Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown V. Board of Education

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Desegregation has been one of the only legally enforceable routes of access and opportunity for millions of school children. Yet even as the nation celebrated the 40th anniversary of the 1954 "Brown v. Board of Education" decision, Gary Orfield, Director of the Harvard Project on School Desegregation, began to attract national attention by identifying and documenting the insidious trend toward the resegregation of our public schools. For the first time since 1954, school segregation is actually increasing for African-American students. Meanwhile, in two rarely-discussed decisions, the Supreme court has opened the door for wide-scale abandonment of desegregation plans. This "quiet reversal"of Brown versus Board of Education, now brought into the open, has threatened to dismantle desegregation. With profiles of school districts nationwide that have turned their back on the promise of Brown versus board of Education, Orfield and Eaton analyze this devastating trend, offering evidence and solutions intended to stimulate national debate about the state of our schools today.

Author Bio

Gary Orfield, director of the Harvard Project on School Desegregation, is a professor of education and social policy at Harvard University. He has also served as a scholar in residence at the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Susan E. Eaton, formerly assistant director of the Harvard Project on School Desegregation, has covered education for daily newspapers in Massachusetts and Connecticut.