Doghouse Schools and the Edgewood Kids: The Fight for Educational Opportunity from Plessy to Rodriguez
William Carlos Wagoner-Morales
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Rationale
We live in an era of increasing school segregation and inequality:
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"students in poverty and those who are members of racial minority groups are overwhelmingly concentrated in the lowest-achieving schools. For example, in California, black students are six times more likely than white students to attend one of the bottom third of schools in the state, and Latino and poor students are nearly four times as likely as white students to attend one of the worst-performing third of schools (EdTrust West, 2010)."
Our national educational system is plainly separate and unequal. Yet how can this be? Didn't the landmark civil rights Supreme Court case
Brown v. Board of Education
rule once and for all that separate is inherently unequal, and thereby end this chapter of our sordid past? How do we reconcile the jarring dissonance of a country espousing "equality and justice for all" with stunning levels of disparity among its citizens?
School curricula and textbooks end the history of "Civil Rights" with the passing of the Civil Rights Bill, as a kind of final emancipation heralding a "post racial America." But the long and protracted fight for equal educational opportunity in America did not begin with Martin Luther King, and legally sanctioned discrimination in our schools did not end with
Brown vs Board of Ed
.
