Supreme Court’s embrace of the ideal of equal opportunity and its critique of the separate-but-equal approach to education transformed the treatment of immigrants, students learning English, girls, students with disabilities, and poor students in American schools; religion in schools; school choice; and social science evidence about schooling—and the story of these changes deserves telling. That is what this book aims to do, even as it tells of a mixed legacy of Brown in these other contexts while also tracing reverberations of Brown outside the United States. To tell these stories is to engage with public policy debates over separate versus mixed instruction in meeting the needs of varied kinds of students. Nested within larger disputes over the viability of the racial integration ideal, this effort also explores the emergence of Brown as a resource for enterprising and visionary reformers concerned with gender, disability, religion, and other topics. The legacies of Brown invite a look at the capacity of individuals to push and achieve change using law and social science; the histories are interconnected with social movements as well as unexpected consequences of resulting reforms. Chapter 1 offers an analysis of what this landmark U.S. Supreme Court case did and did not accomplish when it banned official racial segregation in public schools. I consider whether the lawyers’ goal ever was integration, defined to mean both the side-by-side instruction of students of different races and the creation of school communities with a sense of common purpose and membership bridging different identities, histories, and past opportunities.

School Choice and Choice Schools: Resisting, Realizing, or Replacing Brown?

To school desegregation activists in the 1960s, school choice plans represented one of a series of tactics of avoidance or obstruction. Yet choice programs became part of school desegregation remedies and then became initiatives for varied school reforms. Political alliances and clashes around the issue of school choice color public perceptions even more than the actual effects of school choice on students’ achievement or social integration. School choice can enable both self-segregation or student mixing across many lines of difference. As a tool of school reform, school choice continues to hold promise and risks for those seeking equality and integration within schools while enhancing pluralism and respect for differences in society as a whole. Yet some forms of school choice could undermine equality goals unless they are accompanied by direct efforts to maintain and enforce these goals. Widespread perceptions that American schools are failing have fueled a major nationwide movement for school reform since the early 1980s. At the forefront have been business leaders who—worried about American competitiveness and the qualifications of the workforce for jobs requiring increasing technical skills—have brought conceptions of competition and innovation to the school reform initiatives. Parents and teachers, seeking greater control of local schools, have also energized the movement. Challenging established school bureaucracies and political arrangements, these reformers have pushed for performance standards, voucher systems to promote competition and consumer choices, site-based management, and other opportunities for innovation at the level of the individual school rather than the district or statewide system. One of the key themes pursued by a range of parents, teachers, business leaders, and other advocates as a motor for reform is parental choice. This concept combines a market-style consumer sovereignty idea with notions of personal liberty. School choice stimulates competition among providers, as parents look for benchmarks for assessing quality. As a result, states and localities have initiated institutional innovations. These include magnet and pilot schools, which draw students from an entire district by offering a special focus. Vouchers permit poor students to use public funds to pay tuition in private schools.