July 4th of this year The fireworks will be special as we celebrate another important moment in American history.
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the most significant U.S. Supreme Court decision in at least a century that found separate schools for white and black children to be wrong and illegal.
of Brown v. Board of Education The decision affirmed the nation’s founding principle that all Americans have equal rights under the law.
Providing good schools for all American children is at the heart of the Declaration of Independence. Claims “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, among which are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The good news for this Fourth of July is that a very high percentage of Americans approve of the Court’s Brown decision and oppose school segregation.
But wait a moment for the fireworks. Most Americans, black and white, have been polled saying they believe schools are currently racially integrated. That’s not true. In fact, American schools are more segregated today than they were at the peak of school integration in the late 1980s.
Black students “on average attended schools that were 76 percent non-white, while Latino students attended schools that were 75 percent non-white,” Education Week reports.I recently wrote A 2021 study by UCLA’s Civil Rights Project.
This increase in segregated schools is occurring even as the country includes more people of color than ever before.
Nearly half of American students Young white man. but Associated Press Forty percent of black and Latino students rarely attend classrooms with white students.Almost all of their classmatesThe “s” also includes black and Latino. The Associated Press links this disparity to family income: “Schools where students of color make up more than 90% of the student body are five times more likely to be in low-income neighborhoods. The result is a big hit to academic performance…[h]”High-poverty schools … have worse educational outcomes.”
To avoid that bitter reality, many black and white Americans look away. 80% of Americans He told The Washington Post The poll found that most people believe American schools are more integrated and “less segregated” than they were 30 years ago, or that they are just as segregated as before, not more so.
An even starker reality emerges when we look at the disparity in funding between white and minority schools. As Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who won Brown and became the Supreme Court’s first black justice, explained to me: The biography I wrote about him School integration was a way for white school boards and politicians to ensure equal funding and good schools in all neighborhoods.
Justice Marshall would be outraged at the situation today. As of 2019, According to a report by EdbuildMajority-black and Latino school districts receive $23 billion less in state and local funding than majority-white districts, despite serving the same number of students. Excluding federal funding and capital grants, non-white school districts receive $11,682 per student, while majority-white communities spend $13,908 per student. This resource disparity remains a secret to most Americans.
A Washington Post poll found that 75 percent of whites and 70 percent of blacks agreed that school integration had improved the lives of black students.
As recently as 1973, 70 percent of what was then a predominantly white country opposed busing to create racially mixed schools. Today, 50 years later, whites and blacks continue to oppose busing. White Americans also disagree about other strategies for bringing students of all races together, such as expanding school districts and adding low-income housing to wealthy school districts.
The only idea that has widespread support is to create more magnet schools.
The general lack of interest among white Americans in the issue of school segregation has become a politically thorny issue.
Under Donald Trump’s administration, 85% of 2020 voters were non-Hispanic white.The Department of Education pursued a policy of shifting funding from public schools to private, religious, and charter schools.
Even those who support using vouchers to spur innovation to help students trapped in low-performing schools, myself included, have grown uneasy about the lack of oversight to ensure that these strategies are about creating better schools and not blazing new trails for whites to avoid attending school with nonwhites.
Associated Press report Because of the Trump administration, school board elections, once a “boring event,” have become a breeding ground for “right-wing groups.” Moms for Freedom It has created a sensation by promoting the idea that white students are being taught by liberal teachers about the history of racism and how gay people are marginalized.
A series of missteps, including a scandal involving the husband of one of the group’s co-founders, have caused problems for the group. And now,Educated, we rise up.Founder Jennifer Jenkins said:The group says“We’re not just fighting back. We’re defending the essence of learning, which is inclusion in schools.”
This year, it is important for students to know that the most famous Fourth of July address was delivered by a Black man who sought to end slavery in 1852. “Are those great principles of political liberty and natural justice embodied in the Declaration of Independence extended to us?”AskedFrederick Douglass.
The continued segregation of schools is evidence of the failure of the Declaration of Independence to promise all Americans an equal chance to succeed.
Juan Williams is author Political analyst for Fox News Channel.
