Education Week - May 29, 2024 - 24

19
Should Migrant
Families Pay Tuition
For Public School?
20
Better Classroom
Management
Can't Wait
21
Letters to
The Editor
Brown v. Board of Education at 70:
A Dream Dissolved
By R. L'Heureux Lewis-McCoy
A
This anniversary reminds us that progress is not inevitable
To gain access to good schools, families like mine ran to
s we arrive at the 70th anniversary
of the Brown v. Board of Education of
Topeka, Kansas decision on May 17,
undoubtedly, new estimates of the
segregation within our schools will be
released, and commentaries on the
significance of the lawsuit in sparking
the modern Civil Rights Movement will proliferate. But behind
this fanfare and reflection, a stark truth remains ignored.
The segregation that was meant to be uprooted with
the Brown decision not only persisted, but it has grown, and
today, we stand at a critical juncture-the promise of education
as opportunity that has existed for more than 100 years is on
the verge of being no more.
In recent decades, we have continued to whittle away at
confidence in public schools, silenced the voices of Black
students and families, and allowed opportunity hoarding to
govern how we orient ourselves toward school and each other.
The landmark victory in 1954 was meant to actualize the
ability of all students, particularly Black students, to have
access to high-quality schooling and shatter the grip of
segregation in our schools and public institutions. Like in the
Reconstruction era, Black families after Brown ran at the chance
to better themselves with education and saw it as one of the
engines of mobility, if not the primary one.
As my grandfather who was raised in Selma, Ala., under Jim
Crow would tell me, " Get you a good education, they can never
take that away from you. " My family, like many, knew that
accessing quality schooling was no easy task, and as resistance
to desegregation proved to be an evergreen reality, we took
matters into our own hands.
magnet schools, to the suburbs, to Roman Catholic schools, to
charter schools in pursuit of " good schools, " but as we chased
opportunities, actual opportunity was moving further away
from us. The expansion of segregated suburbs, the crippling of
affirmative action, the failed experiments of education reform,
the gentrification of urban neighborhoods and their schools, all
made it hard for Black children to find possibility.
A few years ago, I met a very talented Black teenager named
Sasha at an open mic night outside of Detroit. Sasha performed
a show-stopping poem that enraptured the room. As I talked
to her about her future, I asked, " Where are you looking at for
college? "
She replied matter-of-factly, " I'm not. "
I laughed and asked her to tell me where she was really
thinking about. She was already on the Advanced Placement
track at her high school and was flourishing in spoken word.
Sasha, raised in the shadows of the collapse of the big three
automakers, outlined how she'd seen a number of members
of her family make the leap to college but struggle to pay
bills, and those who went to schools with big names quietly
professed to her that they'd be paying back their debts " for
the rest of their lives. "
Sasha was making a calculated decision to forgo college
because it wasn't a place of future possibility, instead it was a
place that confined her options in the future.
There are many Sashas among us, talented, astute observers
of the social world, who wonder if the world in front of them
is opening wider or is it rapidly closing. I must admit, when I
first spoke with Sasha, I thought her pessimism was grossly
misplaced.
I'd read reams of studies that showed the return to
investment on education was high for Black students. But
24 | EDUCATION WEEK | May 29, 2024 | www.edweek.org/opinion
at that time, I didn't realize that Black borrowers carried
debt longer than their white counterparts and that American
student debt would grow to more than $1.7 trillion, equivalent
to Australia's GDP.
I told her about the access provided by affirmative action
but didn't predict that the twilight of affirmative action
would come at the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court. I told
her about the scholarships that were surely available for a
student with her talents, not knowing that DEI programs
would be targeted state by state and, then, nationally.
For every study that demonstrates the power of education,
there are emerging counterstories that remind us things are
not promised.
Seventy years after Brown, we would all do well to
learn, as I have, from the Sashas of this world. Talented,
hardworking Black students have not only been segregated
but know the opportunities that were possible when I
was a young adult are not nearly the same today. Many
reflections on Brown assume that we have made progress
and will continue to, but we also must soberly consider
that tomorrow may be bleaker than yesterday and prepare
accordingly.
Three years before the Brown decision, Langston Hughes
asked, " What happens to a dream deferred? " Today, we
must ask ourselves not what happens to dreams deferred but
what happens to a dream dissolved?
LEWIS-McCOY is an associate professor in the Sociology
of Education program at New York University's Steinhardt
School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
He is the author of Inequality in the Promised Land: Race,
Resources, and Suburban Schooling (Stanford University
Press, 2014).
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Education Week - May 29, 2024

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